These are the basic tools authors today need to be able to acquire and use to succeed in today’s marketplace. Please note: I am indicating that the author should foot the bill for these minor expenses, as the author should always maintain 100% ownership of his or her platform without interference or pressure from a publisher to do otherwise.

Firefox Browser: US users can download it here.

URLs for Author’s name, book’s name, tagline/topic: Forward the book’s name and the tagline/topic to the author’s name URL, which can be used as the home base site, saving the author time and money of managing too many sites. Author should purchase his own name URL for 5-10 years at a time. Publisher should never own author’s URLs. I recommend GoDaddy.com or BlueHost.com.

Wordpress.org blog: Widely considered the easiest and cheapest way to own, build, and manage your own website yourself. With minimal tech knowledge and hosting from your URL provider (like those I’ve just mentioned above), a person with modest DIY ambition can create, launch, and manage his or her own site at Wordpress.org. Others can hire the set up out but should still learn how to keep up and back up their sites on an ongoing basis. (Not to be confused with Wordpress.com, which is a good, free way for aspiring authors to practice blogging but allows no storefront capacities, not even Amazon recommendations.)

Thesis Theme: I use Thesis and I’ve been very happy with it thus far. I am also a Thesis Affiliate—I partner only with exceptionally good products for writers—so if you decide to give it a test-drive, please click on the Thesis badge.

Facebook Account: Authors need to have and use a Facebook account because Facebook is the non-social-networker’s social networking site. In other words, the folks on Facebook aren’t thinking about social networking. They are just hanging out. So, authors should hang out there too. Besides, it’s the best place to connect with fellow authors in my opinion. Fan page or no fan page, I don’t think is as important as just be there. Here’s my Facebook page. Why not friend me?

Twitter Account: Once you get the hang of it, Twitter is pretty fun. Of course, you don’t want to be there all day or you will become a person who speaks in sound bytes. I think we’re already subjected to enough of that to take Twitter in moderation. Twitter is kind of like wind surfing. It looks easy, then impossible, then you try it and you are sure that everyone doing it is crazy…but if you come often and stay briefly, you eventually get the hang of it. Feel free to “follow” me.

LinkedIn: I’m not as big a fan of LinkedIn at this point, but I haven’t written it off completely. What this means is that I swing by a lot less often. I see LI as more of a job hunter’s network but I think it can also be useful for networking your way to gigs, repeat or fresh. Until they make the interface more user-friendly, I won’t be able to afford to spend as much time there. Even so, “connect” with me once in a blue moon there. I like connecting with folks I know anywhere.

ShareThis Button: Love this tool, which has cut my social networking time in half! I put the ShareThis button in my Firefox browser so I can quickly share anything with my friends, followers, and connections. And voila! Whatever I notice and like is shared in a few clicks. Add ShareThis to your browser here.

“Outposts” (term comes from the book TRUST AGENTS by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith): Create account pages on all the mob sites that are open to public browsing (for example: Red Room, WeRead, GoodReads, FiledBy, Ning sites, etc.) Don’t be overly concerned with gated communities because they may not come up in Google or, if they do, will require a password, which will be a deal-breaker for most Internet browsers. Choose the sites that your audience will frequent and make sure you are there.

Constant Contact: I’ve been using Constant Contact for years to produce professional quality e-zines. Fortunately, for us, the service has gotten better over time (you probably won’t lose your content now). Also CC is offering some cool services like event management and polling that can make any content producer’s life easier. I’m an affiliate of CC, too, so feel free to use my link when/if you sign up.

Feedburner: Use Feedburner so your blog posts will get delivered directly to your readers’ e-mail inboxes. They will appreciate the service. Nuf said.

Google Reader: You can’t be a thought leader if you don’t participate in the most current conversations on your topic. No, you don’t need to relinquish sleep to keep up with the blogging Jones’ but you want to skim the posts you carefully curate and organize in your blog reader at least once a week. This will give you plenty of food for thought and likely have you gnashing your teeth on more than one occasion. (I repeat: Bloggers like to provoke. Consider yourself warned.) Remember, the choice of who to read and who to banish from your view is completely yours. Choose wisely. Choose Google.

Amazon: I don’t care how much badgering I receive: I use Amazon and I think every author should, if for no other reason than because some of your readers will use it. Even if they don’t use it to make a purchase, readers most certainly use it to share their opinions and influence book store shoppers. Authors are in the business of getting along with everyone, so I don’t think we should follow the badgering or the righteous lead. Where authors or booksellers shop for books is not going to be an accurate reflection of where readers shop for books, because readers shop for books everywhere. Authors need to get out of the business of telling readers how to buy and get back in the business of writing books worth buying. (Apparently I have strong feelings on this topic…I’ve been badgered about this for quite some time. Clearly it’s not doing me much good.) Authors can set up their author pages on Amazon, become a reviewer of relevant books, and retort back when people who clearly didn’t read their books post absurd critiques. Authors, I think you should proceed on Amazon as you see fit.

This ought to be a good short list to keep any author busy, as they get used to using these tools. Have fun!

~Photo by Emily Barney

I’m just back from Digital Book World and rather than offer a play by play on Twitter (I didn’t), a long blog post synopsis (I am sure others will do it), or a bunch of cheeky comments about how nobody in publishing knows anything (after all TOC is coming—oops, that was cheeky!), I’m going to offer up several constructive responses this week that I hope will unite publishers, editors, agents, authors, sales people, and book sellers and remind us that we’re all on the same team.

Whenever a publisher seeks, receives, underwrites, and curates a promising manuscript, the potential for a team is formed. That possible team is composed of the people I just mentioned. It would be terrific if the pod of people supporting the release of each book would actually form a team around and support each book, instead of just giving lip service to the prospect or going through the motions.

