Joint Venture Marketer Shares Online Secrets with Clients and We're Peeking!

While I am on vacation I am running guest blogs from some of the savviest book marketers and writers I know. Denise Cassino is one of those. I am working with her on a Christmas Gift Ideas Catalog this season and a book launch this spring. She is the force behind Long Story Short and you can find her at www.wizardlywebdesigns.com. This is from an e-mail (with permission of course) that she sent out to those of us participating in the catalog. How nice of her to let all of us peek! She is ever one to give more than her clients expect:


Dear Catalog Promoters,

Many of you are far more savvy than I when it comes to Internet marketing and social networking, but for those of you who have not yet discovered some of the very cool tools out there, I want to share some with you and ask that you set these up so you can easily promote our launches and the catalog as well as your own books, products and services. As you all know, the success of this catalog depends upon how many people we reach through our collective internet marketing efforts. Now is the time to work on building up your social media contacts so you’ll all have a wide audience in December.

I discovered www.ping.fm – this is an awesome tool that allows you to post to all your social networks with a single click. It offers about 50 networks in its system so you can easily join those you don’t already belong to.

When you join this, you see on the lower right side of your dashboard, www.hootsuite.com – this is an amazing Twitter tool. I haven’t been a huge fan of Twitter because I think it not very user friendly but this puts all of your own tweets and those of others in categorized columns with profiles of the senders at the click of a button. It also provides a quick retweet button so we can all retweet each others’ tweets which then add credibility to what we’re promoting. You’ll love it!

If you want to really grow your twitter following, www.twitterspinner.com is an amazing tool, but does cost about $19/mo. I’m going to do it because it clears out people you’re following who aren’t following you, it invites followers, it tracks keywords that fit your list and much, much more.

Here's something else of marketing interst. We’re changing the catalog to the Spirit of the Season catalog so if it goes well, we can promote it all year – winter issue, spring issue, etc. Also, some people don’t celebrate Christmas so this is more generic. We’ll provide you with banners and the usual promotional blurbs. Tell you friends to join as the more we have, the bigger the promotion and the sales we can expect.

Those who would like to access the Spirit of the Season catalog to see the festive offerings may do so at www.spiritoftheseasoncatalog.com.

Guest Blogger Biography

Denise Cassino is a Joint Venture Marketing Specialist doing Amazon book, product and service launches which produce #1 Bestsellers.
www.wizardlywebdesigns.com
E-mail: dencassino@gmail.com
Phone: 303 838 3399
Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DCassino

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books for writers, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. Her FRUGAL book for retailers is A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

A Christmas Wish in Prose

I want to send my blog visitors holiday wishes!

I'm including a Christmas prose poem, which means that even those of you who may not be much for poetry should find it accessible. As John Frederick Nims and David Mason say in their Introduction to Poetry, a "prose poem [is] a piece that has most of the characteristics of the poem but it is presented on the page as if it were a short prose piece." One of the first to use the form was Charles Baudelaire who wrote Little Poems in Prose in the 1850s. Here is mine. (-: Even those of you who don't celebrate Christmas may find its message of peace pertinent.

Out of Malibu: America's Fulfillment of Prophecy

Prophecy: "Yet out of you shall come forth to Me
the one to be ruler in Israel,
Whose goings forth are from of old,
From everlasting."


Malibu celebrates the young son's birthday. Every November the city installs a family of balsa on this bluff in a lean-to, here where they would feel at home -- if they could feel. Sunshine. familiar palms. A sea like Sinai's. Unintended, they become graven images, feet statue-still. Once they were folk, now they're revered, waiting, waiting for a miracle to come. Their design never to be worshipped, they ask this night of nights for compassion. And, lo! A birthday gift in this new age. A white star in LA's skies, usually seen dim through Pacific's fog, now a silver sequin. Their feet quicken from carvings to flesh, their robes soften, the child's skin now luminescent wears still a circlet of strawflowers placed on his head by Our Lady of Malibu's first grade class. The choice to stay or go away now theirs, they leave behind those who thought they loved them but imposed burdens beyond endurance. They travel interstate byroads at night when they will not frighten other sojourners, they -- homeless, shoeless, unfamiliar robes, faces still immobile from decades practicing the art of crèche. Now, in mountain blizzard -- unlike weather they had ever known -- a new kind of pageant, idols unnoticed in the snow. A trek, an adventure, a calling! As Chaucer's pilgrims sought redemption, they trudge East. The babe burrows for warmth beneath its father's robes. Here an arch marks a river, mighty as any they had seen, this monster land, roads like veins, Mapquest's blue design. Unlike worshippers, they follow no light but their own, come upon an open swath, Washington's obelisk, rotunda like Rome's, somehow their kin, erected for the ages. Beneath their feet the Post, sodden, headline bawls War. Fine drizzle diffused by starlight they stand before another, newer wailing wall, a granite gash. This, this! their destination. Rain turns to doilies (as this small tribe turned from human tissue to wood and back again), decorates their cloaks, caps, hoods, slides down the polished façade before them. Wet-white punctuations attach themselves to incised names on this family’s own reflected images. The infant reaches out his hand to quench the flow.
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Tracings, published by Finishing Line Press, available on Amazon. It was named to the Compulsive Readers Top Ten Reads list and was honored for excellence by the Military Writers' Society of America.