The Future of Ink: Digital Publishing Roundup September 27, 2013

Book clubs and independent authors - seems like a match made in heaven, right? But how do you go about connecting with clubs, and what should you take into account before reaching out? Check out the following tips from author Stephen McCutchan, who's sharing a few things he's learned about promoting his book with book clubs: Is Your Book a Good Read for a Group?

Today's guest post is by Amanda Luedeke (@amandaluedeke), a literary agent with MacGregor Literary, Inc., and author of The Extroverted Writer: An Author's Guide to Marketing and Building a Platform. Social media sites come and go, and Pinterest is the most recent one to see a major usage spike.

There are two things you bloggers should know: One, great bloggers write great headlines, and two, great headlines often follow sets of similar formulas. Great headlines follow sets of rules - they are compelling, specific, intriguing, and often follow sets of proven formula.

Pr omoting your book is a bit like bringing your baby home from the hospital: After the joy of bringing it into the world, you want to have all the tools you need to give it the best advantage possible to succeed!

Content marketing - creating and sharing your own blog entries, videos, infographics and more to attract customer attention and drive sales - is a great strategy to promote your small business. However, great doesn't mean easy. Many small business owners have discovered that consistently creating, sharing and promoting original, high quality content is a difficult, time-consuming task.

Tumblr launched a book club, Reblog Book Club, this week. The first title is teen author Rainbow Rowell's . Rowell is an active Tumblr user, and Fangirl tells the tale of a college student obsessed with writing fan fiction.

Google has a very useful free alert service which can help you get more visibility, both online and offline. Google Alerts is an online clipping service which alerts you via email when online news or articles are posted that fit your keyword search results.

But here's the hard truth - Facebook is personal. If you don't want to be personal, maybe Facebook isn't the right platform for you. That's not an indictment on your writing or placing a glass ceiling on your writing career. Maybe Twitter or G+ or Tumblr or Instagram is a better place for you to...

I am what the book industry calls a "power reader." I read a lot of books (at least 300 a year), and I read them quickly. With that sort of intake, using an e-reading app that I like is important; there's nothing worse than starting to read on an app and then realizing midway through a book it doesn't have a feature you want, or it has some other limitation.

Random House U.S. is teaming up with Flipboard, a social media-driven platform for curated content, to produce custom digital magazines for two of its authors: Maragaret Atwood and George R.R. Martin. The Atwood magazine will be devoted to her new novel, MaddAdam, while Martin's magazine will be centered on his Song of Ice and Fire series.