Image from Copyblogger.com

This is a great post from Copyblogger, which if you don’t already read, you should be. Founder Brian Clark is a real smartie, and he’s always got great stuff.

When he talks in #2 about not using a standard page from within WordPress, don’t forget that you can remove the sidebars from any WordPress page and still use that as a landing page. I do it all the time, and it’s very simple to have a theme designer help you with a few brief keyboard strokes that will simply create another page template.

Brian often has clever and brief tips that are extremely useful, and you can follow him on Twitter as @copyblogger.

Author Holly Tucker is about to release her book “Blood Work” on March 21st. Check out her pre-release activities to help market her book.

Holly has great cover artwork, and she uses it. She also happens to be adorable herself, so she has her photo in her newsletter. She has created regular and clearly-written contact with her potential reader base, and she’s quick to remark on things like positive reviews (in Publisher’s Weekly – congrats, Holly!) in her neatly crafted newsletter.

But here’s the thing I like the most about this newsletter: the opening line. “My amazing agent, Faith Hamlin, wrote something today in response to a bunch of questions that I had sent her. ‘You’re doing. Fine. Don’t worry.’ ” The periods are what caught my eye. It’s subtle, reassuring, and you want to know the answer to the implied question. It’s like a promise stating, this will not bore you. It slows down the reader and forces them to pause and pay attention.

A good subject line or opening line is tough to write. It must convey excitement, create good feelings in the reader’s brain, and encourage them to read the rest of it. I rarely read an entire newsletter, I confess. So many of them are poorly-written, contain no useful information, etc. But Holly’s style is very readable, and even though she’s not giving me anything scientific I can use in my business, I want to know about her journey as a Writer, as the creator of the “second baby” as she refers to it. I feel her excitement. I want her to succeed.

Good luck Holly! You can learn more about the book here: http://www.holly-tucker.com/blood-work/#about and follow her on Twitter as @history_geek.

If you are trying to sell ebooks to mobile readers (and who isn’t?) you must read this post by blogger Piotr Kowalczyc. The entire post is written in bullet points, with exact instructions on how to sell more ebooks to mobile phone readers.

(And by the way, this is precisely what I do every day. Trust me. It definitely does sell more ebooks.) I might add, that you can use your own affiliate link (Amazon calls these “Associates” when referring traffic to your own books. He also gives great points on using hashtags on Twitter.

Here are the first few lines of the post, just to whet your appetite:

“If you are a self-publisher actively using social media to find readers and draw their attention to your books (probably published in an electronic form), this post is for you.

I’d like to share a simple way to make your e-book available for instant purchase by mobile phone users. As you’ll see – it’s very easy.”

Good luck!