How to Blog a Book: Write, publish, and promote your work one post at a time

Is blogging a book something to consider seriously? Amir’s book suggests it is. And didn’t Ree Drummond’s The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels—a love story find an audience? Isn’t much of the wisdom of Seth Godin to be found in Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck? And Other Provocations, 2006-2012?

Amir’s book covers everything from the basics to a business plan. She covers how to drive traffic and reveals blogged book successes that include Martha Anderson’s The Plot Whisperer.

What are the benefits? Amir says one benefit is that you publish as you write. What are the rest? You’ll have to buy the book!

Breakthrough Branding: How Smart Entrepreneurs and intrepreneurs transform a small idea into a big brand

In early January I met with an amazing web series producer to exchange comments on our respective projects. He said one word repeatedly, “Brand.”

Using Kaputa’s book to guide my branding journey, I found myself challenged in the first pages to look at me in light of my competition. What is my “small idea?” What makes me unique? While others are telling (often risky) life story live, via podcasts and in print and ebooks, I am all genre life story across all media. The new tagline emerged, “life story meets technology.”

Storydame sections now filter through the new tagline and include the newer addition of Psychobabble or psychology that relates to life narrative and the telling of it across media.

Will StoryDame’s brand grow stronger as I read more? If early efforts have been successful I have reason to anticipate more!

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead, 2006)

If you’re a right-brain creative who feels “pooh-poohed” by family and friends alike who say you should abandon your craft in order to embrace left-brain financial practicality, then introduce them to Daniel H. Pink. Pink, who has been praised by Tom Peters and Seth Godin, says six senses will rule the future or Conceptual Age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.

“Stories,” Pink says, “are easier to remember-because in many ways, stories are how we remember.” Pink begins with myth ala Joseph Campbell, then shows how story is being taught as well as used by business and in medicine. Pink includes exercises to set the beginner on the story trail.

While Pink’s thought on story is brief and basic for the practicing storyteller, importance and freshness come via its inclusion with five other senses. The savvy life narrator will recognize that design, symphony, empathy, play and meaning, when incorporated in story as well as the story life, unite with the life story to make it phenomenally stronger.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, new releases & viral marketing to reach buyers directly, fourth edition (Wiley, 2013)

We bloggers, writers and storytellers, already know the cold, hard fact. If we are to gain the much-desired audience for our work, we have to market our work ourselves. The steps I’d taken so far to announce StoryDame.com – a soft launch to family, friends and acquaintances, the creation of a Facebook fan page and Tweets, and cozying up to other writers, storytellers and bloggers – were more to ensure nothing was hugely off in some major way. Response had been better than anticipated; it was time to attempt to determine and reach my target audience. Though I have an MA in media psychology and social change, marketing seemed as foreign as a trek into Middle earth. When Mom asking if I would be interested in a marketing book she had spotted in an email from Amazon on Saturday, I said, “Yes.”

I’d like to think Mom’s call sprang from high interest in supporting my new StoryDame. But knowing her, it could have been that it was already January and the extravagant Barnes & Noble gift card she gave me for Christmas was already burning a hole in her pocket.

Now, I have absolutely no problem picking out books for myself. If I had that problem I wouldn’t currently be sorting through thirty boxes of books in storage to determine what can be passed on to others. And I had already used the $10.00 card that B&N threw in as a bonus when she bought my gift cards on How to Blog a Book. But the main gift card was so extravagant that I was saving it for something uniquely special and valuable to me on my StoryDame path. Maybe that something special had just presented itself. This book deserved a close look.

Snow was in the forecast for Sunday. Having been iced in before Christmas, the potential of inclement weather called for a special treat. I was going out anyway to get provisions in case the snow predicted actually fell. (It didn’t; cold weather descended instead). Why not make a stop at the bookstore.

A staff member located the fourth edition. The attractive cover revealed it’s an international bookseller with more than 3000,000 copies in print. On the back, the four recommendations, including the one by the CEO of HubSpot, were brief and impressive. But it was the seven pages of detailed Table of Contents that sold the book to me. My local library had a copy, but this looked like a book I wanted to mark up. So, I waited in line for a turn at the register where the saleslady said, “Wow!” when she swiped my gift card.

I’m only on page 34, but already realize it’s worth the price. How did author David Meerman Scott’s book reach astronomical success? “I offered advance copies of the first addition to approximately 130 important bloggers. I sent out nearly twenty news releases…, and my publisher alerted contacts in the media.” Already a plan is emerging…