Logical Expressions Blog

Since we are no longer publishing a newsletter, we’ve rebranded our former Publishize Newsletter archive site as The Book Consultant. It still has all the great content you’ve come to know and love and we’ve been writing a lot of new articles lately. So without further ado, here are the latest articles we’ve put online in the last month or so: 10 Ways You Can Use a Web Site to Promote Your Book After your book is done and out in the world, use your Web site to promote it. How to Break...

A friend of mine told me that January 13 is "Make Your Dreams Come True day." I checked multiple Web sites and it seems to be for real. According to Holiday Insights, on this day you should: "Do something, anything to move in the direction of achieving your dreams." What a great idea for a holiday! One of my dreams was always to write a book. If you're like most people, maybe you've shared that dream at one time or another. But then you thought... "I don't know how." ...

Like a lot of people I’ve submitted my articles to free article sites in an effort to drive traffic. I’ve never thought it was a particularly good idea for a number of reasons, so only about 10 of my articles are out there on these free sites. Now I’m even MORE glad I never really bought into article marketing. The other day I looked through my spam filter and discovered a PayPal invoice. I retrieved it from spam land and discovered that one free article site has decided that he’s paying too much for bandwidth so now he’s...

We've been quiet this fall because we've been busy working on our newest project. Over the last couple of years, so many people have asked us questions about how we managed to write and publish our 10 books that we decided to distill everything we know down into easy-to-digest modular "chunks." The result is a series of training courses at our newest Web site http://www.SelfPubU.com. Our beta testers have given us great feedback and now we're finally ready to share SelfPubU with the world. Learning how to publish books used to be time-consuming at best and...

Because we had at least one person who wanted to upgrade her SPOC pass today, but couldn't, we're leaving the registration link and site log-in open through May 31.

The third day of SPOC focused on turning your book into a business with a complete product line. If you joined us, you listened to some big names in the writing and publishing world. Here are a few gems from what they shared, and in case you missed a call, how you can get the audio downloads or CDs.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! We're happy because on today's dog walk through the forest, we found our first morel mushrooms of the season. We plan to invite them to dinner. I'm sending out this newsletter a week early because I may or may not get one out next week. Next Wednesday is the first day of the Self-Publishers Online Conference! As you might imagine, I'm a little nervous about SPOC. I'm quietly hoping everything will go the way it's supposed to and people will love it. But I'll be honest; putting on an event like this...

It's hard to believe, but after all this preparation, the Self-Publishers Online Conference is next week! All the excitement got me thinking about my own book-publishing journey. I like to joke that it only took 10 years to self-publish my first book. Maybe you can relate to this ;-) In 1996, I read a bunch of self-publishing books and became completely overwhelmed. I had piles of notes, no idea how to write the book, even less clue where to get it printed, and zero money for my first print run. A mere 10 years later in 2006,...

As you might imagine, we've been busy with preparations for the Self-Publishers Online Conference, which will be held May 12-14. I've been talking with speakers and sending out press releases. It's a ton of fun getting to spend time with such cool "book people." As I've mentioned, you can attend the conference live for free, but if you want recordings or CDs, you need to upgrade your registration to a paid pass. If that's something you're interested in, be aware that our early bird discount ends in 2 days on April 30. On a totally non-work related...

Well, not yet, but we're getting there. Earlier this week, my wife Susan and I were guests on a teleseminar hosted by Gina Bell of Networking Masters International. The topic was about lessons learned from putting on a virtual event. It was an interesting "round table" call with two other professionals where we all shared the things we did right and the things we'd do differently. I thought I'd share more about the subject here. We have experience in this area because we hosted the Self-Publishers Online Conference (SPOC 2009) last May using software I developed for the...

Although I don’t use Twitter often, yesterday, I wandered over there and took at look at the happenings in the Twitterverse. Much to my surprise, I had a lovely red notice on my page that said my account was suspended. If you click the link on the big red box on your page, you find a page, which I now know contains the “Foul Owl.” (Not to be confused with the Fail Whale, which is equally useless, yet different.) The Foul Owl told me that I could look at the Twitter status to see if something was...

Greetings from all of us at SPOC world headquarters ;-) The conference wrapped up with loads of information about how to take your book and build your business, info-products, speaking career--all to make more revenue. If you joined us, you heard some big name gurus of the writing and publishing world giving the "how-to's" for getting your message out there--lucratively.  Here are a few gems of what they shared, plus, in case you missed a call, how you can get...

