News Items About Book Marketing and Publishing

First, I am grateful to Digital Book Today for including my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT as one of 10 books featured for a week on the site.

In the post “Weekly Featured Great Reads: eBooks for the Kindle 8/15/2012” Anthony Wessel says:

This is a free listing we provide as a service to authors. Digital Book Today has posted our 8 Weekly Featured Great Reads for the Kindle on the right and left hand side of our site. Today we have 8 great eBooks (plus a bonus 2 books) that are highly reviewed Kindle titles with a bargain price. Take the time to check out the “Great Reads” and read more about them on Amazon.

Click here to read the entire list of books.

Second, thanks to HUNTER author Robert Bidinotto I learned about the Forbes article by David Vinjamuri “Publishing Is Broken, We’re Drowning in Indie Books — And That’s a Good Thing.” Click here to read the Forbes article.

Third, because of the quote in the Forbes article of mega-author Sue Grafton from an interview by Leslea Tash for LouisvilleKY.com, I checked out Tash’s followup to her original blog post. The followup contained a response from Sue Grafton to the firestorm raised by her earlier remarks. Click here to read the response. (Note that I left a comment on this followup blog post.)

In Sue Grafton’s followup remarks she said, “I don’t understand the mechanics of e-publishing.” She went on to say:

This is a whole new thrust for publication that apparently everyone has been aware of except yours truly. I still don’t understand how it works, but I can see that a hole has been blasted in the wall, allowing writers to be heard in a new way and on a number of new fronts.

All I can say is that I am personally glad for POD (print on demand), ebooks, self-publishing, Amazon, and all the other online tools that enable authors to bypass the New York gatekeepers.

In fact, here is what I wrote about the New York gatekeepers in my comment on Leslea Tash’s followup blog post:

Sue Grafton’s quoted remark in the Forbes article about self-published novelists not “bothering to read, study, or do the research” is so off the mark.

For my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT, which takes place in 1970 at Ft. Knox, I spent years and thousands of dollars reading books, hiring an editorial book consultant, taking writing courses at UCLA Extension, starting the Los Angeles Chapter of Sisters in Crime, etc. in order to make it the best novel I could.

In fact, at the same time I was in the midst of self-publishing, the novel was selected as a 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semifinalist.

But back then agents and editors in New York did not understand a story about army wives. In fact, one rejection said the women would have to meet through their own jobs — maybe at a law firm — and not through their husbands. Another rejection said there was no more prejudice in the United States.

On August 20 and 21 MRS. LIEUTENANT will be FREE on Kindle as part of Amazon’s KDP Select program. You can download the ebook for free at http://amzn.to/OXrBhh and see what New York editors did not understand. (If you do not have a Kindle, you can download free Kindle apps at Amazon.)

Please tell a friend about the FREE download of MRS. LIEUTENANT. (The story is a slice of women’s social history right before the start of the women’s liberation movement.)

P.S. Louisville is in the story — my grandparents lived in Louisville at the time of the novel, which is based on my own experiences as a new Mrs. Lieutenant during the Vietnam War.

Remember to download your free Kindle mobi format of MRS. LIEUTENANT on August 20 and 21 at http://amzn.to/OXrBhh

And if you do not have a Kindle, download a free Kindle app for almost any electronic device at http://amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

P.S. You might enjoy reading the blog post about how MRS. LIEUTENANT, a 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semifinalist, is getting a second chance thanks to Amazon’s KDP Select.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. A new nonfiction ebook of hers is TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK and her newest fiction ebook is the thriller CIA FALL GUY.

Click here to visit her Amazon author page at amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller

She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com