Sheila Roberts lives in the Pacific Northwest. She’s happily married and has three children. She has had twenty-five books published, both in fiction and nonfiction under different names and in different languages. Her novels have been optioned for book clubs and film. Her book Angel Lane was an Amazon Top Ten Romance pick for 2009. When she’s not hanging out with her girlfriends or hitting the dance floor with her husband, she can be found writing about those things dear to women’s hearts: family, friends, and chocolate.

You can visit Sheila at her website (http://www.sheilasplace.com). You can also find her on Twitter (http://twitter.com/_Sheila_Roberts) and

Facebook(http://www.facebook.com/reqs.php#/pages/Sheila-Roberts/76502579853?ref=ts)

Welcome to Book Marketing Buzz, Sheila. Can we begin by having you tell us a little about your book?

Sheila Roberts: I am so excited about Small Change, my new book with St. Martin’s Press, simply because the theme is one that is near and dear to my heart: learning to live well on what you make. It’s a novel about three girlfriends helping each other conquer their financial challenges. It’s a fun read and, I hope, and inspiring one – good women’s fiction with a nice dollop of romance thrown in for good measure. I’ve also included some great money tips and even recipes for fabulous homemade gifts. Uh, did I mention I’m excited about this book? J

What is the first thing you did to promote your book once your publisher accepted your manuscript?

Sheila Roberts: Actually, the first thing I did was to sit down and make a promotion plan. I actually do this for every book and it includes everything from where I want to place ads to bookstores where I’ll hopefully do an event. (Of course, a budget is part of the plan, too, and I sometimes find I have to scale back just a little to stay in my budget. My ideas are often bigger than my bank account!) Tops on my to-do list is always a blog tour simply because this method of promotion is the best deal in town and you can meet so many new readers on the Internet.

If you had to pick just one book marketing tool that you’ve used to promote your book, which would you say has been the most effective?

Sheila Roberts: I love doing book signings (mainly because I’m a big ham and I enjoy having a captive audience J ) but online promotion is probably the most effective thing I do.

Do you do more promoting online or offline and which do you prefer?

Sheila Roberts: I do online promotion, ads, some radio and TV, book club visits, and bookstore appearances whenever I get the chance. I actually prefer meeting people in person, but I also enjoy online socializing. I’ve met a ton of great people online.

Do you use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to promote your books and have you had any success with it?

Sheila Roberts: I do have friends on Facebook and Tweeps on Twitter. I certainly don’t have a huge following like many people. I always joke with my web guy that I’m going to take over the world. But I’m finding that taking over the world is a slow process J

Do you own a blog and how often do you update it? Did you set up your blog solely to promote your book and what is its effectiveness?

Sheila Roberts: I blog on my website. I feel it’s a good way for people to get to know me as a person. I don’t blog every day but I try to keep things fresh both on the blog and the rest of the site. Visitors can find a new recipe and blog at least every month along with book excerpts and a contest, of course, as well as news of “Sheila sightings”.

Do you recommend authors getting publicists to help them promote their books? Do you have one?

Sheila Roberts: I think using a publicist is a great idea. Maybe not on your first book but at some point. Publicists, like agents, are experts in their field and have contacts that we writers don’t have. Yes, there are some things you can do yourself, but I think most writers reach a point where they need help.

If an author prefers to do it alone rather than hire a publicist, where should they start?

Sheila Roberts: Promote on the Internet. Meet people on Facebook and Twitter. Get a blog tour going. Bottom line: word of mouth is still one of the best ways to promote your book, and the best mouth to get that rolling is yours!

Thank you for coming, Sheila! We wish you much success!

Sign up for our email updates

I found a really interesting article called “32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business” at WebWorker Daily. There were several reasons I liked it, but the main reason was how Facebook can be used as a highly effective business tool. Authors need to keep in mind that their books are their business and any way we can find to promote them is all right in our books. One thing I think authors overlook (I had one of my clients clam up after I asked them their twitter and facebook urls. “I don’t know how to get one,” was the response for Facebook) and now, my author friends, you can get a vanity url which will lead everyone to your facebook page. The link is http://www.facebook.com/username/. Mine is www.facebook.com/thewriterslife if anyone wants to hook up with me or www.facebook.com/pumpupyourbook if you’d like to join our Pump Up Your Book Fan Page. I strongly recommend all writers and authors to visit Facebook (as well as Twitter) and learn how you can not only promote your books at both places but learn what networking with others is all about first hand.

Another interesting article I found was “5 Ways Companies Used News Trends for Business Success” at Mashable. What it is basically telling you is to make your promotions more news worthy and less promotional which we are all told to do when promoting or marketing our book. It’s useless to even waste our time with “Buy Me!” antics, but if you could somehow relate your book to news worthy items, then you just might have something there. How? Read how 5 businesses are doing it and follow suit.

