Need help with social media?
You’ve gotten the message that your business needs to master Web 2.0, become active on social media sites like Plaxo and Bebo, start posting on Twitter, syndicate online, produce lenses on Squidoo, author a blog, and keep up with Digg and Newsvine. You know it will improve SEO, and monetize your expertise. But how are you supposed to do all that and still run your business? Check it out:
www.Expertizing.com

Judy Gruen

This week we feature humorist Judy Gruen's article, 7 Tips to Add Humor to Your Presentations.

Sally Falkow

Next week, we’ll feature IAW contributor Sally Falkow with a 26-page special report, Optimizing Press Releases.

Attorney at Law

Glenn R. Neal is a former prosecuting attorney who also taught Constitutional Law and Criminal Law at WVU in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Book Glenn R. Neal as a speaker for your next meeting or conference

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Be our featured speaker

Francine Silverman is an author, publicist, ezine editor, and radio host whose latest book is Talk Radio Wants You.

Read more

Book Francine Silverman as a speaker for your next meeting or conference.

Email Francine Silverman

Be our featured expert

Dorothy Drummond is an author, speaker, and educator. She is the author of Holy Land, Whose Land? Modern Dilemma, Ancient Roots. Her passion is the Israeli/Palestinian controversy and its wider-world implications.

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Be our featured author

Simply a Woman of Faith
Pat Hastings

If you're looking for inspiration, searching for a way to get closer to God or have your faith renewed, you've come to the right place.

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Feature your book here

How to Publicize Your Children’s Book
Fern Reiss

How do you publicize a children’s book? Many authors of children’s books don’t spend much time trying—but publicizing a children’s book can be easier than publicizing an adult novel. Here’s how to get started.

Read more

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Business / USA

— Tom Blake

In 1972, Victoria Station, a six-restaurant chain, went public and took the heart of Wall Street with it. At the end of IPO day, it was trading at 92-times earnings. Every restaurant they built turned into gold.  Young millionaires were made. Eight years later, Victoria Station was bankrupt. What went wrong?

Read Tom Blake's query

Feature your query here

Attend a talk with IAW Director Fern Reiss:
If you'd like to hear Fern in person, she will be speaking at:

• Private consults, Europe (July & August)
• Publishing Game Workshop, Jerusalem (August 13 and 20)

Please contact us to book her for your event or conference.

Follow Fern online:

• Twitter.com/fernreiss
• Facebook Writing & Publishing Group
• Association of Writers Facebook Page

If you need some personal input on your writing, publishing, or publicity dilemma, consider a consultation with IAW Director Fern Reiss. Fern consults to clients all over the world via telephone or Skype; the charge is $300/ €200 per hour or $1500 / €1000 for six sessions (six hours for the price of five) for publishing consulting. Sign up at PublishingGame.com/
consulting.htm.

28 July, 2009

Welcome to our new members in  Holland and the United States, and our new readers from Fran Silverman’s Book Promotion newsletter.

Seven Tips to Add Humor to Your Presentations
by Judy Gruen

If you do any public speaking for your career, or hope to one day, there's one thing you don't want: the audience falling asleep on you. Keep them awake and attentive by following these tips to add a little humor to your talks. After all, laughter is a much more encouraging sound than snoring!

1. Use humor at the get-go
   Ever wonder why your minister or rabbi often starts their sermon with a joke or funny story? Because it works! Humor gets people's attention and puts the audience at ease. Get them laughing even before you step to the podium by adding a funny line to the short bio that will be read while introducing you. Once you're "on," you might also find something funny to say about your travel experiences, the hotel where you're staying, or something about the room, which will usually be freezing cold or uncomfortably warm.
    
2. Go for humorous anecdotes rather than jokes
   Effective jokes demand precision timing and delivery to make them work. If you aren't confident about your joke-telling skills, not to worry: humorous stories are much heartier and more forgiving, and a better bet for the non-professional humorist.
    
