The technothriller ebook LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS started out as a screenplay written with my husband Mitchell R. Miller and originally titled “Triangle Trade.”

Writing strong female characters is very important to both of us, so we choose as the protagonist a woman. And as Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders is a fictional character, we could choose to make her very good at certain skills – in the same way that Tom Cruise’s character in the “Mission Impossible” films is very good at certain skills.

The screenplay “Triangle Trade” morphed into the screenplay “Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders,” which was a 2005 Nicholls Fellowship competition quarterfinalist. (The Nicholls competition is run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the same people who run the Oscars.)

Mollie has a secret that motivates her to be the very best. And we decided to explore this motivation further in a prequel screenplay – “A Needle in a Haystack.”

Mitch is a long-time member of the U.S. Naval Institute, whose monthly magazine provides excellent information that we often use in our writing. (He is also a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.)

The U.S. Naval Institute magazine frequently features articles about the Coast Guard, including how the Coast Guard is tasked with defending two long shorelines (Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean) with a small budget.

When Mitch and I decided to write a prequel screenplay, we focused on highlighting the Coast Guard’s plight in terms of limited resources to fight terrorism.

This meant that Mollie would have to help out the Coast Guard (she could not very well be in the Coast Guard in one screenplay and the Navy in the next).

Then I put the two screenplays together — and bridged them with a short story we wrote about Mollie working on the problem of IEDs — in order to create the technothriller ebook LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS.

Thus far the technothriller has gotten rather good reviews except for some critical ones complaining:

• There are no problems with women being treated well in the military

• Mollie is unrealistic because she is a superwoman given how good she is at certain skills

• The Coast Guard and Navy would not cooperate the way they do in our technothriller

First, fictional characters are allowed to be bigger than life.

Second, we give Mollie a plausible reason why she would be driven to excel (to be revealed only when you have read the ebook). Plus she cannot stop a speeding train, jump over high buildings, or utilize any supernatural skills.

Third, since the Coast Guard detaches units to serve with the Navy, we do not see any reason why it is a stretch for our fictional Naval officer to serve with the Coast Guard.

(Mitch was a U.S. Army intelligence officer with the 18th MI Bn in Munich, Germany, from September 1970 to May 1972. I worked as a civilian for the 66th MI Gp in Munich at the end of 1971 and the beginning of 1972. We both know how even units within the same military branch can be resistant to working together.)

Fourth, while military men may want to believe that women have equality throughout the military community, they do not. For a year starting in November 2008 I was the co-host of a BlogTalkRadio show on military topics. The rape of female military personnel by male military personnel was one of the topics we covered.

Finally, this question of women serving on a submarine is not so easily handled.

As I’m a member of the Department of Defense’s Bloggers Roundtable, I was privileged to hear “from the horse’s mouth” about the plan for having the first women on an Ohio-class boomer submarine. (See the post “Technical Skills of Women Needed on Submarines” and note the senior female officer “chaperoning” the junior female officers.)

Mitch and I are imagining a sub much smaller than an Ohio-class boomer in which only one female officer is serving for the first time. Visualize how small the living and working spaces are on a sub. Can you really swear that old-timers would welcome with open arms any female serving on “their boat”?

In conclusion, you may enjoy our technothriller ebook or you may not enjoy it. But do keep in mind that this is FICTION!

The technothriller ebook LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS is available for $2.99 in all major ebook formats, including the iPad.

Many book author websites hinder a book’s promotion because of either missing elements or elements that unnecessarily clutter the website. The purpose of a book author website is to convince the prospective book buyer to stay on the site and learn more about the book.

Here are problems that book author websites have that hinder a visitor’s interest in the book:

- Splash page that puts an extra click between the potential website visitor and the home page with the important book information (splash pages are no longer “in fashion” and should be eliminated)

- Home page that doesn’t clearly state front-and-center whether the book is fiction or nonfiction and what the book is about

- Home page and subsequent pages without a clear BUY THIS BOOK NOW button “above the fold” (before having to scroll down the page)

- Not offering a free sample chapter to entice people to read more (in other words, buy the book)

- Not collecting email addresses to keep people informed of the author’s new writing developments (email marketing can be very effective for keeping connected with a book author’s fans)

- Photo or background art on home page that has nothing to do with the book and is confusing to the website visitor

If you’re a book author and your site has these problems, then correct them now in order to encourage your website visitors to stick around on your website and learn about your book.

