Shawn's Writing News

Writing E-Books: The Hottest Marketing Tool on the Web

With so many e-books available on the Web, the need for a dynamic marketing tool to make your e-book offering standout from the rest of the crowd is a must. However, selecting the appropriate marketing tool for your e-book is not easy given the array of competing marketing tools available to you on the Web. Your choice of marketing tools range from pay for click advertising, blogging, article marketing, forums, social networks and online video, to name but a few.

Of all the online marketing tools available on the Web, online video represents the most versatile, most cost effective and most value added asset you can choose. If you are not using online video to promote your e-book, then you could very well be missing out on a lot of potential sales.

Here are six reasons why you should be using online video to promote your e-book:

• Online video has the power to engage your audience faster than any other medium
• More and more people are tuning into online video: In the UK alone, the number of people watching online video went from 6 million in 2006 to over 17 million in 2010
• There are over 50 free to upload video sharing sites on the Web
• Youtube, alone, has more than 490 million unique visitors every month
• Youtube and Google Video are not just video sharing sites – they are search engines
• Youtube is the second largest social networking site after Facebook, with over 15% of the social networking market

Creating online video need not be difficult, as most PC’s and laptops come bundled with video making software. Software such as Movie Maker or I-Movie is not difficult to use and you can create a short video clip within the space of a few hours. You don’t even need a video camera as you can use screen cast technology to capture images from your computer screen. For those of us bereft of video editing skills, I’ve discovered that a Power Point presentation set to music is an effective way of creating online video.

The point is: you don’t need to be a Spielberg to create online video, nor do you need to create an Oscar winning blockbuster. All you need is a short video clip, of no more than 1 minute, to announce the publication of your new e-book.

Online video, if entertaining and informative, has the potential to go viral. For example, Pepsi Cola created a comic video clip that attracted over 26 million viewers over a very short time span. The clip lasted no more than a few minutes. Now that is what I call viral marketing at its best.

Creating an online video and uploading it to any one of the free video sharing sites will increase your e-book’s exposure to a wider audience.

Online video will also help you to create a brand image for your e-publishing business, a must if you want to become a bestselling e-book author. But, more importantly, online video will empower you towards a better rapport with your readers.  Furthermore, the growing popularity of online video amongst Internet users translates into a better opportunity to build a more dynamic online presence for your e-book, which in turn equates to more sales.

Why not give your e-book the online video promotion treatment? The results might just surprise you.

About the Author

The author is a former lecturer in Business and Communications Studies. He holds a degree in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex and is a member of the Institute for Learning in the UK.

As a lecturer, the author has helped over 700 students to achieve their learning goals. A specialist in verbal and written communication, the author still holds regular seminars for business professionals.

For more useful tips On Writing and communicating, why not leave a comment on the author’s blog at http://successfulsteps.blogspot.com/

STRONGER THAN ROCKS * FREE SAMPLE_SHORT E BOOK *

Cursive Writing Activities $12.99 Cursive Writing Activities is designed to help students master important handwriting skills. The book provides a variety of activities that allow students to practice letter formations as well as real world skills such as simple sentences, paragraph writing, creative writing, and everyday writing. Anyone using these instructional and fun worksheets will gain the confidence needed to keep his or her handwriting legible and free of mistakes.Activities include: writing letters and numbers, answering questions with written responses, completing creative writing activities, practicing writing with word games, and more.

Jumbo Book of Writing Lessons $24.99 Designed to become a perpetual reference for all writing skills, Jumbo Book of Writing Lessons is filled with activities to help students improve their writing skills.The book covers: traits of good writing steps of the writing process guidelines for incorporating writing into literacy instructionAs an added bonus, the book includes a reproducible Writer’s Notebook, an excellent reference tool for students.

