Tag: book publishing

5 Cookbooks to Make Healthy Eating Easier in 2015

by Maria

cookbooks to help with healthy eating

If you like food, (i.e. you are any sort of human), you’ve probably encountered one of the most gut-wrenching struggles of mankind. It is this: food has calories. Calories make you fat. This is not good.

I do wish a scenario had worked out where we could eat unlimited qualities of highly caloric food and feel more energetic and healthy than ever. Part of me is still holding out hope that this scientific breakthrough is on its way. It’s the same part of me that is convinced my life purpose is to eat twelve brownies a day.

BUT, until that golden day, you can bet your butt that I will be trying to get as much flavor out of healthy food as possible. And the best way to do this? To the cookbook shelf!

Here are the 5 cookbooks I’ll be pulling from my kitchen shelf this year to make my “get healthier STAT” resolution happen:

For your post-holiday detox:

Clean Slate

Clean Slate: A Cookbook and Guide to Reset Your Health, Detox Your Body, and Feel Your Best by the Editors of Martha Stewart Living

How gorgeous is that cover? My sister bought this book over the holidays, and we both completely fell in love with the spare but elegant design. It also has options for a 3-Day Cleanse or a 21-Day Cleanse, and the recipes look delicious. If you need to watch what you eat, why not do it in style?

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How to Transform Your Brand into a Household Name

by Maria

content marketing with book publishing

Today I’m excited to be back on the Female Entrepreneur Association website talking about how brands and businesses can become about more than just profit–how they can influence and change the cultural conversation about how we work, play, and live.

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Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

Read:

We have our Friendsgiving weekend in the hills of Virginia coming up, so here’s some light and fun reading looking. I so enjoyed this visual essay Medium published this week on How to Sell a Book–you can find it here. It’s by Sarah Lazavoric, who herself just released a book called A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy. I absolutely love the premise of her book–here’s a snippet from the back cover copy: “Like most people, Sarah Lazarovic covets beautiful things. But rather than give in to her impulse to spend and acquire, Sarah spent a year painting the objects she wanted to buy instead.” 

I really admire this idea of enjoying beautiful objects without having to purchase them, maintain them, and store them. I just wish I could paint at all, so I’d be able to do what Sarah did!

And here’s my favorite graphic she drew for the Medium essay. I want to deny this and pretend that I’m more multifaceted, but…it sounds about right.

1-Krg-Hr263KDqdAuupjEzaA

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8 Ways to Boost Your Amazon Author Ranking

by Maria
how to boost amazon ranking
how to boost amazon ranking

Today I’m excited to share a guest post written by the fabulous Christine Dore! Christine is an editor at a Boston-based publishing house, and she focuses her list on creative nonfiction. We’re lucky to have her on the blog today, sharing some insider tricks that can help your book shoot up the Amazon rankings. 

Amazon Tips for Authors – Or: How to Tame the Amazon Beast

In the timeline that is book publishing—and book selling—the ecommerce beast known as Amazon (some view this creature as fuzzy and loveable, others not so much) is a completely new phenomenon. Both Amazon itself and book providers are constantly learning and adjusting how we use this new retail giant to it’s fullest potential. Here are a few tips and tricks to help your title make its way up the Amazon algorithm and into your readers’ e-carts:

1. Preorders. Preorders. Preorders. If you haven’t heard this word yet from your editor, you will. Use any and all means of mass communication—social media, your blog or website, any regular writing gigs you may have—to push preorders of your book. The more people that preorder your book on Amazon, the higher the initial order Amazon will place for your book. This trend trickles down to other outlets as well, as they tend to follow suit to what Amazon is putting their money behind.

2. Encourage pageviews. The more people that look at your listing page, the higher it pops up on searches for your topic or genre. Even asking your family or blog readers to look up your book on Amazon every day for a week will affect its ranking. The Amazon system is run by a computer; it doesn’t know or care who’s looking at it–it just notices that people are and reacts accordingly.

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