How Free Content Can Boost Book Sales

To sell more books, authors and publishers need to actively manage how their books are discovered, including which excerpts potential buyers can read for free.

“Every author writes different kinds of books and has different audiences, but your audience always wants value,” says Rob Eagar, president of WildFire Marketing. Fiction readers are looking for emotion and stories that inspire, while non-fiction readers want to learn new information or how to overcome a challenge.

So, as Rob advised at Digital Book World’s recent Discoverability and Marketing conference, when doling out free content, don’t just settle for the first chapter. Instead, answer the reader’s age-old question: What’s in it for me? more »

Advice for Parents who “Friend” their Kids

Sometimes parents are their own worst enemies when they “friend” their kids on Facebook.

Thinking back on high school, no one wanted to be embarrassed in front of their friends. So why would we want to bring that on our children? more »

Social Networks Mirror Teen Social Lives

How teens get along within social networks reflects what happens in real life – for good and for bad.

Just as they do face to face, kids love to socialize online. Four out of five online teens hang out on social networks. Some of them may like to tweet or dabble in MySpace, but practically all have a profile on Facebook. “No one had any idea how quickly and or how widely this would spread,” says Stephen Balkam, director of the Family Online Safety Institute which sponsored the new report by the Pew Research Center. more »