Greetings from all of us at SPOC world headquarters ;-) The second day of our conference, "Promotion Day," brought more gems and insights. If you joined us, you heard some big name gurus of the writing and publishing world giving the "how-to's" for marketing and promoting your book. Here are a few gems of what they shared, a preview of what's coming today on "Platform Day," plus, in case you missed a call, how you can get the audio downloads, CDs...

Greetings from all of us at SPOC world headquarters ;-) What an amazing first day of our online conference we had! If you joined us, you listened to some big name gurus of the writing and publishing world. Here are a few gems of what they shared, plus, in case you missed a call, how you can get the audio downloads, CDs plus other must-have items for the soon-to-be author. ** Dan Poynter - "Confirming Subjects & Finding Markets" How to research your subject matter and draft your marketing plan ...

SPOC, the Self Publishers Online Conference, takes place this week and Friday, the final day of the conference, ends with a bang with speakers Michael Port, Jill Lublin, Patrick Snow, Melanie Jordan and Donna Kozik. It's free to attend the online conference - all you have to do is register here: http://www.selfpublishersonlineconference.com/ Click the Register button in the upper right-hand side. When you register, you can see that you can choose from several ...

SPOC, the Self Publishers Online Conference, takes place next week and next Thursday May 14 brings another panel of publishing experts to the calls including Shel Horowitz, Brian Jud, Sandra Beckwith, Penny Sansevieri and Carol White & Debi Flora. It's free to attend the online conference-all you have to do is register here:  http://www.selfpublishersonlineconference.com/ Click the Register button in the upper right-hand side. When you register, you can see that you can choose from several options. Attending live is free. If you want more...

Greetings from all of us at SPOC world headquarters ;-) SPOC, the Self-Publishers Online Conference, is a virtual online publishing conference that starts next week. It features presentations by Dan Poynter, Michael Port, Peter Bowerman and other publishing experts. If you haven’t officially registered for the conference, you can here: http://www.selfpublishersonlineconference.com Click the Register button in the upper right-hand side. When you register, you will see that you can choose from several options. Attending live is free. If you want more goodies you can read about the paid options on the Attendees page. After you’ve...

I was just finishing up my notes for a teleseminar I'm doing with Linda Joy Myers today at the National Association for Memoir Writers (NAMW). Linda Joy's specialty is helping people become healed and transformed through creativity, art, and writing. I love the work she does and I'm thrilled that I've had the opportunity to get to know her. My NAMW teleseminar is called "Understanding Your Publishing Choices". Business and life are full of choices and almost invariably they relate to your goals. If you want to publish a book that will be in every bricks and mortar Barnes...

A big "thank you" to everyone who answered last week's 2-question survey. The teleseminar topic winner is "How to Set Up a Book Launch Campaign for Your Book." The teleseminar will be held on Thursday March 19 at 10 am Pacific time, so mark your calendar. (We'll send out call in information before the call.) We also got some great feedback from Publishize readers on other topics that are troubling them. Since we're only going to do one teleseminar a month, I thought I'd address some of the topics as articles too. A couple of people had comments...

Over the weekend, James and I did what we call "big picture thinking." We talked about a number of ways we can better serve our clients. One thing we decided is to start doing free monthly teleseminars just for readers of this newsletter. Publishing is a lot of work and people learn in different ways. So for those of you who like to listen and ask questions, here's your big chance to talk to us. The first teleseminar is on Thursday March 19 at 10 am Pacific time, so mark your calendar. (We'll send out call in information before the...

During the winter, it's incredibly quiet outside because most of the birds fly south or go into hiding. Whatever they do, they stop making noise. Over the last couple of days, even though it's been dreary and gray, I've been starting to think that the worst of winter may be behind us. The avian forest dwellers are starting to tweet and chirp again. When the birdies are happy, it makes me happy. This week's article is more about business than publishing, but something I'm constantly trying to explain to aspiring self-publishers is that publishing is not all about...

As some of you know, I've been doing a lot of teleseminars in these first few weeks of January. We did ones called: Get Your Book Done (with Donna Kozik) Sneak Peek into Book Coaching (with Lisa Manyon) Why Becoming a Book Author Can Change Your Life (with Gina Bell) All of them talk about our 90 Day Book Challenge which starts on Monday. If you are thinking about writing a book, this course is a great opportunity to make it happen. (If you have questions, don't be shy...ask me)...

Hi everyone... I wanted to let you know about a call I'm doing with Gina Bell today at 1 pm (Pacific time). You can sign up here:   http://www.logicalexpressions.com/Teleseminar_gina.htm Why Becoming a Book Author Can Change Your Life: Susan Daffron talks to Gina Bell about the many ways becoming a book author can have a huge impact on your business and your life. Susan is the author of 10 books, 9 of which she self-published over the past three years. Gina and Susan...

