Daily Thoughts 1/5/2010

Pieter_Claeszoon, Vanitas-Still-Life with Crystal Ball, 1634

Daily Thoughts 1/5/2009

I read some more of the In The First Circle this morning. It is slow but steady going.

I have been spending time looking for local authors who are fairly prominent. We have a guide for Westchester county, but it includes only the name and the city which the writer lives in. I spent some time looking up people like Billy Collins, Don De Lillo, S. J. Rozan, and other very prominent authors on the web. A few of them had Facebook pages. It is hard to search Facebook by county. I find Facebook's search engine to be difficult to use.

I also spent some time looking through Linked In. It is easy to find editors and writers, but most of them are presenting themselves for business or marketing. There are a couple of hundred listings under Westchester authors in Linked In. I could probably do a blog search as well to get some more names. It is better to qualify the people who you are looking for and at least understand what they write. I am hoping to contact people directly.

Also, the book Brain Rules 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina came in for me to look at. I still have a large stack of books on my desk. The book includes a dvd in it by John Medina covering the contents of the book.

I am in the B's in the Westchester Authors list. I have identified a number of the author websites, a few which I liked were, Lynne Biederman's site, http://www.lynnbiederman.com/ , and James Bradley's site http://www.jamesbradley.com/ . They were both quite well designed. It is very important to have a nicely designed website if you are an author today. It creates a brand for the books you are selling and gets your message across.