NovaBackup Software for PCs-Laptops-Workstations. Automatic. Simple. Local and Online Backup $49.95 NovaBACKUP automatically backups and protects important PC/laptop computer files such as photos, images, personal files, business files, and system information. With easy setup and simple to follow step-by-step wizards, anyone can implement professional and reliable data backup and protection procedures in minutes. Backup your data to hard drives, tape drives, CD/DVD/BluRay drives (with full support for media spanning) plus get online data protection from your choice of world class storage providers … all in the same, easy to use, software. Receive full peace of mind with automatic (set it and forget it) processes. local and online storage (Best Practices), and full disaster recovery protection to return your system exactly as it was in the event of disaster. With NovaStor’s patent pending technology, you can find and restore files easily and restore historical versions of files, from a single view, regardless of when or where the files were backed up. You don’t even have to remember which device you stored a file on. NovaBackup remembers and tells you! Copy & mirror functionality provides a simple method for twinning/mirroring of data and directories in native format and includes integrated Open File Backup. Fast Bit Technology updates your backups with bit level incremental changes. This makes for super fast backups both locally and online. Other great features include mapped drive recognition, virus scanning, data encryption, and Windows 7/Vista/XP/2003 support. NovaBACKUP claims countless technology and consumer award including TopTenReview Gold, PC World Best Buy , Tucows Five Cows, and more — plus NovaStor has been protecting millions of PCs for over 10 years and is a proud Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

NovaBackup Business Essentials by NovaStor. SQL and Exchange Server Backup Software $299.95 NovaBACKUP Bus. Essentials automatically backups and protects all the important files stored on your Windows Server system with SQL/Exchange such as mission critical business files, databases, emails, shared images, shared media files, documents and all system information. With easy setup and simple to follow step-by-step wizards, anyone can implement professional and reliable data backup and protection procedures in minutes. Backup your data to hard drives, tape drives, CD/DVD/BluRay drives (with full support for media spanning) plus get online data protection from your choice of world class storage providers … all in the same, easy to use, software. Receive full peace of mind with automatic (set it and forget it) processes. local and online storage (Best Practices), and full disaster recovery protection to return your system exactly as it was in the event of disaster. With NovaStor’s patent pending technology, you can find and restore files easily and restore historical versions of files, from a single view, regardless of when or where the files were backed up. You don’t even have to remember which device you stored a file on. NovaBackup remembers and tells you! Fast Bit Technology updates your backups with bit level incremental changes. This makes for super fast backups both locally and online. Other great features include mapped drive recognition, copy & mirror functionality, open file backup, virus scanning, data encryption, and Windows 2008 R2 and 2003 support. NovaBACKUP claims countless technology and consumer award including TopTenReview #1 Gold Award, PC World’s Best Buy , Tucows’ Five Cows Rating (out of five), and more — plus NovaStor has been protecting millions of PCs for over 10 years and is a proud Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

NovaBackup Server. Software by NovaStor. Easy to use backup and restore for Windows Server Systems $199.95 NovaBACKUP automatically backups and protects all the important files stored on your Windows Server system such as mission critical business files, shared images, shared media files, documents and all system information. With easy setup and simple to follow step-by-step wizards, anyone can implement professional and reliable data backup and protection procedures in minutes. Backup your data to hard drives, tape drives, CD/DVD/BluRay drives (with full support for media spanning) plus get online data protection from your choice of world class storage providers … all in the same, easy to use, software. Receive full peace of mind with automatic (set it and forget it) processes. local and online storage (Best Practices), and full disaster recovery protection to return your system exactly as it was in the event of disaster. With NovaStor’s patent pending technology, you can find and restore files easily and restore historical versions of files, from a single view, regardless of when or where the files were backed up. You don’t even have to remember which device you stored a file on. NovaBackup remembers and tells you! Copy & mirror functionality provides a simple method for twinning/mirroring of data and directories in native format and includes integrated Open File Backup. Fast Bit Technology updates your backups with bit level incremental changes. This makes for super fast backups both locally and online. Other great features include mapped drive recognition, virus scanning, data encryption, and Windows 2008 R2 and 2003 support. NovaBACKUP claims countless technology and consumer award including TopTenReview Gold, PC World Best Buy , Tucows Five Cows, and more — plus NovaStor has been protecting millions of PCs for over 10 years and is a proud Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