3. Know your audience
   Find out to whom you are talking and what makes them tick -- or what might tick them off. Ask the event organizer what's important to them, and gear your talk – and any jokes you may be thinking of – to work for them. If you have any doubts about your material, test it with the event organizer to make sure it will fly with your listeners. You want your audience to remember you, but for the right reasons.
    
4. Use self-deprecating humor
   Self-deprecating humor makes you relatable to your audience. When you share a funny story about the time you locked your keys in the car twenty minutes before you were expected to meet your wife at a restaurant to celebrate her birthday, you'll have the attention and the empathy of your audience. They'll be only too glad to laugh at the foibles and tribulations that they can easily imagine happening to them. But remember, self-deprecating humor has a touch of strength beneath; it is not loser humor, which is loser material.
    
5. Keep it clean
   A lot of today's comedians rely on raunchy material for laughs, but millions of people are still turned off by R-rated jokes. Don't confuse your podium for a spot at open-mike night at the local comedy club. Professional audiences will almost always find racy material offensive and out of bounds. Work funny and clean for true professional speaking success.
    
6. If You Use Borrowed Material, Give the Source
   Borrowing a joke? No problem, as long as you give credit where it's due. Not giving attribution is not only really bad behavior, but if you don't, and someone else also heard the material elsewhere, you'll be considered a plagiarist. Go to brainyquote.com and type in "Comedian Quotes" to find a wealth of great lines to use.
    
7. Engage Your Audience
   Keep your audience in the palm of your hand by keeping them engaged. Ask them questions and welcome their answers, ask for a show of hands. Move around, like Oprah, in the audience as you speak. Don't hide behind that podium! Who knows? Someone may shout out a very funny answer to your question!

Even if you are not planning a speaking career, but need to address business groups now and then, infusing humor to your presentation will help you enjoy yourself more in front of a microphone, and your audience will love you for adding entertainment to their education.

For more tips and more details on this subject, go to judygruen.com and buy the whole downloadable report for only $5.00. What a deal! Judy Gruen is the author of three award-winning humor books, including The Women's Daily Irony Supplement, named ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year (humor) in 2008. Her humor has appeared in Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Day, Family Circle, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, and many other media outlets. She is a regular humor columnist for www.aish.com, www.mommasaid.net, and Jewish Life magazine. Her humor talks to various groups have also delighted her audiences. Some have even purchased her books afterward.

Next week: Stay tuned for IAW contributor Sally Falkow’s 26-page special report, Optimizing Press Releases.

Report: 55 Things You Can Offer to Generate Publicity
with Joan Stewart

If you missed the last newsletter’s six-page special report with Joan Stewart on 55 Things You Can Offer to Generate Publicity you can still read it. Among other things, Joan covered:

• The advantage of individual landing pages—and how to do them
• How to include assessments
• What types of checklists draw attention
• How you can generate interest with online courses
• How Associated Press offers passes to encourage interest—and how you can, too

There are dozens more creative ideas in Joan’s report. Members can read the report right now.

New Members:
If you missed any of the articles, audios, or reports below, you can still read and/or listen to them in our Member Archive. 

New this week:

The American Library Association Conference held in Chicago last week scored a record-breaking 29,000 attendees, despite the economy…  BusinessWeek publisher McGraw Hill slashed 550 jobs…After 26 years, Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts is closed… US publisher Sourcebooks takes a stand on the inadvisability of cannibalizing new books with ebooks (see the full story at online.wsj.com/article/SB124744388627630253.html)…

Magazine ad revenues were down 21% in the first half of 2009…September magazines will be one-third lighter, due to ad cuts…Bloomberg’s new NYC initiatives will include free workspace for freelancer journalists: www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/the_state_of_journalism/
bloomberg_tries_to_strengthen_dying_media_industry_120978.asp…

Members can read more by clicking through to:
PartyLine Media Leads and
Wooden Horse Magazine Update
Or get the latest updates by following Fern on Twitter:
twitter.com/fernreiss

In this era of social media hoopla, don’t neglect traditional marketing methods.  The media and the public are overwhelmed by full email boxes and too many tweets and Facebook messages: If you really want to stand out and get the attention of a journalist or potential customer, try sending a letter (or invitation for a consultation, or thank you note, or suggestion) through the postal service.   Because people are getting so little ‘snail mail’ compared to email, this can really make your message stand out.

