Welcome to Songdove Books Newsletter: June 2014
First off, welcome to all the new subscribers over this past month! It's great to have you all along for the ride as we delve into life at Songdove Books once a month. This particular issue will be more a case of social housekeeping than anything else. BUT, that means it could be a bit long, so grab your favourite beverage, put your feet up, get comfy in your favourite chair, and let's get started.
New Book Project Update!The big news this month is that this book is going on a pre-launch virtual book tour! Editors and reviewers are coming back with very little to report, so we're on tour across 11, hopefully 12 different blogs (if I can find another blogger to replace the one who had to bow out). The twist with this particular tour, is that each of the bloggers hosting myself and my book, are being featured on my own blog as well! You get to meet each blogger before they engage in their stop along this tour.
Secondly, whether it's on my blog or on a tour blog, you have the opportunity to download a free single-day prayer guide taken from somewhere within the upcoming book. If you download them all, you'll have 24 different single-day guides from this new book. In addition, you'll have a chance at each stop on tour, to enter for your own copy of a full one-month sampling of the book.
You can view the full tour schedule at the FB link here: https://www.facebook.com/events/880095405340333/?ref=2&ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming Just click the description box to view the whole 8 week timeline.
BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!"Practical Thoughts on Becoming an Author" has become an e-course! This is a 19-day course that comes to you via your inbox once per day. Most of the sessions are short, with a daily task to be completed at the end of each session. Who might be interested in such a course?
- The person who has had an idea for a book bouncing around their thoughts, but never written it down.
- The person who has begun a rough draft, but unsure what to do next.
- The person who thinks it costs too much to break into publishing.
- The author who is looking for a cheaper way of getting their books out there.
Contents of this course will cover:
- tools that cost very little to no outlay at all.
- Tips on why those tools are needed.
- Instructions on how to use one of them to prepare your manuscript for self-publishing printers.
- Links where you can download various tools
- Links leading to resources and information
etc.
The cost of the course is only $15 and it's a one-time fee for the full 19 day duration of the course. Because this is an e-course, from time to time content may change or get updated to reflect new information coming down the pipe. If you get word of a significant change that you want to walk through, you are more than welcome to purchase the course again to learn the new content.
More information and the purchase link can be found at this link: http://songdove.fa-ct.com/wordpress-mu/songdovemusings/so-you-want-to-be-an-author/ The little giftbox icon beside your name box when you click "I want this", allows you to purchase this course for a friend as well. Feel free to pass this link around to those you know who may be interested in what it takes to get a book idea from concept to print-ready with very little financial outlay.
Be sure to add the course's email address to your whitelist so that you don't miss out on any of the daily sessions.
GRADUATION IS ALMOST OVER!"Mom's Little Black Book: Godly Advice for the HIgh School Graduate" has now been purchased for eight high school graduates this year! That's 8 students entering college or university or diving into work, armed with tidbits of both parental advice as well as guidance from God's Word. If you know a graduating student, why not get this as a grad gift for them too?
Don't forget that this grad gift is currently being bundled with "Dressed for Eternity" to create a gift bundle worth $48, for only $40 plus shipping and handling. This offer is good through to the end of July in an effort to catch as many graduates around the world as possible! Click this blog post URL to get to the paypal button at the bottom: http://songdove.fa-ct.com/wordpress-mu/songdovemusings/2014/04/29/peer-pressure-and-grad-gift-bundle/ Your order will be shipped to you as soon as possible.
Wrap-up
Well, now the moment I've been waiting for! Just a few more bits of news, a minor rant, and we're done. Still with me? If you didn't sip any of that cool beverage before, now's the time to pull it out. If you weren't in a comfortable chair before, now's the time to move toward it. Are we ready?
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Amazon has just released a new tool for Twitter, that is really quite cool for those of us who are writers, authors, and bloggers! The tool, when seen on Twitter, is simply a hashtag that you type into a response. If this response is to someone posting a link to an Amazon product, that hashtag will tell Amazon to add that product to your Amazon shopping cart! The next time you visit Amazon, you'll be able to complete your purchase without having to track down that particular product again, or forget that you wanted to order it.
This becomes a new way for product reviewers to share their reviews and for those reviews to draw in potentially further sales for the product being reviewed. This is a new way for authors to share their books and tap into a potential market already present on Twitter.
