Category Archives: Author

Reviews and Interviews

Well, the ball is really rolling on this project! Many blogs are going to be hosting an event called Fairytale Fortnight, in which they review upcoming fairy tale retellings. The Fairytale Keeper: Avenging the Queen is to be featured on quite a few of those. In the next three weeks, I expect to see between five and ten more reviews and I’ll post links to those as soon as I get them. My author interview with Alice at Alice in Readerland was recently posted and a review by Vicky Culbertson, Sanders Middle School’s Media Specialist, was posted to my page on Amazon.

A Crazy Month

March has been a whirlwind for The Fairytale Keeper!  I received my first copy of the book a few weeks ago and since then have sent off a dozen or so copies to reviewers.  I started a Facebook fan page two weeks ago and already have 450 fans.  The first chapter was posted about a week ago and the reviews have been very positive so far.  In fact, I was the featured author on The Secret Writer on March 22, 2012.

I’ve been talking to wholesalers, distributors, and the like to make sure my readers can order my book from independent bookstores, major book sellers (Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Borders), and online retailers (Amazon, Createspace, Apple).  And I’m happy to say that on June 1,  anyone who wants a copy should be able to get one pretty easily!  Here’s hoping that April is just as productive a month as March!

Mommy Approves

So my mom finished reading my manuscript yesterday.  I’m floating on cloud 9 right now because it seems she couldn’t put it down.  When I gave it to her on Tuesday, she told me to give her a while to finish it (which I assumed to mean a few weeks).  She finished it in two days!!!

I’m sure some of you authors out there can relate to this: Having an unpublished novel is like having read an amazing book and having no one to discuss it with.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t talk about it anyways, but this one-sided conversations usually ended in someone changing the subject with good reason, I suppose. A huge thanks to my mom for giving my book  a general thumbs up, giving me some well-needed feedback, and giving me someone to talk to about my baby.

Marketing Yourself on WordPress: It works if you work it!!

I spent a full eight hours yesterday trying to make this website easy for people to find. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle because I share my name with a blues singer who has a lot of YouTube videos, go figure.

When I googled myself yesterday at 8 am NOTHING came up. This morning, I googled myself and I was the number one suggestion! How do you like them apples? I like them apples. I like them apples a lot! So what exactly did I do?

I did a little research. I am reading The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing by Marilyn Ross and Sue Collier which has many marketing tips.  I also read WordPress tutorials on how to increase traffic to my site.  Then, because I am not very technologically savvy, I read more tutorials on how to actually do the things suggested in the WordPress tutorials.  –But by reading and  following the instructions in this post, eight hours of work can easily be condensed into one.

In The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, Ross and Collier suggest some free websites that will register new blogs with dozens of search engines for (drum roll, please) FREE.  http://www.addme.com is one example.  It took me less than five minutes to fill out their online form. Ross and Collier also suggest that I go to the search engines themselves and register with them.  This will get a blog recognized more quickly. WordPress suggests this too, so I’ll discuss exactly how to go about doing this in a minute.

WordPress wants its bloggers to succeed.  They give many great suggestions for how to increase traffic to new websites. Here are the ones that I found most useful.

1.  Check out blogs similar to your new site.  Leave comments, like their posts, and follow some of them. This is a great way to let people know your here.  I did get some traffic from this and a few followers to my blog.

2.  Create tags and categories for your posts. It is incredibly quick and easy to do.  Just follow these instructions:  http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/tags/

3.  Register your website with Google, Bing, and, Yahoo. Here are some links that will help you with this process.  It took me two hours to do this, but using these links, it should only take a few minutes.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

4.  Create a Gravatar.  I don’t know why this is important, but it is.  Here’s the link on how to do it: http://en.support.wordpress.com/avatars/gravatars/

5.  Link your Facebook account and Twitter accounts to your blog.  This is also very easy.  Just follow the steps suggested in this link provided by WordPress:  http://en.support.wordpress.com/facebook-integration/

I hope these suggestions help you like they’ve helped me.  I literally went from off the radar to number one on the search list over night.  If any of my readers have any other tips, please post comments so I can share them!!

So I’ve FINALL…

So I’ve FINALLY jumped on the Twitter bandwagon.  Does that make me so 2000-and-late or what?!  If you’d like to follow my escapades as I learn about publishing, book marketing, and writing, I’ve put the link to my Twitter account below.

https://twitter.com/#!/AndreaCefalo