In addition, another major problem for promoting books is authors who only have blogs with no websites:

The problem with only using a blog to promote your book is that the nature of blog posts (the newest entry on top) makes it more difficult for a first-time website visitor to grasp what your book is about. A static home page with all the important book information clearly visible is a much better book marketing strategy. And then from the home page a visitor can click to the blog.

Of course, you want to engage in social networking to drive visitors to your website. And if you accomplish driving visitors to your website, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to be interested in what you have on offer.

Isn’t it worth investing time in making your website an effective salesperson for your work?
___

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant. If you liked this article, you’ll love her free report on “Power Marketing’s Top 3 Internet Marketing Tips” – claim your report now.

In the last few weeks I’ve been contacted by two different producers interested in my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT for a film or TV project.  Both producers came across me on the Internet.

Now I’m certainly NOT saying that anything is going to come of this, although I did have lunch with one producer in LA.  (The other producer is in Australia.)

What I am saying is that it has taken me more than a solid year of being active on the Web before these two contacts occurred.  And if I hadn’t been persistent — if I’d given up blogging, etc. after only a few months — these contacts probably wouldn’t have happened.

If you’re a fiction writer and you’re not active in cyberspace, you can’t expect people to find you.  In fact, you have to openly invite people to contact you.

I’ve seen book authors who have protected status updates on Twitter.  What’s the point of that?  If you’re an author you want to make it easy for people to follow you on Twitter so you definitely don’t want to protect your status updates.

In other cases, I’ve seen book authors who don’t have a dedicated website for their books.  These authors may have a page on their publisher’s site, but they’re missing out on all the advantages a dedicated website can provide.

If you’ve spent all that time writing a book — and you believe in your book, then you should be doing all that you can to ensure that you and your book are easily findable on the Web.

And that calls for an online marketing strategy that requires commitment.

Luckily, with so many free and low-cost online marketing tools, the commitment is one of time rather than money.

If you’re not active on the Web, get started now.  For ideas for Internet book marketing, see http://budurl.com/bookmarketarticles as well as www.WeTeachWebMarketing.com.

___

Yes! You can use this article in your ezine, blog or website as long as you use the article in full and include the following resource box:

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a National Internet Business Examiner at www.InternetBizBlogger.com as well as the author of the novel MRS. LIEUTENANT, and her company has launched www.WeTeachWebMarketing.com to help people promote their brand, book or business online.

Whether you write novels or poetry, there are other people on Twitter with whom you share interests. Below are three strategies to help you connect with like-minded people:

• Use tweetbeep.com (or a similar third-party application) to track conversations around keywords related to your fiction. For example, you can track the words novels or fiction or poetry.

You’ll get an email notification from tweetbeep.com when someone uses these keywords in a tweet. Click on the username of the person sending the tweet, check out his/her profile, and then if possible send a reply to that person (public tweet) engaging in that conversation.

• Do tweetchats to engage in real-time conversations. Consider having these at a set time each week. Use tweetchat.com (or a similar third-party application) to “host” the chats. And consider having a different expert each week to drive the chat.

For example, you could follow the tweetchat model of #smallbizchat Wednesdays 8-9 p.m. Eastern and have a #fictionchat weekly.

• Use twitwall.com when you have a longer announcement than 140 characters. Twitwall is a great way to announce tweetchats and give instructions for people new to tweetchats on how to participate. You can even include photos and video with your twitwall announcements.

These are just some of the Twitter strategies you can use to promote your fiction.

If you want more information on using Twitter, read my Examiner.com articles on Twitter.

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Ever heard of Tom Swifties?