This means adding to my hootesuite scheduling now. For those of you who like daily Bible verses, those will always show up at 8:30am unless I make a mistake somewhere. Every Friday at 10am, a different location around the world is presented where any of my books may be purchased. Some locations offer paperback, others offer digital, others offer both. Some locations are in North America while other locations are from other continents. Starting soon will be a single Amazon product link to each of my books available there, one per day. If you miss a day when a given book was offered, you can get to it either via my author name on Amazon, or waiting for that link to come around again in rotation. Right now, that is an 11 day rotation, soon to be 12 come the Fall. This schedule will be inserted at 12:30pm every day. At 2:30pm, tweet promos for my e-course will resume, and at present there are 14 different tweets that you're welcome to RT when you see them. Just 5 paid sign-ups every day would ease the financial picture quite a bit! Those of you who have signed up during the pre-launch tour and lead up to my next book being launched, may have taken the course for free. But if you know someone who might be interested in the course, gifting it to them will help out them as well as myself. When the pre-launch tour is over, the new-subscriber gift will change.
Of course, sprinkled through these various time slots will be links to various blog posts that come up each week, links to each month's newsletter when it is posted online, Listia's automatic tweet whenever a book is relisted there, etc.
That's three to four guaranteed tweets every day, and random two or three more on days when they hit.
It's been suggested to me that I short-list those I am following on Twitter, so that scouring for things to RT that augment the message I want to get out there, will be a quicker task to accomplish. Up until now, Twitter has been difficult to deal with simply due to all the wasted time looking for decent tweets to RT. So this concept of only checking lists is something I'll be finding time to test out.
When it comes to social media, I've been dragged into each new phase all but kicking and screaming! From the time I was first invited until I finally got dragged in by a Pastor's wife, it took two years just to get me started on Facebook. That was back in 2007. It would be several years before I'd hit Pinterest and LinkedIn almost at the same time in the year 2012. The reasoning was book promotion, getting word out about the message God had given me to write. I held off joining Twitter for even longer, but finally gave in somewhere between 2012 and 2013. Google Plus has been the latest hold-out in my list, but I am finally there as well. The major frustration there is that Google insists on it's single-sign-on thing which drives me NUTS! My preference is to use my own email address for various services, but Google has also insisted that if you have a gmail address, even if it's never used, that such an address will be the default for ALL services under it's umbrella! Ugh! My youtube account is not under gmail, my Google Play account however, is. My Google analytics are, unfortunately under gmail, but I wanted my g+ acct to be under my own email address! Unfortunately, Google can't remember which service uses which email address, and automatically assumes I am logging in under the gmail acct! So I find myself having to log out, then log back in to use most google-related services including G+. Worse yet, I found 5 followers on the gmail g+ user! Double ugh! I've left a message on that account urging the followers to find me at the account I actually set up.
I have however, been learning how to use these various social networks. LinkedIn is still a bit of mystery to me. I have Facebook pretty figured out, along with Pinterest. I will be looking at a way to tame Twitter, and I think I've found some groups on G+ that I'm dipping my toes into. But yes, I've been a bit of a rebel the whole way along in this world of social media. That admission may be hard for some reading this to accept. I'm the one talking about how on and offline life is often no different. I'm the one talking about the benefits of taking Christ to the grid, and my FB avatar displays this. I'm the one talking about how people are freer to express themselves in a more anonymous setting than face to face many times. I'm the one promoting ways prayer groups can meet across time zones around the world. Ah well, it's a good thing we all have areas in life where we are growing, stretching, and being taken to new heights. Once I conquor all there is to social media, there will be a new hill to climb.
For those that may not be aware, this is the current list http://songdove.fa-ct.com/wordpress-mu/songdovemusings/how-to-reach-me/ of where I can be found online, separate from, but in some cases joining with locations where my books are also sold.
Pinterest, Goodreads, Shelfari, Freado, Twitter, Chapters, Barnes & Noble, Librarything, Slideshare, Facebook, Youtube, Google+, Wattpad, linkedin, Authorsdb, Hubpages, Squidoo, Godtube, Inkbok, Smashwords, Deeper Shopping, Amazon, Cafepress
Visiting any page of my blog will offer you a "follow me" pull-out on the right-hand side where some of these places are listed as well.
I think that's all for now. Some months are quite short, other months I just have a lot to say. Hope to see you around the blog tour.
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