Canada is the home of literally hundreds of organizations for writers, ranging from The League of Canadian Poets to the Speculative Fiction Society of Canada, from the Christian Word Guild to the Canadian Romance Authors' Network.

Members can read more at Spotlight.

(Members: Interested in sharing what’s going on in your part of the world? Become an IAW ambassador.)

Book Profile

Each month, the International Association of Writers sends a newsletter featuring your latest books to bookstores, libraries, bloggers, reviewers, and book groups worldwide. The book listings also run in several locations on the website, and each week we feature one of the books in our newsletter. Here’s how to make the most of your IAW Book listing:

• First, be sure to fill out an Author Profile. You must create an author profile before you can submit book profiles.
• Next, from the book profile page, select the genres carefully. Bookstores, libraries, bloggers, reviewers, and book groups may be looking for authors in particular genres, so be sure the genres you choose accurately describe your niche. (You can choose from a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres.)
• Be sure to upload an image of the book's cover.
• Make your book's description concise, accurate, and entertaining. The more memorable it is, the the more interest you'll generate.
• Your short biography will be displayed along with your book profile, as well as in several other places on our website, so be sure it is interesting and describes your expertise accurately.
• You can submit up to three book reviews. These are important: Libraries, especially, place a lot of emphasis on reviews.
• Remember that in today’s economy, traditional sources of book and author information (such as newspapers) are disappearing; so more and more bookstores and libraries are looking to the IAW. Don’t miss out on this easy way to market yourself and your books.

Next week, we’ll look at optimizing your Agent Query profile. Stay tuned!

The more members we have, the more clout we have with journalists, booksellers, literary agents, librarians, meeting planners, etc. Want to help make others aware of the International Association of Writers? Here are some ways you can help:

• Become an Ambassador from your geographic area, or become a web ambassador and mention us on listserves and writing forums online.
• List us as a favorite on Digg.com or Delicious.com.
• Email a friend or colleague to tell them about us.
• Add this to your Facebook or Twitter Status line: “Looking for publicity as a writer or small business? Check out AssociationofWriters.com”.
• Sign up as an Association of Writers fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/FernReissAssociationofWriters
• Remember—sign up three friends or colleagues, and get a free one-year extension on your membership!

Q: What’s the best way to publicize a novel?

A: There are dozens of things you can do to publicize your novel.  First of all, put nonfiction ‘hooks’ throughout the novel:  If you’re a golfer, put a golfer into the novel; if you love golden retrievers, add a dog.  That way, you can publicize the nonfiction hooks in the same way you would with a nonfiction book—always much easier, particularly for radio and television appearances. Instead of a reading, which might be of interest only to a few, try a workshop or demonstration on something related to your book. Find more ideas here: www.publishinggame.com/art_PublicizeYourNovel.htm

Members can post their Talk Out questions here.

Judy Gruen took 3^rd Place in the online column writing division of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists (NSNC) annual writing contest. The online division was new for 2009, reflecting changes in the media, and Judy won for her humor columns on Aish.com’s “Jewlarious” section. Read more of Judy’s work at www.JudyGruen.com.

“A few days after I posted my speaker profile on the International Association of Writers’ website, I began receiving inquiries from meeting planners who wanted to book me for high-paying speaking gigs. The International Association of Writers rocks!”
— Linda Gradstein, correspondent, National Public Radio

“I’m loving the site—thank you!”
— Kristin J. Eckstein, producer, ArtsImagine.com

Members send your kudos & we'll print them in a future issue.

The National Book Festival, Saturday, 26 September. Sponsored by the Library of Congress, this mega-event will be held on The Mall in Washington, D.C., United States.

Read the entire Calendar. (Members—post listings at no charge.)

Copyright © 2009 International Association of Writers

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The International Association of Writers, Speakers, and Experts
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