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Brilliant website design and why it’s so important for authors. James mentions some of her favorite authors who have ugly and terrible websites. BUT if the author is established, it doesn’t matter. New authors don’t have this luxury. We have to stand out in the market. We have competition. The author website is a way to connect. It’s critical to make a good impression and a personal connection. You can only do this through your web presence and social media. Bring them back to reading your work, so they will read your books, enjoy them and tell their friends. Chris Guillebeau, author of the recent $100 Startup tells how it was easy for him to get a book deal as he had an established platform online. Read more in James’ guest article - Is your website hurting your writing?

A bad choice of colors can kill first impressions.

A mystery might be greys and blacks, whereas a go-getting kickass non-fiction book might be red and modern white.

I suggest using a few keywords that represent your brand – i.e., genre, interests, business or service, and using hashtags (#) with them. Why? This makes it a hot link (this one goes to #snark) to Search – important for you to have more visibility in Twitter’s internal search engine.Also, this is how you show up on Google.

If you’re using a header for your Facebook timeline, now you can use the same one for your Twitter header. Very cool.

“Robert was doing rather better than we expected him to,” she wrote. Ms. Dewey said it had sold an additional 5,000 copies in the United States, for a total of 13,500, which is “a great achievement for any unknown author.”

“It would have stayed on the path it was on, which is towards oblivion.”

“It’s the power of the author brand,” Mr. Entrekin said.