An integrated Marketing and Self-Publishing System

It’s the age of self expression, self publishing, and conversation. It is a manifestation of web2.0 tech-enablers unlocking existing human needs such as Self-Actualization – a need for creativity, spontaneity, and acceptance of facts (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) 

Self-publishing has made experts of us all; books give the “little guy” a chance to publish a comparable product. All of us can have podiums just as nice as The New York Times now. And while this may be a good thing, it comes with a large asterisk.

Beyond the actual publishing, is the marketing – major commercial publishing houses offer first-time authors next to nothing in terms of promotion. You STILL have to promote and publicize and support your work yourself – and even the big guys will tell you that you need a blog. 

LifeTrackers provides a medium that helps you storytelling, branding, dialoging, and connecting with your audience the minute your book idea is conceived or even before you know that you have a book idea!   Because we’re neck-deep in an age of self-expression without reflection, we are throwing but not catching.  LifeTrackers tracks and catches your self-expression, ideas, and actions as they happen; it helps you weave out themes, reflect on what are enticing and coherent stories, connect and grow your audience community as it happens. 

In a nutshell, LifeTrackers is a storytelling, branding, dialoging, and connecting medium for self-publishing.

As Magic Has It: Small Emails, Big Gigs

The latest Harry Potter book is out. In 24 hours it sold over 10 million copies. That’s 10 million. In one day. Who wouldn’t want to be the next writer with a Harry Potter series? J.K. Rowling is probably richer than the queen at this point, and even Sir Paul can’t keep up.

So here’s the question many writers are asking: How can I do the same thing?

J.K Rowling’s magic is nothing more than tracking and capturing our real lives; each one of us has it!

It wasn’t the magic that made Harry Potter so popular. The magic is in the characters and the story. Every single one of us could relate to the characters in some way. We were poor little confused Harry, who was thrust into a position he’d never wanted, but had to find his way to his inner strength. We grew up in a family like Ron’s, or had to do battle with the bullies in school. And these days, everyone can relate in some way to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named — the “evil-doers” of the world.

It’s a magical world with characters far more real than any “reality” TV show. As child or adult readers we can disappear for a time into another world – a world much like ours, but also different. It’s a world fraught with similar dangers, but with the added element of magic. Terrorists become Death Eaters, and Harry, good natured Harry, is the hero we all wish would suddenly spring to life.

How do you make your characters real and create dialogue that is exactly the way your characters would really talk? Your email might be your treasure chest! “Track small e-mails, ready for the big gig.” We are now living in a world that we are more and more habitually chained to Internet, we have conversations anytime with people from anywhere in the world over the Internet. Email captures the majority of our dialogs and conversations with the world and reveals more of ourselves than we might realize. Sometimes I have these weird moments when I accidentally get into my old e-mail archive, open an old email out of random curiousity, and then have a deja vu time reading some of the page turners I find there. However, my email inbox is too clogged with a mix of great gems and spam, making it impractical to extract the juicy stuff. Lifetrackers does the trick, minus the pain.