Dear Cindy, Love Mom

Elaine’s new book (and I do mean new!) has just received an amazing review on : Sports Illustrated and it’s climbing the charts incredibly fast. Elaine wrote this book to help others; a compilation of the diary she kept while struggling to cope with the untimely death of her beloved daughter, and I can attest to how powerful her words are.

Her family started the Cindy Lynn Sherwin Memorial Foundation to sponsor events that promote physical health and works closely with the Brain Aneurysm Foundation to increase funding and awareness. A growing number of marathoners and triathletes are now competing on behalf of Team Cindy , raising money in her name.

Elaine is donating 100 percent of the proceeds from the book to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation.

Visit Elaine’s website here: Dear Cindy, Love Mom

Here’s a link to the full story in Wired Magazine: Daemon

By courting bloggers and influential techies like Joi Ito, Stewart Brand, and Craig Newmark — demonstrating that if you can get the geek grapevine on your side, you don’t need Random House.

Lesson: Figure out a way to get your book in front of an audience that gets it.

Blogging can be thought of as a continuous conversation of sorts, a conversation that propagates throughout the Internet by word of mouth in the form of links or emails between interested readers. What separates it from the static web pages we’re used to seeing, is an informal, more intimate exchange of dialog that creates a sense of community – only this community isn’t simply one website, but an amalgamation of several linked together as lists of links to other blogs. These lists are called blogrolls, and are the life-blood of the successful blog. But you can actually think of them as recommendations.

Link by cherished link, some bloggers have developed readerships numbering in the millions – becoming celebrities of sorts within the blogosphere, and even transcending the Internet into mainstream media. But the more obscure niches are finding an audience as well – which is the real power of blogs, and a source of optimism for the modern day author-entrepreneur.

It’s possible for a successful book to never see the light of day in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Combined with print-on-demand and/or eBook technology, it’s now possible to write, edit, design, print, market, and distribute a book entirely electronically – completely on a do-it-yourself basis. Any of the technical steps you don’t care to tackle can be outsourced to the burgeoning number of freelance professionals online. Your book can readily incorporate the production values normally associated with name-brand publishers, and rival in quality most of what can be found on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble.