Flashgordon’s Items of Note

Promotion is a must in any writer’s career and online venues are one of the fastest growing mediums. If you’re a recently published author – self or traditionally published – you have to promote yourself to get your name out into the public. If you’re a previously published author, you have to promote to keep your name out in the public. Book promotion is a constant as a writer. In fact, its how you get people to know about you and read your writing, and readers are what writers and authors really love.

Online magazine promotion is one form of promoting your books or writing that can be a great marketing tool. If done right it can be highly effective. There are five general ways that you can promote your books or writing using online magazines, all of which will help you promote your book or writing.

1. Paid Advertisement or Classified Ad – Every magazine, even those on the web, is always looking for advertisement. It’s how they pay their bills. Likewise, many magazines have a classifieds section. You can use either one of these avenues to help you promote your books. Check out their rates and see what packages fit into your budget. If they don’t have anything that works with your budget, contact them, and see if they have any specials for the month or can offer you a promotional deal that won’t break you. Often, the classifieds are free or extremely cheap and they are read by your target audience – subscribers of the magazine.

Read the other ways to use online magazines for author promotion and book marketing here.

Today I’m pleased to have a guest post from Paul Kiritsis. He has just released a very interesting book called Hermetica: Myths, Legends, and Poems, and his website contains a bunch of fascinating stuff concerning his astrology work. I asked him to share some thoughts on his writing process, and especially on how astrology plays a role in his work.

Hi there, thanks for having me! Yes I am a true Cancerian – emotional, loving, intuitive, imaginative, shrewd, cautious, protective and sympathetic. All the good stuff really! I guess being ruled by the moon is sometimes a terrible thing for those that live around us, but in the end it’s truly worth all the pain. If you like taking a step forward, one back, two to the side and then coming back to the same point at which you started and doing it all over again then I’m your man! I’m the sort of person who likes to make plans and then scrap them, make new ones, scrap those and then go back to the original plan. All within a few minutes!

I do possess a keen interest in astrology and let me tell you, much of what I write is dependent on astrological cycles and in particular, the cycle of the moon. When the moon is full, my thoughts are thawed out and clearer, enabling me to write for hours on end without a temporary glitch in my neuronal synaptic transmission. The moon speaks to me with its craters and eerie glow; each blemish, each contour has its own tale to tell. The Aussie winter and particularly the month of July is the most productive and creative part of the year for me. November and March are also months associated with creative streaks as well, perhaps because they’re inextricably linked with my two sister water signs; Scorpio and Pisces. When the sun rises in the constellation of Cancer, I find that there is a clearer understanding between the pen and the mind. I actually finished writing an entire book in only a month this year; incidentally July! Go figure. The least productive times of the year often occur during the festive seasons; Christmas (in December) and Easter (in April). Last year I didn’t do one bit of writing in December. I couldn’t even bare to look at a book.

Read more about Paul Kiritsis and how astrology influences his writing and books here.

One of the strengths of cultural anthropologists (as opposed to political scientists or mass media researchers) conducting research in the emerging field of media anthropology is that through their deep relationship with a particular place, particular people, and particular media, they are able to more holistically document the visible and audible evidence of cultural production in all of its situated complexity. Jeff Himpele, in Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes,in this way creates a comprehensive media ethnography of La Paz, Bolivia, but he also goes beyond geographic constraints to look at the history of media circulation and distribution in the country as its own unique narrative and constitutive cultural process. Himpele performs an ethnographic service to his readers by offering a focused perspective of an emerging indigenous public media sphere, with increasing political consequence, that largely has been unobserved, unnoticed, unanalyzed, unarticulated, and thus unknown. At base this is a superb example of an intimately engaged, meticulously researched longitudinal ethnography.

Read more about Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Central Andes here.