Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Interview With Author Richard W. Block


Life as I Lived It: Small Town Country Living

1.       What inspired you to write your book?  It was my intention to show people of different walks of life, how to live there life to the fullest by giving examples of how I lived mine and to brighten ones day by reading a story or two that will
take them from their world into mine.

2. What is it about?  It is a book compiled of 122 short stories that are true, about growing up from the 1950’s to now. Almost everyone can relate their memories to mine as they read.

3. What do you hope will be the everlasting thoughts for readers who finish your book?  That they are glad they took the time to read and experience the events in the book and want more.

4. What advice do you have for writers?  Write well enough to make the readers feel like they are experiencing what you have written.

5. Where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?  That depends on the quality and content of the stories that are being written by good writers.

6. What challenges did you have in writing your book?  Taking the time to sit down and write my stories in a way that they appeal to every reader who will want to recommend reading it to all his friends and neighbors.

7. If people can only buy one book this month, why should it be yours?  Because it is unique in the way that it contains 122 stories that are true and easy reading. A reader can open the book to any story with a title that sparks their interest and read it in only a few minutes! The reader will get the meaning of a whole story without having to start at the front and read the whole book to get the meaning of only one story, instead there are 122 stories that the reader will get the pleasure and learning from different stories covering a vast range of topics. I must warn you that once you start reading my book, it becomes addictive!

About the author
Richard W. Block has been an Eagle Scout and a Scouter for fifty years. Block is an instructor for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, a fourth degree knight in Knights of Columbus, and a National Rifle Association (NRA) life member and certified instructor. This is his first book.

For more information, visit iUniverse.com. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iUniverse

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.

Q & A With The Co-Writer of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT


Interview With Jeffrey Price
Author of Improbable Fortunes.

1. What inspired you to write your book?
My writing, whether it be Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Improbable Fortunes, has always been concerned with two questions: Who are we and how did we get here? I’ve lived in the West for more than half my life. I’ve seen it change, sometimes for the good, but not always. When people speak of gentrification, it is usually in the area of how Brooklyn has gotten too expensive for artists. I wanted to write about the gentrification in pockets of the West–in my case, Colorado. I live in an affluent western ski town, but the area to the west of me is comprised of small ranching and mining towns that struggle to keep their heads above water. The inhabitants of these towns became more familiar to me when a served as a Deputy Sheriff Reserve for three years. It was during that time that I began collecting the characters for the book. 

2. What is it about?
The book is about the fabric of small town western life as experienced by the main character, Buster McCaffrey. An orphan, he’s raised in the town of Vanadium by four different Foster families. He’s meets a wealthy New York venture capitalist, Marvin Mallomar, who comes to  town hoping to simplify his very complicated life. Buster, a cowboy by profession, helps him set up his cattle ranch. Then things get sticky when Mallomar’s wife, Dana, initiates an affair with the innocent cowboy to take revenge on her husband. Mr. Mallomar goes missing during a catastrophic flood and the law and the townsfolk look upon Buster as the culprit. The book is a bildungsroman that also renders a picture of the uneasy relationship between established locals and the nouveau settlers who don’t always know what they’re in for. 

3. What do you hope will be the everlasting thoughts for readers who finish your book?
I suppose the first thing I would want readers to take away would be an appreciation for my characters. I’m hoping that certain aspects of them, which I can’t go into for spoiler reasons, will be surprising. Not everybody in the West is out to take over public land by force of arms. Not everybody in the West is small-minded, racist and homophobic. 

The other pill that is harder to swallow is that we are conditioned to see change as a favorable thing. My book is not so sure about that.

4. What advice do you have for writers?
The usual advice is to write about what you know. But I’ll say that you should write something that’s original and hard to explain in three sentences or in an elevator.

5. Where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?
I’m a novice to this–having spent most of my life in the movie business–so I really can’t venture an opinion. What I will say is, as I’ve gone around the West giving readings of my book, that the Independent Book Sellers are a vibrant segment of the business helping to keep reading alive and well.

6. What challenges did you have in writing your book?
Mostly finding the time to concentrate on the book in between screenwriting jobs.

7. If people can only buy one book this month, why should it be yours?
Because Improbable Fortunes is a tall tale that is funny and sad, surreal, violent, romantic and ultimately an uplifting human experience. I hope that covers it. 

For more information, please consult: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781941729083

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.

