Okay, so it’s summer and maybe you’d rather be surfing, really surfing, or swaying somewhere in a hammock with an old paperback. But if you find yourself lounging at your computer looking for inspiration or new ideas or a little distraction from your work, here are a few places we recommend:
• We know it’s easy to get lost looking online for useful, insightful advice about self publishing. Here are four blogs worth bookmarking (with thanks to Belinda Pollard at Small Blue Dog Publishing for curating them), with short descriptions and links to some of the bloggers’ best posts. Joanna Penn and Joel Friedlander, we’ve recommended before and heartily second for their smart words on marketing and design. She also recommends Molly Greene and Michael Hyatt for their approachable posts on blogging/social media and platforms/technology, respectively.
• Author, do you have a street team? Do you know what a street team is? We didn’t either, but we really like this idea.
• From the sharp marketing department, here’s a great story from someone who actually clicked on one of those Facebook ads and bought something. It’s an analysis of an effective ad campaign, with a few pointers, we think, for anyone trying to package and sell anything, which is, really, to distinguish your product from all of the other like products out there. (Plus, we’ve seen these razors and they’re quite handsome.)
• Now for some leisure reading. How expensive is your reading habit? We suggest taking your lunch break with Kaya Genç’s recent essay in Salon. He reconsiders George Orwell’s 1946 essay Books v. Cigarettes in the digital age—it’s eBooks v. lattes for him—and finds that it’s as relevant as ever.
• You’ll want to carve out a nice little space in time to surf Flavorwire’s 25 Best Websites for Literature Lovers. (Thanks to Creative Nonfiction e-newsletter’s aptly named Distractions section for pointing us in this direction). And while yes, it is a distraction, there’s a ton of cool literary stuff out there, much of it leading to other cool literary stuff— a short, harrowing travel piece; a podcast of an interview with an author you’ve never heard of but whose book you want to buy–immediately; an old-school hip-hop video. You might be wowed or inspired or delighted.