And I believe the most interesting article was author Libba Bray’s interview with Skype where she discusses her “virtual book tour.” I know most people have read about this before now, but it bears repeating because this is a really great way to promote your book. We do something similar at Pump Up, but it’s more or less a vidlog. Vidlogs are where authors talk about their books and which are posted up at YouTube, among other video sharing websites such as Yahoo Video, Google Video, Veoh, VSocial, Blip…dozens upon dozens of places in which to do this. Readers tend to love seeing their favorite authors talk about their books as opposed to reading about them. One particular favorite vidlog we have done was with Kelly Epperson sitting on Santa’s lap with her book in her hand. Wasn’t Santa so accomodating?

That’s it for today. See you in the blogosphere!

Sign up for our email updates

How many of us are bloggers who write blog posts about books – whether it’s a review or you’re hosting an author and want to include the book cover?

Did you know that you could actually be making money off of this?

I just read an interesting article. Although it was an older article, it makes as much sense today as it did then. The article was about using Amazon affiliate buttons on every post you make to make money from your blog.

While this isn’t a new approach to making money from your blog, it is one thing I notice that is neglected from a lot of book blogs, as well as any other blogs that are talking about reading books, reviewing books or promoting books.

Before I go further, I have a confession. I have been an Amazon associate for a few years now and frankly I never saw any money to be made here. This is a personal observation and I’m sure there are a lot of people out there using it and making money. It’s really stupid of me because my business deals with books. I’ve already slapped myself so you don’t have to do it. However, the more I study this, the better the equation looks at the different ways you can get people

But…read this…

Okay so it’s Problogger and he gets a million hits and while that certainly would help but it’s the point he made that really made me rethink using it again.

He said that what people did was even if they weren’t interested in buying that product, they might go browsing which they did in his experiment which led to a $500 payout for him.

Get signed up for their Amazon’s affiliate system (it’s easy peasy) and get those buttons up, especially if you’re talking about, reviewing or promoting a book.

To sign up, click here. To find the buttons, look for the tab at the top that says “Associates Central.”

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but Book Marketing Buzz has a new look.  The picture on the left shows you what we used to look like in case you forgot.

I have a wonderful wonderful lady who has helped me change over from the generic wordpress template to a more professional one.  I’ve got lots of templates on my dashboard to the point that if I’m not happy with this one, one or two clicks, and I have another one.  And – I’m still finding them to load on here.  I’m a happy camper now.

But it was in the middle of our redo when I got a frantic call from her.

“I lost your archives!”

Seems that HostGator told her that wouldn’t happen and they were very, very wrong.

And of course she was very very upset.

But you know, I didn’t panic.  I immediately went to my old wordpress dashboard and there was Book Marketing Buzz right there – with archives intact.  Only the thing was, I would have to reload them.  Talk about a relief.  I don’t know who was more happy – me or her.

But I love this woman.  For a small fee, you tell her what you want and she’ll set you up on a spanking new blog with all the bells and whistles.  Leave a comment below and I’ll get up with you on who she is.

The point being – I am slowly adding the archives of the old Book Marketing Buzz to the new one so if you’re a newcomer, this isn’t all we have by far.

Now if you’re wondering why I chose to go self-hosted which would cost, I’ll tell you.

Not only do you not have to depend on the generic templates they give you at Wordpress, there are plugins up the yooza that are perfect for what I want to do with this blog.  I can now add javascript, which means I can add codes to my template here that I couldn’t do on the free Wordpress template site.  I have a very cool plug-in that lets me submit my latest blog post to sites such as Yahoo Buzz, Twitter, Facebook – lots and lots of places – and I just love my new tweetmeme button which makes it so easy to announce my latest blog post at Twitter.

I still have so much more to add and between my work with Pump Up Your Book and getting these blogs in shape, it’s a race to the finish line, but stick around, I have new ideas coming up!

–Book Marketing Buzz

Interesting article in TechCrunch this morning. Seems they had run a story about a 104-year-old woman who had signed up for Twitter (supposedly the oldest woman to sign up for this wonderful microblogging platform), but the thing is, it ended up being a PR stunt that either worked or not (depending on your take on things). TechCrunch apologized; wasn’t their fault. They were just reporting a news item and wanted to clear up the facts (thanks TechCrunch!).

But what I find interesting in all this is that Ivy is still twittering. Just four hours ago, she wrote, “hello all spending the morning reading wont be able to use lap top much today other residents are using it be in touch later.”

So is Ivy doing this or someone from The Geek Squad who supposedly put her up to it in the first place? Who knows, but I followed her. It would be interesting to see how far this takes us, you think?

But is there a fine line between getting that story and maintaining integrity while doing so? Do you think IvyBean 104 was being taken advantage of and has no idea what’s going on or maybe really she can Tweet?