Why Is Any Book A Good Beach Read?



There’s a phrase thrown about for books, usually novels, that says “It’s a good beach read.”  The implication is that it’s a book that will captivate you while you seek to escape the world, perhaps while on a vacation. It’s similar to its winter cousin, “It’s a curl-by-the-fire book.”  Why do the two things seemingly go together -- book and beach?

Reading a book, even one for pleasure, makes us feel we’re doing something. It is a measured accomplishment to say your read a book.  Maybe you can judge a vacation by how many books you read, though that would depend on several factors, including where you went, who you went with, the weather, how good the books are, and how fast you read.

It’s a distinct pleasure to spend many hours at the beach, alternating between a hazy snooze, eating, walking the shoreline, taking a dip into the water and reading a book. Reading a newspaper can be enjoyable, but it’s more of a snack than a full meal. And if it’s breezy, turning the pages of a broadsheet like The New York Times becomes an Olympic sport.

I’ve vacationed the past three summers off the coast of some of New England’s most enthralling beaches.  I’m a New Yorker who actually hasn’t been to nearby Fire Island or the Hamptons, but I’ve gravitated to Cape Cod.  This summer I spent eight days on Martha’s Vineyard with my wife and two children.

Being on an island is exactly what I needed.  It technically has one traffic light, though it’s just a four-way flashing red light.  There is scant evidence of any chains (I saw a Dairy Queen with a small sign that inconspicuously, almost apologetically, says DQ).  There are no billboards.  The house we stayed in didn’t have a/c though the fans and freshwater breeze cooled it nicely.  I only watched ten minutes of TV my first night there.  I checked my phone a lot less often than I usually do.  It was a time to detach and unwind.

However, I still had my 8 and 11-year old kids and wife with me.  Though they can add such pleasure and depth to my life, they can also drive me crazy.  “I want to do this,” says one.  “I don’t want to do that,” says another.  How do you get four minds to agree on anything?   My daughter always, oddly, bemoans that we take beach vacations and yet every time we hit a beach she tells me she doesn’t want to leave, having busied herself collecting rocks or shells, petting dogs, or playing in the sand and water.

My wife and I would eventually settle into our books amid the calming surroundings.  We gave in to the influence of nature and sometimes nodded off from reading.  I guess we enjoy book-induced snoozing as much as actually reading.

The beaches of Martha’s Vineyard are all very different.  Most lack depth but run long down the coast.  Some curve around where you feel there’s water coming at you from all angles.  No one’s selling crap on the beach -- no food, no peddlers, no jet ski stands.  It’s doesn’t have volleyball nets either. It’s not California, Florida or Atlantic City.  It has its own quiet, almost private charm.

Lighthouses dot the 87 square miles of escape.  I walked up two of them, getting a wonderful 360-degree view from around 50 feet up, which feels high considering few structures stand any taller than half its height.

You’d think books don’t belong on the beach.  It’s a contrast between the natural environment and a manufactured existence.  They also compete for your attention – do you read and escape from a beautiful place that itself is an escape from life and one’s busy world?  Does water mix with paper?

We did a lot of fun things on our semi-annual family vacation.  We went to an airfield that featured low-flying bi-planes that landed and took off while we lunched outside on some good fare.  We even had a cool celebrity sighting.  David Letterman, the long-time late night comedian of 30 years looked in full retirement mode as he sat at a table with his family directly next to us.

We also rented paddleboards for the first time.  We brought along our own kayak that we bought last year after enjoying a rental in Cape Cod.  We biked almost daily and we made sure we had ice cream every afternoon or evening.  One time we brought seafood to a beach in Menemsha and watched the sunset.  Just beautiful.  Just exploring new terrain in a place you need a ferry to get to was fun.

One of my favorite pastimes is to go into independent bookstores in towns that I visit.  I managed to buy two books at one in Vineyard Haven.  I also stopped several times at the one in Edgartown.  I was looking for the new Tom Wolfe book on language but it wasn’t out until a day or two after we left paradise.

I didn’t realize how many people read at the beach until I took notice this vacation.  It seems this area, in particular, invites wealthier, more educated people so it only makes sense that book readers will fill the beaches.  It’s such a nice site to behold – the beauty of nature, the beauty of books.  Throw in some bikini-clad hotties and you’ve hit the trifecta.

Did you read any good books on the beach this summer?

