This is one reason our WF chapter is so valuable. By the support we give each other and the genre, we’re affirming that there’s a market for women’s fiction.

Steve Jobs: 7 Lessons from a Marketing Genius by Carmine Gallo is a great blog on marketing any product. Books are a product! One of the 7 lessons is creating a “Twitter-friendly headline.” According to Gallo, when Jobs “introduced the MacBook Air in January, 2008, he said that it is simply, ‘The world’s thinnest notebook.’” Simple and powerful!

Looking for an agent? Writer’s Digest has a list of 24 Agents Who Want Your Work. 11 of the 24 are looking for women’s fiction.

Anyone thinking of querying a BookEnds agent should wait until the end of January. Jessica Faust and Kim Lionetti are taking a query break. On her blog, Jessica says says she stopped taking queries in the beginning of October. Since she began her hiatus, “there’s at least an extra hour in every day to work with my clients, get my office organized or even, on those rare evenings, put my feet up and read something I don’t have to. More then that though, it’s been a really nice mental break for me.”

If You Build It, They Won’t Come: A Guide to Author Websites is a GREAT article on websites. It gives percentages of what readers want in a website. And on how a website helps sell books. Did you know “Book shoppers who had visited an author website in the past week bought 38% more books, from a wider range of retailers, than those who had not visited an author site”? Neither did I, until I read the article.

Librarians visit websites, too, according to Susan Gibberman, Head of Reader Services, Schaumburg Township District Library and RWA’s 2008 Librarian of the Year. In her Romance University blog, she gives the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly about querying librarians.

She adds that library patrons can request books from librarians. I’ve done that with The Lost Recipe of Happiness by Barbara O’Neal (aka Barbara Samuel) and The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh. In both cases, I brought the book to the library and actually put it in the acquisitions librarian’s hands so she could read the first pages for herself.