The Venture Edge

The past three days have been very interesting ones for yours truly. My latest book -- Writing Fiction For Dummies -- was just released, and my coauthor Randy Ingermanson and I are wrapping up a three-day book rush, hoping to drive initial sales of the book. While we're still tabulating the results, early indications are that our efforts paid off in a very big way. As I write this, our book is ranked #368 on Amazon.com -- that is, Writing Fiction For Dummies is the 368th best-selling book on Amazon.com. Not bad out of millions of books available on the Amazon website.

A couple days ago, the coauthor of my upcoming book Writing Fiction For Dummies -- Randy Ingermanson -- and I had a conference call with the marketing folks at our publisher, John Wiley & Sons. It was clear to all of us that the old ways of marketing books are mostly broken -- it no longer makes sense to send out 1,000 copies of a press release or 100 review copies of your new book and hope that the media picks up on your message. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they won't. What does make sense today is connecting one-on-one with people using Facebook and other social networking websites.