Join Frank Edwards as he tours the blogosphere February 1-25 2011 to talk about his new medical thriller, Final Mercy (Zumaya Publications).

Frank was born in Rochester New York. In 1968 he entered the US Army and served a tour in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. He received a BA with honors in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill then attended medical school at the University of Rochester, graduating with an MD in 1979. In 1989 he received an MFA in writing from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC. After practicing for a decade in North Carolina, he returned to the Rochester, area in 1990 where he remains in active practice.

He has published a number of poems and short stories in literary magazines including Carolina Quarterly and The Virginia Quarterly Review, along with numerous medical articles. In 1988, Henry Holt published his first non-fiction book, Medical Malpractice: Solving the Crisis. His second non-fiction book, The M & M Files: Morbidity and Mortality Rounds in Emergency Medicine was published by Hanley & Belfus in 2002 and has become a standard text in emergency medicine.

For the past thirteen years he has taught creative writing seminars to medical students at the U of R. In 2004, the University of Rochester Press published his collection of poems and short stories, It’ll Ease the Pain.

Final Mercy is his first novel.

Final Mercy centers on Dr. Jack Forester, director of the New Canterbury University Hospital emergency department, who is about to win an ongoing battle to modernize the ED when he’s stymied by the power-hungry dean, Bryson Witner. Then someone tries to murder Jack’s mentor and the former dean, setting it up to look like suicide.

Bit by bit, Jack uncovers facts that suggest several other recent tragic accidents may not have been in the least accidental. The deeper he digs, the closer danger creeps, and the phrase “life or death” begins to take on a new and very personal meaning.

You can visit his website at www.medthriller.com.

Frank’s tour schedule:

Tuesday, February 1
Interviewed at Literarily Speaking

Wednesday, February 2
Book reviewed at By the Book

Thursday, February 3
Interviewed at Book Marketing Buzz

Friday, February 4
Interviewed at Review From Here

Monday, February 7
Interviewed at Blogcritics

Tuesday, February 8
Interviewed at Pump Up Your Book

Wednesday, February 9
Guest blogging at Moonlight, Lace & Mayhem

Thursday, February 10
Interviewed at Examiner

Friday, February 11
Book reviewed at Lucky Rosie’s

Monday, February 14
Guest blogging at Simply Stacie

Tuesday, February 15
Book reviewed at Books and Thoughts and Adventures

Wednesday, February 16
Book reviewed at Book Reviews by Molly

Thursday, February 17
Interviewed at The Book Connection

Friday, February 18
Guest blogging at Murder by 4

Monday, February 21
Guest blogging at Pitching Pencils

Tuesday, February 22
Guest blogging at Two Ends of the Pen

Wednesday, February 23
Interviewed at Shine

Thursday, February 24
Book reviewed at Black Diamonds Book Reviews

Friday, February 25
Guest blogging at Southern City Mysteries

For more information on his virtual book tour, you can visit Frank’s official tour page here.

Pump Up Your Book is an innovative public relations agency specializing in online book publicity for authors looking for maximum online promotion to sell their books. Visit our website at www.pumpupyourbook.com to find out how we can take your book to the virtual level!

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