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Celebrate Curiosity Day By Getting Into Trouble



How will you spend Curiosity Day?

Never heard of it?  Are you curious to learn more?

September 17 is an annual celebration of being curious.  This year it’s the Saturday closest to H.A. Rey’s birthday.  Rey co-created a monumental children’s classic, Curious George.  In fact this is the 75th anniversary of the historic publishing of the curious little monkey.

Houghton Mifflin, the long-time publisher to Margaret and Hans Augusta Rey, said it’s celebrating the brand’s diamond jubilee with the publishing of an anniversary edition of the original book, and a new collection of seven stories, the Complete Adventures of Curious George.

The original seven-volume series that began in 1941 has grown to 133 titles in 26 languages.  Publishers Weekly reports there are 75 million Curious George books in print.

The Reys fled Paris, France in June 1940 during a bloody period of World War II.  They left just before the Nazis invaded.  They took with them five manuscripts, one about a French monkey for a book originally titled The Adventures of Fifi.

Let me just say for the record that Curious George is my all-time favorite children’s book character.  Sure he has his rivals, including Cat in the Hat, but this good little monkey who is always very curious, has always stolen my heart.  He embodies exactly what we should all be -- curious daredevils who ignore authority but manage to find a way to save the day.

The American Booksellers Association promoted a summer reading campaign that was inspired by the ever-seeking monkey with its theme of “Get Curious about Reading."  There was a Curious George tour, created in conjunction with the American Children's Museum and the Ultimate Block Party.  I didn’t seek a comment from the inquisitive animal for this story, but no doubt he’d probably answer me with questions, contorted stares, and a sneaky smile.

I raised my kids to snack on Curious George books.  I think they would also say he was one of their favorite book characters.  Why not?  He10 Proven Ways to Generate PR For Your Book honors the part of us that wants to touch the stove to see if it’s hot.  He’s mischievous, but not malicious.  He wants to help, not harm, but he always seems to get into trouble and cause a ruckus.

We should celebrate Curiosity Day by reading Curious George and by unleashing the inner-seeker within each of us.

To learn more on how to promote books, read my greatest blog posts from the past five years and 2,000 posts:

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.

Monday, August 29, 2016

Whatever Happened To The Great Books?


Some 64 years ago, on April 15, 1952, the University of Chicago and the Encyclopedia Britannica formally launched the Great Books of the Western World. I cameacross a book from a decade ago that explores how the collection came to be and what became of it, A Great Idea At The Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, by Alex Beam.

Beam writes: “There sat a freshly minted set of the deluxe, faux-leather Great Books, all fifty-four volumes of them, nine years in the making, stuffed with 443 works by seventy four white male authors, purporting to encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud. The Great Books of the Western World were in fact icons of unreadability-32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type.  There were no concessions to contemporary taste, or even pleasure.  The translations of the great works were not particularly modern. There were no footnotes to mitigate the reader’s ignorance, or gratify his curiosity.

But these books fell short in certain ways. Beam writes: “Only two nominal twentieth-century writers, William James and Sigmund Freud, made the cut.  No Romantic poets, no Mark Twain, and no Jane Austen.  Yet backed by advertising hype and by unscrupulous, foot-in-the-door salesmen, Britannica would eventually sell 1 million sets, each costing several hundred dollars each.  Against all odds, the Great Books joined the roster of postwar fads like drive-ins, hula hoops, and Mexican jumping beans.  Tens of thousands of Americans rushed to join Great Books discussion groups, prompting Time magazine to print the hilarious claim that “Great Books has switched many Americans-at least temporarily-from the works of Spillane those of Spinoza and St. Augustine.”

And then these books sputtered in sales during the 1960s and flat-lined in the 1970s. they fell off a cliff in the 1980s and have not been heard from since.

“Among major universities, only Columbia, where the whole idea began, still force-feeds a much-abbreviated version of the Great Books curriculum to its undergraduates,” says Beam.


So what criteria was used to determine inclusion into the series of ‘great books’? Beam uncovered notes from the initial meeting of a committee gathering in December 1943 that said each book chosen should:

1.      Be important in itself and without reference to any other, that is, it must be seminal and  radical in its treatment of basic ideas or problems;


2.      Obviously belong to the tradition in that it is intelligible by other great books, as well as increasing their intelligibility;


3.      Have an immediate intelligibility for the ordinary reader even though this may be superficial;


4.      Have many levels of intelligibility for diverse grades of readers or for a single reader rereading it many times; and


5.      Be indefinitely rereadable…It should not be the sort of book that can ever be finally mastered or finished by any reader.


