ReleaseWire Connect

BookIM is featuring a new weekly podcast for self-publishing authors on how to market their books. This weekly podcast will include tips for authors on how to market and present their books to potential buyers; tips that are good for any fulfillment service including Amazon. Successful book selling requires more than just having a fulfillment page at Amazon and we’ll discuss the intricacies of book marketing with authors during these podcasts. Topics such as web hosting, site creation, SEO, targeted marketing, social media and others will be the subject of weekly podcasts. The first podcast, titled "The Need for Author Web Sites", covers the necessity for having an author web site and includes such diverse issues as domain registration, hosting, WordPress, WordPress Themes, SEO and Marketing.

The release of the long awaited sequel to the Flores Girl trilogy, “Emptiness and the Warrior” from author Erik John Bertel, is due for prerelease in September 2014. Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot is the wildly successful science fiction adventure story that has been downloaded over 400,000 times as an ebook and podcast since its first release. Flores Girl has achieved many prestigious accomplishments over the years being the Wattpad inaugural featured work. This is the same novel that the Discovery Channel considered for a video project on the Flores Island hobbit find. Additionally, the realistic depiction of Homo floresiensis in the novel was based on feedback from some of the leading physical anthropologists in the field.

A pilot demo video is being produced by Max Sports Channels for a reality TV series called WaterDemons that documents the lives of amateur drivers that race power boats in excess of a 100 mph for the sheer fun of it. The harsh reality of the present television landscape is that programming is often dominated by sporting events populated with professional athletes or reality TV shows consisting of manufactured eccentric personalities doing the most mundane tasks. Unfortunately, the public often finds that today’s professional sports personae have over indulged egos that are fed in part by their multi-million dollar contracts or even larger product endorsement deals.

On July 18th 2014, Amazon unveiled a webpage for Kindle Unlimited—a subscription service where users can “enjoy unlimited access to over 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks on any device for just $9.99 a month”. The service named Kindle Unlimited, offers a Netflix-style, all-you-can-read approach to more than 600,000 e-books, including blockbuster series like “The Hunger Games” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” nonfiction titles like “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis, as well as literary fiction and classics. Books that can be downloaded free as part of the subscription have an orange “Kindle Unlimited” icon under the title, along with a price tag of $0.00. Kindle Unlimited will be competing with publishing start-ups offering similar services, like Scribd and Oyster.

In the realm of popular fiction most female authors have been relegated to the romance novel genre while men, such as George RR. Martin, continue to dominate the fantasy genre. That's changing as women begin to add their own take on the male dominated genre. Joining the ranks of such female authors as Patricia Briggs and Charlaine Harris, K. Ione Kellerhals has released her own twist on the urban fantasy genre in The Torc of Anubis. In Ms. Kellerhals’ first novel, a female avatar named Liadan is challenged to protect the world from the nightmares of the other realms. Combining a blend of mythology with the energy of a graphic novel is no mean feat. Like Ilona Andrews, K. Ione Kellerhals succeeds in creating a powerful, independent female warrior.