A Conceptual Guide To Openoffice.Org 3 $34.5 This internationally-acclaimed, award-winning instructional book and comprehensive learning resource series provides an easy-to-read, thorough, self-paced guide to using the most popular open source office productivity suite. Written by an educator who is passionate about lifelong learning, this book has been adopted by educational and government institutions worldwide to provide learners with the skills they need to succeed in today’s workplace and in their personal lives. Ideal for students and self-learners alike, this second edition provides over 350 pages of instruction for the four core applications within OpenOffice.org: Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet application), Impress (presentation application) and Base (graphics interfaced-based database application) through a series of hands-on lessons and quick reference guides. Gabriel’s unique writing style and meticulous, step-by-step instructions has received praise from readers for his unique approach to learning. Users of this book will learn how to create and format a wide-range of documents that can be resourceful in the classroom, their professional career and in the home. Topics covered in this book include: how to create a resume using Writer complete with supplemental resource references to make an job applicant’s skills and experience standout, how to format a research paper in the MLA writing style, how to create a household budget using Calc to manage monthly expenses, create a bulk mailing list for business purposes using Writer and Base, and much more. Internet access is required to download the necessary lesson files and free OpenOffice.org software.

Akiko (Amiga) $49.99 Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Akiko is a custom chip used in the Amiga CD32 games console and forms part of the AGA chipset used in that system. The Akiko chip performs ‘chunky’ to ‘planar’ graphics conversion in hardware. The Amiga’s native display is a planar display which is simple and efficient to manipulate for routines like scrolling. However, chunky displays are faster and more efficient for 3D graphics manipulation. Akiko allows this conversion to be performed in hardware instead of relying on software conversion which would otherwise slow the system down. The conversion works by writing 32 chunky pixels to Akiko’s registers and reading back eight 32-bit words of converted planar data which can then be copied to the display buffer.

Albums Produced by Paul Northfield: Freedumb, Vapor Trails, Different Stages, the Dark Third, Suicidal for Life, Black Science, Creature $8.96 Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher’s book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Freedumb, Vapor Trails, Different Stages, the Dark Third, Suicidal for Life, Black Science, Creature, Helpyourselfish. Excerpt: Vapor Trails is the seventeenth studio album by the Canadian rock band Rush, produced by Paul Northfield and released in May 2002. The release of Vapor Trails marked the first studio album for the band in six years (since Test for Echo in 1996) due to events that befell drummer Neil Peart in the late 90′s. According to the band, the entire developmental process for Vapor Trails was extremely taxing and took approximately 14 months to finish, by far the longest the band had ever spent writing and recording a studio album. Despite controversy surrounding its production and sound quality, the album debuted to moderate praise and was supported by the band’s first tour in six years, including first-ever concerts in Mexico City and Brazil, where they played to some of the largest crowds of their career. The album was certified gold in Canada in August 2002. The song “Ghost Rider” appeared on the album and was written by Peart as a tribute to his travels around America after his tragic loss, while “One Little Victory” served as the first single in order to announce the band’s return from hiatus. On Vapor Trails there are no keyboards, no traditional guitar solos and no processed-guitar tones. Instead, Vapor Trails uses a more purified guitar tone, vocal, guitar and bass overdubs, and more personal lyrics. Much of the recordings were from one-off jam sessions and many of the original takes from those sessions were used to construct the songs. Rush made extensive use of computers and music editing software to piece the jam session recordings into songs. Drummer Neil Peart remarked, The production of Vapor Trails has been cri… More:

Amstrad Magazines: Amstrad Action $9.16 Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher’s book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Amstrad Action was a monthly magazine, published in the United Kingdom, which catered to owners of home computers from the Amstrad CPC range and later the GX4000 console. It was the first magazine published by Chris Anderson’s Future Publishing, which with a varied line-up of computing and non-computing related titles has since become one of the foremost magazine publishers in the UK. The publication, often abbreviated to AA by staff and readers, had the longest lifetime of any Amstrad magazine, running from October 1985 until June 1995 and produced 117 issues in total. The magazine was still being published long after the CPC had ceased production and games were no longer available in the shops. Published by Future Publishing, a company set up by Chris Anderson (ex-Personal Computer Games and Zzap!64 editor). Launch Editor, Peter Connor, also an ex-PCG staff member, shared the writing duties with the only other staff writer, Bob Wade. Bob, another ex-PCG/Zzap!64, was given the title Software Editor and would review the vast majority of the games featured, with Peter given a second opinion. Trevor Gilham, Art Editor, would complete the four man team. Issue 1 dated October 1985 was released in September 1985 with the cover price of £1; 1 pence for every one of the 100 pages. It took the new publication a few issues to find its readers, but with the help of a bumper 116 page Christmas 1985 issue with a cover mounted tape, the circulation figures grew rapidly. In October 1986 Amstrad Action split into three separate publications. AA still catered for the CPC range, while 8000 Plus and PC Plus focused on the Amstrad PCW and PC range respectively. Amstrad Action #100, with re-designed logoAA finally gave in to readers pleas to have a permanent cov… More:

Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish $44.95 Blender has become one of the most popular 3D and animation tools on the market, with over 2 million users, and it is free! Animating with Blender is the definitive resource for creating short animation projects from scratch, the ideal platform for experimenting with animation.Blender expert and author Roland Hess walks you through the entire process of creating a short animation, from writing to storyboarding and blocking, through character creation, animation and rendering.• Learn the ropes from Roland Hess, one of Blender’s developers and a community guru for this FREE animation program, which was used in the previz for Spiderman 2 • Create a single short animation project from start to finish, take an in-depth look into how all of the Blender tools work together• Study, pick apart and reuse all of the files from the animation referenced throughout the book, with the Blender software and sample animation files included on the companion DVD

Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish $44.95 Blender has become one of the most popular 3D and animation tools on the market, with over 2 million users, and it is free! Animating with Blender is the definitive resource for creating short animation projects from scratch, the ideal platform for experimenting with animation.Blender expert and author Roland Hess walks you through the entire process of creating a short animation, from writing to storyboarding and blocking, through character creation, animation and rendering.• Learn the ropes from Roland Hess, one of Blender’s developers and a community guru for this FREE animation program, which was used in the previz for Spiderman 2 • Create a single short animation project from start to finish, take an in-depth look into how all of the Blender tools work together• Study, pick apart and reuse all of the files from the animation referenced throughout the book, with the Blender software and sample animation files included on the companion DVD

Assessment Methods for Student Affairs $32.56 Assessment Methods for Student AffairsAccountability and demonstrating organizational effectiveness are two hallmarks of contemporary administrative practice in higher education in general and in student affairs administration in particular. As funding for student affairs is increasingly tied to the need to show how student affairs programs and services make a difference in higher education, accrediting bodies, governmental organizations, governing boards, students, parents, and other stakeholders continue to accelerate their demand that higher education organizations be accountable for their work. Consequently, the technical and methodological aspects of conducting assessment projects have become of critical importance to student affairs administrators. Assessment Methods for Student Affairs provides a practical guide to the nuts and bolts of conducting assessments, exploring issues such as how to get started, how to use survey instruments and software, how to collect and analyze data, how to present information in a meaningful form to the various stakeholders of the assessment project—whether by writing reports or conducting briefings—and how to implement findings.Editor John Schuh and his fellow contributors, all experts in the field, detail the methodological aspects of conducting assessment projects specifically for the student affairs practitioner who is ready to conduct assessment projects, but is not quite sure how to manage their technical aspects. Using a variety of case studies and concrete examples to illustrate various assessment approaches, the authors lead the reader step-by-step through each phase of the assessment process with jargon-free, hands-on guidance.This book is not written for statisticians, qualitative methodologists, theoreticians, psychometrists, or others whose careers are centered on the development or refinement of various research paradigms. Written by practitioners for practitioners in a straightforward and