Interestingly, there were some authors whose works were agreed upon as destined for inclusion without debate. They, alongside The Bible, included:

Homer                                                

Aeschylus

Sophocles

Euripedes        

Herodotus

Thucydides

Euclid                                                 

Plato

Aristotle

Galen                                                  

St. Augustine

St. Thomas

Dante

Machiavelli                             

Cervantes

Shakespeare                                        

Galileo

Harvey

Newton

Hobbes                                                           

Descartes

Spinoza

Pascal                                     

Locke

Hume

Rousseau

Gibbon                                               

Dostoevski

Marx                                                   

Tolstoy

Freud


“The culture wars of the 1980s effectively buried the Great Books in a blizzard of anti-Establishment, multicultural rhetoric,” says Beam. “The academy turned against the dead white males whose busts adorned the friezes atop university libraries.”

There still exists The Great Books Foundation and sets of these books could be found on ebay for several hundred dollars. Many of the books in the series still hold appeal and value, but collectively, The Great Books is now just a great footnote to attempts at creating the ultimate reading list.


To learn more on how to promote books, read my greatest blog posts from the past five years and 2,000 posts:

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.

Friday, August 26, 2016

36 More Amazing Book Quotes



I recently posted 59 of the best quotes I’ve come by about books (http://bookmarketingbuzzblog.blogspot.com/2016/08/why-do-we-love-quotes-about-books.html) and then I read two interesting books that collected quotes. No Two Persons Ever Read The Same Book Quotes:  On Books, Reading, and Writing created by Bart Van Aken and The Quotable Book Lover, edited by Ben Jacobs and Helena Hjalmarsson.

Here are another 36 quotes – enjoy:

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.”
--Georges Simenon

“Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination.”
--Paul Auster

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.  The man who never reads lives only one.”
--George Raymond Richard Martin

‘If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.”
--Kingsley Annis

“Book collecting is an obsession, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, a fate.  It is not a hobby.”
--Jeanette Winterson

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
--Benjamin Franklin

“A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.”
--David Mitchell

“Write drunk.  Edit sober.”
--Ernest Hemingway

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”
--Mason Cooley

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
--Edward Bulwer-Lutton

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life”
--William Somerset Maugham

“There is more to life than books, you know, but not much more.”
--Stephen Patrick Morrissey

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the greatest minds of the past centuries.”
--Rene Descartes

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
---E.M. Forster

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."
--Caroline Gordon

“Books are the carriers of civilization…They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.  Books are humanity in print.”
--Barbara W. Tuchman

“It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”
--Voltaire

“The lessons taught in great books are misleading.  The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.”
--Anita Brookner

“All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all Time.”
--John Ruskin

“I cannot live without books.”
--Thomas Jefferson

“It’s much more important to write than to be written about.”
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“A publisher is a specialized form of bank or building society, catering for customers who cannot cope with life and are therefore forced to write about it."
--Colin Haycroft

“Publishing is merely a matter of saying Yes and No at the right time.”
--Michael Joseph

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
--Mark Twain

“Men do not understand BOOKS until they have had a certain amount of life.
--Ezra Pound

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
--John Locke

“All biography is ultimately fiction.”
--Bernard Malamud

“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.”
--Edward F. Albee

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong.  They know less, that’s why they write.  Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”
--Margaret Atwood

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection …We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.”
--Anais Nin

“Nothing I wrote in the thirties saved one Jew from Auschwitz.”
--Attributed to W.H. Auden

“I suppose some editors are failed writers – but so are most writers.”
--T.S. Eliot

“The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.”
--J.M. Barrie

“The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”
--Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

“You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many books.”
--Carter Burden

“Sir, everything that is not literature is life.”
--Jose Saramago

To learn more on how to promote books, read my greatest blog posts from the past five years and 2,000 posts:

2016 Book Marketing & Book Publicity Toolkit

2015 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit

2014 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit

Book Marketing & Book PR Toolkit: 2013

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Gutenberg: How One Man Remade The World With Words



The invention of writing was amazing.  Developing an alphabet and a uniform set of rules to govern a language is also amazing.  But when mass printing with movable type became available some 550 years ago it was nothing short of revolutionary, much the way the Internet these past 20-25 years has forever altered how the world communicates and conducts life. I came across a 2002 book by John Man, Gutenberg:  How One Man Remade The World with Words, and it manages to rekindle the significance of what took place when Germany’s Johann Gutenberg, invented movable type printing presses.