Right now, I am happily uploading a 9MB audio file. I am thrilled to be able to do this ostensibly boring task because for the last 3 weeks or so our satellite Internet has had a BIG problem. It has been somewhat agonizing to do things like send this newsletter on our backup 26.4 dial-up connection. Today, James installed a new transmitter on our satellite dish and it seems to have solved the problem. (Or at least helped a whole lot - cross your fingers!) In other news, I'm doing a call with Lisa Manyon on Friday. If you've...

As promised, here's the information about the special book promotion that is happening today only - December 11, 2008. The book is my ninth book and it's called Publishize: How to Quickly and Affordably Self-Publish a Book that Promotes Your Expertise.  As many of you know, I self-published 8 books in less than 18 months. Publishize is filled with all my best self-publishing secrets and online book marketing tips. Today only we are offering free shipping on the book and a slew of bonuses from many people in the publishing and business world. You'll find audio and print bonuses...

While I was at the PubWest publishing show in November, I was interviewed by Chris Kenneally about my book writing process, IdeaWeaver, and of course, our new book Publishize: How to Quickly and Affordably Self-Publish a Book That Promotes Your Expertise. You can listen here: BTB #73: Advice for Accidental Authors Susan Daffron shares "provocative and insightful advice on what it takes to make a publisher out of an author during at break at the annual PubWest Conference. Technorati Tags: susan daffron,pubwest,ideaweaver,publishize,book publishing,self-publishing,authors,logical expressions

Seth Godin recently blogged about how you have to be careful about how much importance you put on the noise you hear on the Internet. Loud does not necessarily equal important. You have to consider the source and evaluate whether what you are hearing is a harbinger of a movement or just someone sounding off. Seth summed it up with:   "And most of all, get straight on who you are trying to please, and why." That's the key, right there. You can't really evaluate the noise until you know what matters to you and your...

James and I will be participating in a free teleseminar with Donna Kozik, where we will explain the information you MUST include on your book's Web site. Ideally, you should put up a Web site before you have even finished your book. In fact, our Publishize site was up for at least 6 months before we released the book. In fact, almost as soon as I got the domain name, I put up a site. Even a simple site with basic information is better than nothing because you can link to it and give the search engines time...

Over the years, I have saved many of the emails we receive through the contact forms on our various Web sites. In addition to our main Logical Expressions site, all of our article sites (The Publishize Newsletter, Computor Companion magazine, Logical Tips, Pet Tails etc., have comment forms that appear on the article pages. I receive contact form emails from at least one of our sites almost every day. Most of them are from happy people who have solved a problem thanks to one of our articles. If there's such a thing as karma, we have points...

by James Byrd The title makes it sound like this is going to be a complicated posting, doesn't it? Not to worry: the subjects of this post are about making things easier, not harder. The "logical half" of Logical Expressions (that's me) has been busy with a couple of side-projects that came to fruition this week. I wrote articles about each of them on my Nerdy Musings site. The Logical Expressions Redirector The PayPal Button Converter for ASP.NET The LE Redirector is essentially TinyUrl on steroids. If you aren't...

This week, I discovered that the online version of the Redbook article (with me and my photo in it) has appeared online. You can check it out here: http://www.redbookmag.com/your/letting-intuition-guide-you The article is called "Trust Your Gut. Change Your Life." The description is: "Tap into the power of your intuition to make your dreams happen. Learn how these five women used theirs to change their lives." My story is on page 2 of the online version: "Listening to her gut led to...A life-changing move" The article goes on to describe how 14 years ago, James and...

This week's big news is that when I went to the mailbox the other day, I found the August issue of Redbook magazine in there. This issue is mighty exciting to me because it has an article about how and why we started Logical Expressions. (Our version of the story is here.) If you're a Redbook subscriber, check out page 138. The title of the article is called "Trust Your Gut. Change Your Life." You'll see a huge 2-page spread with my picture. Let me just say right now that the photographer Erika Larsen is extremely talented. I don't...

If you tried to communicate with me in the last day or so, you might have had a problem. Our hosting company is located in Eastern Washington, which had a huge series of thunderstorms yesterday. Something related to the storm caused our dedicated server to take a dive. When you have as many Web sites as we do, putting them all back online takes some time. Sadly, this is not the first time James has had to rebuild our server after a crash. It's just as unpleasant the second time around. However, once again, we did have backups and...

