Tag: Marketing

Big Changes to Facebook Cover Photos (but it’s a secret)

Facebook LogoBig news for cover photos on Facebook. As you may know, Facebook has very strict guidelines when it comes to what you can say, what you can do, and how you “advertise” on your Facebook Page. Of course, the reason was, Facebook wants you to advertise through Facebook ads!

However, very quietly, Facebook has dropped some of its restrictions; most importantly, it doesn’t disallow Call-to-Actions. Hold on, before you grammar police get all handcuffing on me, the previous sentence was meant as a double negative. You see, Facebook didn’t come out and say, “You can now do this.” They actually just dropped the language that says you can’t. Continue reading “Big Changes to Facebook Cover Photos (but it’s a secret)”

Codebreaking for Beginners

Last month I was busy making new business cards to distribute to unsuspecting tourists (see my post “Stop me and Buy One”.) I checked out what information should be on my card and having established that I needed to put some of my book covers on the back, and an eye catching simple design on the front, I discovered that I should really add a QR code. Yes, those foxed me too, but wait a minute and you too will find out that QR codes are utterly brilliant.

The QR code was invented in Japan by a subsidiary of Toyota to track vehicles during manufacture. It was designed to allow high-speed component scanning and has since become one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. QR codes then became common in consumer advertising. Smartphone users or iPad owners can install a free app with a QR-code scanner that is able to read a displayed code and convert it to a URL, which in turns directs the smartphone’s browser to the website of the company, store, product. Continue reading “Codebreaking for Beginners”

For Sale: NYT Bestseller Status

Moving the needle on your book sales is a chore. It’s hard enough to write a book, but selling it takes things to a whole new level. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just publish your book and have it appear on the New York Times bestseller list without making any effort at all?

An appearance of your book on the NYT bestseller list is a sentinel event. It is one of the highest bars to hurdle. You’d be up there with the big names in traditional publishing. You’d become a household name. The money and recognition would start pouring in. Steven Spielberg will make your book into a movie, Oprah will want to interview you, and [insert name of latest sex symbol here] will want to have your babies!

After all, an appearance on the prestigious New Your Times bestseller list must mean you’ve sold lots and lots of books. It’s probably one of the books everyone is reading, right?

That’s a nice dream. If you like it, I advise you to read no further. Continue reading “For Sale: NYT Bestseller Status”

Tutorial Tuesday Time Out

IU Tutorials and Tools for Prospering in a Digital WorldWell hello there fans of Tutorial Tuesday. Here at Indies Unlimited, we take pride in bringing you tutorials each week to help you get more out of social media platforms, software packages, handy websites, tools, and more. You can check out past tutorials for free here. If you don’t feel like going through all the tedious and strenuous labor of repeatedly clicking that “older posts” arrow, you can check out this nifty book here.

Occasionally I’ll get messages from folks asking for tutorials on specific subjects, or I’ll write them based on queries which come up during conversations with other authors. Of course, that means we haven’t covered everything yet…

So how about we open up the comments section today and YOU tell US what you’d like to see tutorials about? Let’s not get silly here, we can’t give you tutorials on picking the right lottery numbers or on how to build a laser death ray (that’s proprietary), but we can help in author-related topics other than becoming a best-seller overnight or how to get on Oprah. And please, keep it clean, folks. Here are some upcoming tutorials: How to Create a Sell Sheet; How to Find Media Outlets; Preparing for a Radio Interview; and How to Write a Bio Blurb. We look forward to seeing your ideas. If we’ve already got a tutorial on it, we’ll let you know that, as well.