He singlehandedly ignited an explosion of art, literature, and scientific research. The book’s back cover sums up the book perfectly:  “In Gutenberg, you’ll meet the genius who fostered this revolution, discover the surprising ambitions that drove him, and learn how a single obscure artisan changed the course of history.”

Just before he printed his first book, The Gutenberg Bible, in 1454 or so, Europe’s books were hand-copied and all existing copies of books probably didn’t equal what a modern public library holds.  But by the debut of the 16th century, the number of printed copies of books exceeded millions of units.  This single artisan changed the course of history.

Man notes that “Printing changed things so utterly that it is hard to imagine a world without it…The result, of course, was a new world of communication.  Suddenly, in a historical eye blink scribes were redundant.  One year, it took a month or two to produce a single copy of a book; the next, you could have 500 copies in a week (500 was an average print run in the early days).”

Books hold great thoughts, most borrowed and some original.  They are perfectly suited to provide an examination of all of life, or more aptly, a tiny sliver of life in a snapshot of time.  Who knows what Gutenberg envisioned when he created his printing press but he launched something spectacular that reverberates today.

He unleashed an explosion of information sharing, which expedited the advancement of all things, from science and medicine to politics and philosophy.  Think about it.  Literacy rates were very low 550 years ago but even amongst the literate, information flowed slowly, with bias and limitation.   Once books became accessible to those who were not part of the wealthy or elite class, a democracy of ideas was able to develop.  Information would beget more information.  Debates and dialogues would ensue.  From books, came great discoveries and movements and a reformation in the way all aspects of life were carried out.

Man writes glowingly of the lasting significance of the invention:  “Gutenberg’s invention had created the possibility of an intellectual genome, a basis of knowledge which could be passed on from generation to generation, finding expression in individual books, as the human genome is expressed in you and me, itself remaining untouched, a river of knowledge into which every new generation could tap and to which it would add, even after the last press ceases, and paper is no more, and all the vast store of accumulated knowledge is gathered in hyberspace.”

However one thing that didn’t change with the advent of mass printing was the habit of censorship and banning.  Man writes how the Church, all powerful five-six centuries ago, spent considerable effort to make sure certain books went unread, though such efforts also backfired and created heroes of those it scorned:

“If some works needed to be published, others certainly didn’t – a view that inspired the response that has won the Church its most scathing condemnation from non-Catholics: its attempt to control the press by banning those works of which it disapproved.

“The Church had always claimed the right to approve or disapprove of books, and there had been occasional bannings, easy to impose by the Inquisition when monks produced the books for other monks.  But the advent of printing raised the stakes, and the coming of Reformation raised them higher still.  In 1542, Pope Paul III set up a local branch of the Inquisition, as opposed to its fearsome Spanish counterpart, to counteract the Reformation, which it did by initiating a reign of terror that Spanish inquisitors must have envied.  One of its functions was to condemn heretical books, a task paralleled in France by the Sorbonne, which published its own list of banned books. The Council of Trent (1545-63), called to retrench after the Protestant defection, established a centralized list of books that existed thanks to that accursed invention, printing – a list that, thanks to that accursed invention, printing, could be distributed across the world of the faithful.  Published first in 1559, the list grew year by year, and so did its malign reputation.

“Actually, it was not all malign, because the Index Librorum Prohibitorum proclaimed what was new and interesting, and acted as good advertising for Protestant publishers.  Banning never really worked:  in France the official bookseller Jean Andre printed both the Index and the work of the banned heretic poet Clement Marot.  Being banned was a sort of recommendation.  Those on the Index in the early days included Peter Abelard, Lefevre d’Etaples (the first translator of the Bible into French), Boccaccio, Calvin, Dante, Erasmus, Rabelais and, of course, Luther.  Eventually, there would be 4,000 books one the Index by the time it was disbanded in 1966.”

What would Gutenberg think about the Internet?


To learn more on how to promote books, read my greatest blog posts from the past five years and 2,000 posts:

2016 Book Marketing & Book Publicity Toolkit

2015 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit

2014 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit

Book Marketing & Book PR Toolkit: 2013


Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016.