On Friday, I mentioned that I updated the special reports that you get when you subscribe to our Publishize newsletter. You now get two reports "The Nine Lives of Content: How to Turn Just One Idea into Multiple Products That Promote Your Expertise" and "7 Steps to Self Publishing Success: Create a Print Book that Establishes Your Credibility and Positions You as an Expert (But Doesn't Cost You a Fortune!)" One thing I forgot to mention is that I also finally compiled a complete list of all the things we give away on all our various sites. It's...

In a great flurry of writing activity this week, I finally wrote down the basics of our Publishize Book publishing system. The result is: "7 Steps to Self Publishing Success: Create a Print Book that Establishes Your Credibility and Positions You as an Expert (But Doesn't Cost You a Fortune!)" This report explains the seven steps you need to take to self-publish a print book. It's the same process we went through to produce 8 books in less than 18 months. I also updated our other special report: "The 9 Lives of Content: How to Turn Just One...

After putting off redoing our Logical Expressions corporate site for quite a while, we finally bit the bullet, gutted it, and started over. The new version is online here: Logical Expressions, Inc. Corporate Site In addition to changing the design and clarifying our message, with information for people who want to: write a book, publish a book, or promote a book, the new site also has a number of new pages that better showcase all the stuff we do. Now we have pages...

Because I'm on so many marketing and business-oriented email lists, I tend to have a good notion of what books are coming out in the business realm. Recently, Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer have been promoting a new book on Information Marketing. I surfed over to Amazon because it looked like a book that I might be interested in...until I read the reviews that is. A lot of people didn't like it, particularly folks who read a lot (like me). But imagine my surprise as I'm scrolling through reviews to find our OWN book recommended over...

We've developed a lot of Web sites for small businesses over the years, and we've heard many stories of confusion and horror related to setting up a domain name for a business Web site. The confusion occurs at the beginning when the business owners are getting ready to set up their first Web site, and they are trying to figure what domain name to register and how to register it once they pick one. Some people put off this task for a surprising length of time in fear of making a mistake. Everyone seems to intuitively understand how important...

There's an interview with me on the Virtual Woman's Day blog, which is owned by the Women's eCommerce Association (WECAI). The blog's tagline is "Where Women Connect Virtually to Share Their Stories, Promote Their Products and Make New Friends." You can read the interview with me at this link: eMonday Woman Interview with Susan Daffron (Among other things, you'll find out why we moved to Idaho and about the inordinate number of books I have sitting on my nightstand!) Technorati Tags: web business success,online business,business,daffron,marketing,idaho,logical expressions,ecommerce,wecai

I was interviewed by Nan Russell for her Work Matters Internet radio show on WebTalkRadio.net. I am the second person on the interview, which was about how we managed to escape the city, move to the wilds of Northern Idaho, and make our business actually work from out here in the middle of nowhere. Nan is a great interviewer and I had fun talking to her. Check it out at: Work Matters Week 3 Show This link may change, but you should still be able to get to it using the Podcast link on this...

In our newsletter survey, an overwhelming percentage of people wanted more information on how to write copy. So, I decided to start with a basic truth that many copy experts seem to sort of gloss over: know thy customer. Write Compelling Copy with Your Customer in Mind Enjoy ;-)   Technorati Tags: publishize,daffron,copywriting,writing,publishing Technorati Profile

Today we packed up all the Logical Tips books that people bought during our pre-order sale and took them off to the post office. (In fact, the response was sort of overwhelming; we actually almost sold out of all the books we ordered!) Anyway, the packing and shipping process was the source of great excitement among the canine team. Our golden retriever Tika thinks these books should go in a flat-rate box. These books seem to pass the sniff test. All that packing is hard work! ...

With the release of our new Logical Tips books, we have now published eight book ourselves (the four Logical Tips books, Happy Hound, Happy Tabby, Web Business Success, and Vegan Success.) This week's article in the Publishize newsletter offers a few reasons why we have opted to take the self-publishing route, after going about it the "traditional" way: A Few Good Reasons to Self Publish Your Book Enjoy!   Technorati Tags: web business,web business success,vegan success,vegan,pets,happy hound,happy tabby,publishize,logical tips,daffron,writing,dogs,cats,cookbook

Periodically, I encounter something that makes my online world better. Today in a forum, I found out about Windows Live Writer. If you have a blog, it's an incredibly cool tool. You can update your blog from your desktop, so you don't have to log into your blogging software. It's fast and easy to use. Anyway, blogging is part of many people's marketing mix these days, which ties into this week's article. If you'd like to read it online, use the link below: http://newsletter.logicalexpressions.com/LPMArticle.asp?ID=146 Enjoy!  Technorati Tags: web business,marketing,online business,publishize