Every team needs a leader. For an A-list book, the leadership for steering that book team to success typically comes from inside the publishing house from the beginning and all the way through until the end of the publishing process. For books not on the A-list, authors are often left completely in the dark about the perception of their book from within the publishing house. And because of this void of communication, often no one steps up to lead the team, because the author is busy writing or fretting about a lack of attention to the book.

At this point, the A-list cat is out of the book-publishing bag, folks. Authors talk. We are all connected to each other. And we all know which publishers are team builders and which publishers are not. If you say that you give all authors/books the same consideration, when it’s common knowledge that this is not true, consider using the future tense and start doing it.

Let’s not kid ourselves, folks, authors pretty much know that not all books are created equal as far as publicity is concerned. (And if they don’t know, they can read these books and find out.) Therefore publishers, who don’t plan to invest in marketing and publicity for every book launch, need to “tap” authors to steer their own book-marketing ships.

What is desperately needed here is better communication, education, and just the tiniest bit of ongoing support. Nothing any editor or publisher shouldn’t be able to handle even with diminished editorial staffs. (And P.S., transparency and honesty in difficult publishing times is always appreciated more than you will ever know.)

The way to make this kind of non-A-list author support plan successful is to systematize the communication between the publishing house and the author as much as possible. Perhaps you think that systematized communication would disappoint or upset the author. If you think this, you have not been talking to authors who have been left completely in the dark about the fate of their books, who are crave any kind of communication from their publisher beyond deadline management.

Systematized communication looks something like this. Feel free to customize these suggestions to your own needs:

1. After signing: A letter from the CEO or President welcoming the author to the imprint, which describes why the publisher is proud of their long, successful history.  If the imprint is new or recently moved, describe to the author why this is good news to them.
2. Shortly thereafter: A letter from the acquisitions editor, also welcoming the author to the imprint, and then outlining what to expect from the editorial process with a copy of the imprint’s specific editorial guidelines.
3. An editorial phone conversation with the author about the book production schedule: And if you possibly can spare five minutes to answer the author’s questions or just make small talk, that would bring a level of human connection to the process, which is sorely needed. Update this conversation with an e-mail if/when it changes.
4. A fresh correspondence each time you hand your author off to someone new in the production chain: Another letter, this time of introduction from the new person welcoming the author again to the imprint and saying that the new person is excited to work with them and is interested in the best possible outcome for the book.
5. Paced phone outreach: Each new person in the production chain should be required to reach out to the author on at least one Friday afternoon during the book process to chat and answer questions for five/ten minutes at the appropriate junctures in the book production process. Fridays are a good, more relaxed day for these chats. Perhaps right before the employee leaves for the weekend, so there is a cut-off time. These conversations can lead to bonding between publishing insiders and authors, which can inspire authors to write better, network more, and market the book better because they feel connected to something bigger than themselves.
6. A minimum of one phone meeting with the in-house publicist, the author, the agent, and the editor. One meeting is better than none. Time it about six-three months prior to launch. It’s really up to the author and agent to get as much out of this meeting as possible. So authors and agents, be prepared and have your questions ready.
7. Publisher-endorsed book marketing techniques: Get your folks who are working with the A-list into a conference room or call and jot down all the book-marketing techniques that seem to be working from an in-house point of view. Add a caution to the author at the end of this list, which contains warnings about the types of “exposure opportunities” that can eat up the bulk of an authors book promotion time (see my post on the topic for examples) with scant, poor or negative results. Ask your authors what is working and stealing their time away from better quality marketing opportunities. Compile this info into a PDF and update it quarterly. (See agent Rita Rosenkranz’s free e-book as an example and feel free to send your authors over to download a copy or share it with them yourself.)

Wouldn’t these bare bones types of team-building strategies create more positive outcomes for the non-A-list author, than him or her sitting alone in his or her workroom, wondering what the heck is going on with his or her book?

An intern could certainly assist an editor with managing and streamlining this process. The systematized communications alone, even without the more personal support calls, could double your future book sales if an author feels included and valued by the imprint rather than captured, indentured, and then forgotten.

Now that authors are as connected as we are and are as connected to our own audiences as we are, and publishers are lowering advance sizes, the publishers who are the most sophisticated and successful team builders are going to ultimately attract the best writers and sell the most books.

Because success in today’s economy means leveraging all of you assets, including the publisher/author relationship. Authors likely know and are going to continue to know going forward which publishers team-build best (take my publisher, for one example).

What have I forgotten here?

Any authors who have been through the process care to chime in?

~ Photo by oooh.oooh

On December 1st at 7 pm at the Old Church in Portland, I will attend Writer’s Faire with a whole bunch of Willamette Writers authors. We are going to have a blast!

I hope you can come and hear the open mic during which time 32 of us will dazzle you with 3 minutes on who we are and what we offer.

If you are looking for inspiration to complete your book or writing project, I can’t think of a better way to find it than by hearing the stories of the following 32 authors:

• Rosemary Lombard
• Lizzy Shannon
• Blythe Ayne
• Daniel Shaddox
• Michele Longo Eder
• Liz Nakazawa
• Marie Therese Gass
• Kim Taylor
• Carolyn Rose
• Evan Nichols
• John Schouten
• Carla Dietz
• John Reed
• Kelly O’Tillery
• Bob Ferguson
• Harley Sachs
• Kilong Ung
• Alaina Smith
• Sage Cohen
• Cindy Hudson
• Jennifer Omner
• Jennifer Ott
• Lois Ruskai Melina
• Cindy Anderson
• Judy Nedry
• Bob Masin
• Ronald Green
• Shelia Deeth
• Linda Kuhlmann
• Kellie Grill
• George Byron Wright
• Chris Mulligan
• Christina Katz

Hope you can make it to the party!