Gary Kliewer & Confluence Book Svc.

More important than ivy-league academics or descriptions of your decades of experience, the endorsements you have received and testimonials you have earned convince and sell your readers that you are the top-of-the-line master. Face it, people want to base their decisions on the judgments of someone else they consider an expert. It is true whether they are voting for a candidate or buying a novel. Naturally, it is especially, critically true when they are selecting a how-to book or a text on…

Do I have to? You’ve written and perhaps published your book. You’ve discovered how much time it takes to make even a traditional sales kit look professional. You fought for some local publicity. Now you are asking, do I really have to get into the social media thing, too? I am supposed to tell you “yes.” But the honest answer is “maybe.”

To find out if you should commit your precious time to building your social media presence—or if it is more likely to be a…

Every book we are working on now has multimedia elements.

Among the textbooks for which we manage production, a large percentage of academic references are website links; that’s where the current, peer-reviewed, accurate sources live now. Most reference works and textbooks have supplemental websites where students go for the in-depth research, study questions, and video. After all, for today’s students, bound books are inefficient and old fashioned.

No longer do the visual…

Whether working with a major house or self publishing, an author today must maintain a website. Having a professional online presence is as standard as having a sales sheet and a business card. But the old (that is, more than two years ago) expectation that a website can be just a glorified billboard is obsolete thinking. What can or should an author-and-book website do for an author now?

First, the site does serve as a sales tool, but only if it is a dynamic tool where reviews and…

Even if you are not personally ready for base jumping, you may enjoy watching extreme sports. Now we have extreme publishing: James Joyce has been quoted inside the DNA of a bacterium!

Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute stitched together the entire genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. We have been adding and subtracting bits of DNA for decades, but this engineering feat is a milestone. This time, the scientists started from the raw recipe, the…