Maybe you’re too young to be familiar with the classic Tom Swift adventures for boys. Or maybe you’re a girl who never read a Tom Swift book nor cares to.

Tom Swifties are one-line jokes lampooning the style of Victor Appleton, the author of the original Tom Swift books. People started making jokes about his overuse of adverbs and the unnecessary taglines he wrote into his dialogue. Like the Polish jokes, they were so much fun that that a whole series of them became available for pun aficionados. The author of these classics, of course, laughed all the way to the bank. But that’s a lesson for one of my marketing seminars, not this article on writing.

Tom Swifties were then. This is now. I haven’t dared to go to the new books in the series but I assume that this outdated writing has been eliminated from them.

You’ll want to minimize tags and adverbs in your writing, too!

An example from one of the Swift books will suffice to let you know what to watch for. (Thank you to Roy Peter Clark for the example.)

“‘Look!’ suddenly exclaimed Ned. ‘There’s the agent now!…I’m going to speak to him!’ impulsively declared Ned.’”

Even authors who swear that adverbs are always very, very good things to use and are reluctant to give up their clever taglines can see how, well . . . .awful this is. In fact, I have to reassure people the quotation is real! Some of the writing that comes to the desks of agents and editors looks almost as bad. Here’s how you can make sure yours doesn’t:

1. Use taglines only when one is necessary for the reader to know who is speaking.

3. Cut the “ly” words ruthlessly, not only in dialogue tags but everywhere.

You will find specific techniques for strengthening your writing in the process of eliminating adverbs in The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. This book will also give you some computer tricks for making these edits easy. Until then, take Nike’s advice and “Just do it!”

—
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning author of 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. The former is the winner of USA Book News “Best Professional Book” award and the Book Publicists of Southern California’s coveted Irwin Award. The Frugal Editor is both a USA Book News winner and a Reader Views Literary Award winner and won the New Generation Marketing Award. Learn more at www.HowToDoItFrugally.com. Learn more about editing at www.thefrugaleditor.blogspot.com. The Frugal Editor is available at www.budurl.com/TheFrugalEditor and as a Kindle book at www.budurl.com/FrugalEditorKindle

Offering book club discussion questions can be a very good way to encourage book clubs to discuss your book. If well-written, these questions can “demonstrate” the kinds of discussions that can flow from a club reading your book.

Recently I decided to provide more motivation for book clubs to discuss my book MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL by adding a short video to the book’s website page that offers the discussion questions.

You can read the questions now or watch the video below. Then leave me a comment whether you think this video is effective in encouraging book clubs to discuss MRS. LIEUTENANT.

__
Phyllis’ company has just launched www.WeTeachWebMarketing.com to help people promote their brand, book or business.

Books have always been judged by their covers. In a bookstore you look at the cover first, then turn over the book to read the back cover. Or maybe you next read the inside front and back flap covers of a hardcover book.

Now, though, many of us judge a book by first seeing it on the Internet — even if we ultimately buy the book in a bookstore using a 30% off coupon.

And on the Internet, especially on Amazon, the book cover is a tiny thing. And, yes, many books on Amazon have the LOOK INSIDE feature. Still, your book cover has nanoseconds to connect with a potential buyer before that person clicks away to another book.

Here are seven tips for a book cover that gets people interested in your book:

1. Decide on your book cover design by looking at it the exact size it will appear on Amazon. Yes. many books on Amazon have LOOK INSIDE. Still, your book cover has nanoseconds to convince someone to stay around and learn more.

2. Make sure your book cover clearly conveys what the book is about – is it a novel, a how-to book, a memoir? Yes, the title has the heavy lifting duty here, but our brains process pictures faster than words. Use the design cover to speak to our brains.

3. Make sure the title and your name can be clearly read against the cover art. Some books might, for example, use light blue type against a dark blue background. This is not the easiest to read, especially when reduced to a tiny photo.

4. Make sure the size of the title and your name are large enough to be read when reduced to a tiny photo. A great title does no good if it can’t be read when reduced in size.

5. Choose simplicity over complexity. You want the eye to be drawn to the title and a photo that makes an impact on the brain. You don’t want a cover with so many competing elements that the eye doesn’t know where to look first — so the person simply clicks away rather than suffer the confusion.

6. Graphic artists are not necessarily the best people to hire to design your book cover. There are specialists in book cover design who know the additional details that should be considered when designing a book cover.

7. Make sure the cover doesn’t mislead the potential buyer. No nude women on the cover of a how-to about growing roses in your garden. On the other hand, you don’t necessarily have to have a rose on that book’s cover. But the book’s cover should have the look and feel that is complementary with the tone of the book.

Bonus tip: No matter how good the cover is, if your book is filled with grammatical errors, incorrect punctuation and spell-check errors (such as their for there), people will be disappointed with your book. If you’re self-publishing, hire a professional copyeditor before you publish the book. Your reading public will thank you.

___

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a National Internet Business Examiner at http://budurl.com/internetbusiness as well as a book author, and her company http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com provides internet marketing information with easy-to-implement solutions to promote your brand, book or business.  Her company just launched www.WeTeachWebMarketing.com.

I admit that in the fall of 2007 I was resistant to the entreaties of a colleague that I consider self-publishing my long-gestating novel MRS. LIEUTENANT.

But in December of that year I had an epiphany.  I was about to reach a “significant” birthday and I couldn’t wait any longer for someone to say yes to me.  And at that moment I was finally open to hearing what my colleague had been saying for months:

Self-publishing today takes many forms but it is definitely not restricted to the old vanity press model where you paid for thousands of books that you then stacked in your garage.

Today one of the easiest options is a print-on-demand (POD) publisher – only the books ordered are printed.  That’s right – even one book at a time I learned.

I signed up with BookSurge, the POD unit of Amazon, and away I went.

Now in fairness to the people reading this guest post, I’ve taught copyediting at the college level.  So I was pretty confident in my proofreading abilities.  But earlier I had hired a book consultant to find the missing element in my book.  (People read the manuscript and liked it but kept saying something was “missing.”)

He was expensive and worth every penny even though the basic problem was the confusion of the timeline of events.  I worked on fixing that, then rewrote once again, and proofread again.

The other advantage I had is that I’d studied advertising design a long time ago.  Thus I knew how important the cover would be.  And while I paid to have a cover designed by BookSurge, I had very strong opinions which were honored.  I wanted the faces of four very different women on the cover representing the four protagonists of the novel.

If you don’t have the background for your own proofreading and cover design, I strongly urge you to get professional help in both these areas.  I’ve read self-published books that haven’t had professional editing – and you can really tell!

Next then comes perhaps the hardest part – marketing your book.  I was lucky in this arena because, while my book was going through the BookSurge stages, MRS. LIEUTENANT was named a semi-finalist in the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.  We were each given a page on Amazon, and I spotted that another semi-finalist had a blog on her page.  I wanted one too!

That started my intensive quest to learn everything I could about internet marketing.  And the result of that intensive quest led me to becoming an internet marketer and sharing what I’ve learned with others.

And FYI – while some book reviewers still treat self-published books as a stepchild, other reviewers have embraced the wider diversity now available.  Plus the proliferation of blogs that review books means that there’s so much more opportunity to get your book reviewed than there was when print media controlled which books got reviewed and which didn’t.

If you’re a book author and you truly want to see your book published, do consider self-publishing – as long as you have your book professionally edited, get a good cover design, and are prepared to learn how to do the marketing yourself.

___

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a National Internet Business Examiner at http://budurl.com/internetbusiness as well as a book author, and her company http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com provides internet marketing information with easy-to-implement solutions to promote your brand, book or business.  On July 1st her company is launching the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program.

Whether you have a fiction or nonfiction book, there’s a lot more gold in that tome than you may realize.

Let me show you what I mean:

We’ll start with a nonfiction book we’ll call 15 WAYS TO START AN ONLINE BUSINESS.  And we’ll agree that:

•    The book has been published (whether from a traditional publisher or self-published doesn’t matter).

•    Each of the 15 ways has an individual chapter.

•    You have a website for your book.

Now you take those 15 chapters – and you plan and record a one-hour teleseminar around each one.  Voila!  You now have 15 teleseminars that you can sell off your website.  And as easy as this you now have an internet business.

Of course, as your mindset focuses on having an internet business based on your nonfiction book, you’ll begin to see other opportunities.  Perhaps there’s an expert in a related area who you would like to interview and then sell that interview.  Or perhaps you’d like to offer one-on-one coaching through the internet or telephone.

Once you’ve done all the heavy lifting of creating a good book, don’t stop there.  Keep looking for how you can build on that basis.

And what if you have a fiction book?  Yes, it isn’t quite as easy as a nonfiction book to use as a basis for an online business, but we’re writers – let’s use our imagination to think of a possible scenario for this endeavor:

Let’s say your novel, like my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT, takes place during the Vietnam War.  There are many people alive today who are too young to have any knowledge about this war.  What if you wrote ebooks about the war from the point of view of the people in the different countries involved in the fighting?

You could do research and write an ebook about the United States’ role in the Vietnam War and include the U.S. military point of view as well as that of the U.S. war protestors’ point of view.  And then you could do research and write an ebook about Australia’s role in the Vietnam War and include the Australians’ opposing viewpoints.

Okay, maybe this isn’t an exciting example.  How about – if you’ve written a romance novel – doing research and writing ebooks about dating relationships?

One ebook might be “The 7 Ways You Can Blow a Relationship in Only 10 Minutes.”  Would people buy that ebook?  I think so.  And I also think people might buy a series of teleseminars that you host with different dating experts.

Now does this romance/dating example get your thinking cap fired up?  It does mine – if only I could write a good romance novel ….

Step back from being the author of your published book and instead think about how you can develop your book’s “brand” into an online business.  You’ll probably be surprised how many good ideas you can come up with.

___

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a National Internet Business Examiner at http://budurl.com/internetbusiness as well as a book author, and her company http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com provides internet marketing information with easy-to-implement solutions to promote your brand, book or business.  On July 1st her company is launching the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program.

Reprinted from a blog post of Phyllis Zimbler Miller as a National Internet Business Examiner.

Amazon today is such a behemoth site that it’s hard to grasp the possibilities for marketing your brand on Amazon, which you can do even if you’re not a book author.

And these opportunities are made more confusing because Amazon frequently changes its features and procedures.

Still, the site does have opportunities if you have an account, which means you’ve once bought a book or product through the site.

(When my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT came out in April 2008 I had to get my own separate account — rather than sharing an account with my husband — in order for me to have an author account.)

Here are the steps to starting to get positive online exposure for your brand, book or business through Amazon:

Step 1: Sign into your account.

Step 2: Click on the words YOUR PROFILE under the GO button at the top right-hand side of the screen.

Step 3: Click on the words EDIT YOUR PROFILE near the top right-hand side of the screen.

Step 4: Fill out your profile. (Note: I had to change my name from that used by my Amazon account based on my credit card to my author name – Phyllis Zimbler Miller.)

For marketing purposes, what you fill in for your SIGNATURE is very important because that’s what automatically appears every time you write a review on Amazon. (Mine currently says: Author, MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL, and Internet Marketer)

Step 5: Now search for a book or product on Amazon about which you want to write a review. If you’re a novelist, it makes good sense to write a review of a novel you’ve just read. But if you’re an online clothing retailer, you can still write a review of a novel.

The point is to write short and well-written reviews that catch people’s attention and get you noticed because of your automatic Amazon signature. (When someone clicks on your signature, it links back to your Amazon profile page, where you can include a URL of your website).

Step 6: To write a review scroll down any book or product page until you reach: Create your own review

Click on this, follow the instructions, and voila! Your Amazon automatic signature is now visible on this book or product page.

Put on your thinking cap to consider how you can use review opportunities to promote your online brand, book or business. And there are actually more advanced strategies for getting noticed on Amazon, but reviews are a good place to start.