Now updated for 2015! The best, most comprehensive guide for writers is now revised and updated, with new sections on ebooks, self-publishing, crowd-funding through Kickstarter, blogging, increasing visibility via online marketing, micropublishing, the power of social media and author websites, and more—making The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published more vital than ever for anyone who wants to mine that great idea and turn it into a successfully published book. Written by experts with twenty-five books between them as well as many years’ experience as a literary agent (Eckstut) and a book doctor (Sterry), this nuts-and-bolts guide demystifies every step of the publishing process: how to come up with a blockbuster title, create a selling proposal, find the right agent, understand a book contract, and develop marketing and publicity savvy. Includes interviews with hundreds of publishing insiders and authors, including Seth Godin, Neil Gaiman, Amy Bloom, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Lopate, plus agents, editors, and booksellers; sidebars featuring real-life publishing success stories; sample proposals, query letters, and an entirely updated resources and publishers directory.

Are you excited that you finished your manuscript? Are you ready to publish your book? Are you ready to watch your book fly off the book shelves? Think Again! Without an effort to market your book, no one will know it exists, and the ugly truth is that marketing is your job - not your publisher's job. Once you finish your book, the work just begins. Whether a traditional publishing house publishes your book or you publish your own book, all authors are equal once a book is in the marketplace...unless of course, you are the President of the United States. If you think marketing sounds difficult, like a job for a publicist, think again. In The Secrets to Successfully Marketing Your Book, you will learn how to use social media and traditional methods to reach potential buyers. As a published author with the American Management Association, Susan Page learned the hard way how to build awareness for her product. Two years after her first book was published, it continues to sell well. Along with an engaging and user friendly approach to marketing, The Secrets to Successfully Marketing Your Book presents a plan that outlines the monthly tasks you have to accomplish starting six months prior to publication and continuing until after publication. You could buy a book on social networking, another book on building a web site, and another book on developing a marketing plan, but The Secrets to Successfully Marketing Your Book blends all these topics together in one organized marketing plan. Susan Page outlines what you have to do to keep your book selling. And she writes it in the same pragmatic approach as she took with The Power of Business Process Improvement. She goes right to the information authors want and shares the secrets by explaining the "how" and not just the "what" you have to do. So, save your money on a publicist. You have the power to market your book. Your success depends on you.

The alliance of critical theory between Frankfurt and Paris Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period. To assess these resources, it examines the work of two of the twentieth century's more prominent social theorists: Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault. Although Adorno was situated squarely in the Marxist tradition that Foucault would occasionally challenge, Deborah Cook demonstrates that their critiques of our current predicament are complementary in important respects. Among other things, these critiques converge in their focus on the historical conditions-economic in Adorno and political in Foucault-that gave rise to the racist and authoritarian tendencies that continue to blight the West. Cook also shows that, when Adorno and Foucault plumb the economic and political forces that have shaped our identities, they offer remarkably similar answers to the perennial question: What is to be done?

Here is a practical "how-to" roadmap by a hugely successful author written for the unpublished massed.

Finally The complete, ultimate marketing guide. Successful Marketing: Secrets & Strategies provides entrepreneurs and small business owners with everything they need to know to create a successful marketing plan, attract customers, increase sales, and make more money.

So, you're interested in growth hacking. Maybe you know a little about it, maybe you've never heard about it, maybe you're the inventor of the term and you're scoping out the competition (hi, Sean!) No matter who you are, you're not looking to make a business grow - it's your looking to make a business erupt like Vesuvius. You're looking to spread like blue jeans and the Beatles - to become an uninterrupted facet of modern life, like automobiles, cable television and Facebook. In the digital age, there is such a proliferation of choice and competition that it is no longer enough for a business to "get people in the door." A consumer can easily try a product, make a snap decision on its relative value, and leave with no more effort than clicking "unsubscribe" to the first auto-drip e-mail that arrives in their inbox. Recent societal and technological developments have introduced an urgent need for online businesses to focus on retention and engagement. The more engaged users are, the more likely they are to refer friends, family, professional contacts and like minded people to their particular community, which in itself organically drives acquisition. This results in a larger user base, which increases engagement and thus retention and referral. This is a concept known as virality, which is the evolution of the concept of "word-of-mouth marketing." Virality is the way that you accomplish that benevolent positive feedback loop. As a growth hacker, virality is what you are about, because you are responsible for driving explosive, exponential growth for a company, a la Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. Your job is to do the years of work that make something an "overnight success." After the roar of the crowd has subsided and their fickle attention spans start to scan the horizon for the next big thing, it's your job to shake it all up, re-engage them and turn your huge growth gains into a long-term, sustainable user base. This is not marketing. This is not product development. This is not entrepreneurship. This is growth hacking.