Information and tips, focusing on publishing, publicity, promotional ideas, author profiles, design resources and more.
If you’re new to Sarah Martin’s writing, her new website is the perfect introduction.
Sarah writes across a range of genres and age groups, but what ties all of her work together is heart — stories about people, belonging, resilience, friendship, and the natural world.
It’s a beautiful new online home for her books and writing life.
Visit: sarahmartinwriter.com
Beautifully designed by Michael Brimelow.
Author Ian Burrett has constructed an excellent website to promote his book. The one page site is very simple, has clear opportunities to purchase and good supporting information. Also available online at Booktopia and other booksellers. Ian reports that the book has been selling well.
The book blurb and author biography are as follows:
Many war veterans and their families have endured years of debilitating physical and emotional problems, and as a result they and their families have arguably suffered as much or more that those who have died during all conflicts in which Australia has participated. Because of this the author believes that returned service people have just as much right to be named on community war memorials as those who died during or as a result of their service.
Hundreds of thousands of our returned heroes, primarily from the two World Wars, have not been named on community war memorials. This book explains why this has happened and gives step-by-step guidelines to assist communities to update their memorials. It includes many points not previously revealed to the general public on this topic. It also provides assistance to those wishing to research their service person ancestors as well as school students and other researchers studying our wartime history.
No similar book has been previously published. With respect to community war memorials the orientation of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Australian War Memorial and the RSL is primarily directed towards those who died during or a result of their service. Their assistance is orientated to people researching individuals, not community researchers desirous of updating their local war memorials with a large number of names. This book can be regarded as a text book for those wanting to give our returned heroes, and those who died, the long-overdue recognition they so rightly deserve.
About the Author
Ian Burrett is a retired Vietnam veteran. His inspiration for writing this book is his father, Lt Col Athol Frederick Burrett DSO MID. Of the 12 000 Aussies who landed at Gallipoli on April 25th and 26th, 1915, Athol was one of less than 300 still fighting when World War I ended. Ian is currently the treasurer of the Portland NSW RSL sub-Branch. He has been a JP in NSW for nearly fifty years. Ian’s formative years were spent in Goulburn, NSW, and he was heavily into sport. He represented Goulburn in hockey, table tennis, swimming and snooker. He played a side drum in scout and school cadet bands at Anzac Day marches.
Ian has had a varied career, primarily in real estate, an area he worked in for about twenty-five years. He was the principal of Raine & Horne franchises at Kincumber and Avoca Beach, on the Central Coast of NSW. Prior to that, based in Sydney, he was regarded as one of Australia’s leading authorities in assisting accountants in public practice to install internally-managed superannuation funds for their corporate clients. He wrote articles for CCH Australia Ltd and conducted seminars on the topic in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. He was working in the security industry prior to his retirement in 2007.
Now single, Ian was married twice. Ian has two children from his first marriage—Lisa, a solicitor, born 1973 and Brett, a doctor, born 1979.
Independent authors should have a place online where potential readers can discover more about them and their work. It might be a social media page or a website. Here are two websites that do an excellent job of providing information about the author in a professional and interesting way. Nic d Alessandro’s and Mary Garden’s respective sites are high impact, easy to navigate and provide extended information about their work.
While a website will not, on its own, drive much traffic for an author, most established authors have a site dedicated to their published books, and establishing the basics of their story. If a potential reader is searching for information about a particular author, it is good for them to have somewhere to go. Independent authors will typically only have a small (or no) budget) for such an undertaking, Fortunately, there are some excellent website building services that do not require their users to code or even know much about the technical side of things. So keep it simple to begin with, maybe even just a single page with links to your Amazon and other listings.
As the biggest seller of advertising space in the world, Google knows a thing or two about marketing. They have distilled some of that knowledge into a series of lessons. Topics include "Create a Landing Page that Lands Customers", "Segment Your Customers to Reach the Right Ones" and "Keep Customers Interested with Email Automation".
“We assembled a small team of our own marketers and challenged them to build a product they would use. The result is Primer.”
Only the British Museum could bill itself as the Museum of the World without straying too far into hyperbole. With the fruit of centuries of acquisition (imperial or otherwise) at its disposal, the BM has allied with Google to showcase some its most impressive items online. Users can scroll along an interactive timeline and drill down to objects of interest. Along similar lines to their very successful "A History of the World in 100 Objects" collaboration with the BBC.
If you'd like to search the web without every keystroke being logged, analysed and monetised, try Duck Duck Go, "the search engine that doesn't track you" (and is blocked in China). Of particular interest is escape from the "filter bubble". Many google and Facebook users are unaware that search results are subtly tailored to their user profile and history on that service. So you may miss out on interesting links because Google automatically demotes them according to your perceived preferences.
Musician Tony McKenna wanted a mockup of his website that he could take to a developer for implementation. We designed a logo and related header bar, and worked with a three column grid and colour scheme drawn from the landscapes loved by our client.