Assessment Methods for Student Affairs $40 Assessment Methods for Student AffairsAccountability and demonstrating organizational effectiveness are two hallmarks of contemporary administrative practice in higher education in general and in student affairs administration in particular. As funding for student affairs is increasingly tied to the need to show how student affairs programs and services make a difference in higher education, accrediting bodies, governmental organizations, governing boards, students, parents, and other stakeholders continue to accelerate their demand that higher education organizations be accountable for their work. Consequently, the technical and methodological aspects of conducting assessment projects have become of critical importance to student affairs administrators. Assessment Methods for Student Affairs provides a practical guide to the nuts and bolts of conducting assessments, exploring issues such as how to get started, how to use survey instruments and software, how to collect and analyze data, how to present information in a meaningful form to the various stakeholders of the assessment project—whether by writing reports or conducting briefings—and how to implement findings.Editor John Schuh and his fellow contributors, all experts in the field, detail the methodological aspects of conducting assessment projects specifically for the student affairs practitioner who is ready to conduct assessment projects, but is not quite sure how to manage their technical aspects. Using a variety of case studies and concrete examples to illustrate various assessment approaches, the authors lead the reader step-by-step through each phase of the assessment process with jargon-free, hands-on guidance.This book is not written for statisticians, qualitative methodologists, theoreticians, psychometrists, or others whose careers are centered on the development or refinement of various research paradigms. Written by practitioners for practitioners in a straightforward and

Basic Extensions: Simons’ Basic $9.62 Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher’s book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Simons’ BASIC was an extension to BASIC 2.0 for the Commodore 64 home computer. Written by 16-year-old British programmer David Simons in 1983, it was distributed by Commodore in cartridge format. Simons’ BASIC manual front page. Simons’ BASIC cartridge. One of the early Simons’ BASIC cartridges, with the misspelled label contributing to the software’s naming confusion. Simons’ BASIC added 114 additional keywords to BASIC 2.0. These included commands to ease the coding of sprites, high-resolution and multicolour graphics, and sound. In addition, commands were also implemented to aid in structured programming. Keywords to assist in writing and editing BASIC programs, similar to those in the VIC-20 Programmer’s Aid cartridge, were also included. Also, programs written in Simons’ BASIC could employ hexadecimal numbers in assignments and calculations by including a $ prefix, or binary numbers by utilizing a % prefix. Because a portion of the cartridge data was mapped into memory at addresses $8000$9FFF, which overlapped part of the standard C64 BASIC RAM, the amount of available memory for BASIC programs was 8 KB less than that of a standard C64 configuration. The band Barcelona titled their 1999 debut album Simon Basic in tribute. The album includes the song “C-64″. … More: http://booksllc.net/?id=3415270

Beginning RSS and Atom Programming (Programmer to Programmer Series) $39.99 Beginning RSS and Atom ProgrammingRSS and Atom are specifications that give users the power to subscribe to information they want to receive and give content developers tools to provide continuous subscriptions to willing recipients in a spam-free setting. RSS and Atom are the technical power behind the growing millions of blogs on the Web. Blogs change the Web from a set of static pages or sites requiring programming expertise to update to an ever changing, constantly updated landscape that anyone can contribute to. RSS and Atom syndication provides users an easy way to track new information on as many Web sites as they want. This book offers you insight to understanding the issues facing the user community so you can meet users’ needs by writing software and Web sites using RSS and Atom feeds.As the first book to cover RSS and Atom together, it begins with an introduction to all the current and coming versions of RSS and Atom. You’ll go step by step through the process of producing, aggregating, and storing information feeds. When you’re finished, you’ll be able to produce client software and Web sites that create, manipulate, aggregate, and display information feeds effectively.What you will learn from this bookWhat developers’ tools are available to create and customize feedsThe various approaches to storing feed data, from XML to SQL to RDFWhy RSS and Atom information feeds must follow the rules of XML syntaxHow XQuery and XSLT can be powerful tools for selecting and manipulating a portion of an RSS or Atom feedWhat’s required to build a tool to aggregate information from multiple feedsThe newest use for RSS — podcasting MP3 audio files to iPods or other MP3 devicesWho this book is forThis book is for beginning programmers who have some programming experience and are looking to add information feeds to their Web sites. No previous programming experience is