A GLAWS Special Speaker Event

"Using Brand Power to Boost Your Writing Career"

Saturday, January 20, 3:00 pm 2010
Palms-Rancho Park Library, Los Angeles CA
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The publishing world is undergoing massive change right now.  The good news is that the changes, while disorienting, are nearly all good and empowering for authors.  This presentation will help make sense of the chaos, and provide specific advice for building your brand as a author to make the most of the opportunities that are unfolding.

Agents, editors, publishers – today nearly all take into consideration an author’s “brand” when deciding whether of not to take on a book. This event will help you build a personal brand by effectively leveraging social media and other vital tools. It is getting easier and easier to build a personal brand by effectively leveraging social media and other vital tools.  We will also teach you how to cut through the confusion, misinformation and buzzword distractions by addressing:

• Why there is a difference between building an "audience" and building a "community"
• Recent changes in self-publishing and online marketing for authors
• The main online marketing goals a writer should be trying to achieve to further their career
• The essential online marketing tools and how you should use them
• What online marketing tools should really cost
• The most common time-wasting activities when marketing online
• Why a social media marketing campaign is the easiest starting place

Come learn from the BackMyBook team and other authors what it's like out there, what to avoid, and what to repeat.

Guest Speaker:

Tay Nguyen, Co-Founder and VP Product, BackMyBook.com

Tay Nguyen co-founded DivX, an Internet video company that grew from a small cult of technologists into a major consumer electronics brand with over 12 million unique web site visitors a month and a logo branding program used by every major consumer electronics company including Sony, Samsung, LG and others. As a DivX co-founder, Tay was involved in all aspects of the business, from strategy to product development to marketing. BackMyBook.com is his latest venture, combining his love of reading and writing with his experience in building and marketing products through the Internet.

Other guests may include:

Gk Parish-Philp, Co-Founder and VP Product, BackMyBook.com

Gk has extensive expertise in building digital media communities and online brands. He was instrumental in taking MP3.com and DivX, Inc. from start-ups to successful IPOs by managing their online product strategies with an eye toward developing powerful, engaged communities around their brands.

Wayland Myers, VP Marketing, BackMyBook.com

Wayland Myers has over 12 years experience building web presences and managing online marketing efforts for small to large organizations. He managed one of the major tabs on Kodak.com, leading multiple web teams in the development and use of CRM (customer relationship management) tools, and was responsible for the online brand management for the B2B Kodak Communications Group. He is currently the president of a search marketing consulting company which builds and manages Enterprise SEO (search engine optimization) tools and strategy for Fortune 500 companies such as Expedia.com. As a fellow writer, board game designer and artist, he is actively working to give something back to the creative community by offering his experience and knowledge of online tools and marketing techniques to BackMyBook.com authors.

BackMyBook.com is the brainchild of Tay Nguyen and GK Parish-Philp, battle scarred veterans of the Internet boom and bust, and experienced practitioners in the art of community marketing. They are champions for the artist having their voices heard against the larger forces arrayed against them.

"It’s in our DNA to fight for the rights of the content creator and the content consumer. The more content creator and content consumer can directly connect, with minimal interference by middlemen, the better the world will be, in our opinion. We would’ve been right there with Gutenberg to liberate book printing from the hands of the Church, to free newspapers from autocratic governments, to allow Martin Luther King to speak freely at the Mall. We were there to help artists make their music heard on mp3.com, to give film creators a free distribution mechanism for their high-def content via Stage6.com and the DivX codec. Our latest front in this on-going war is the publishing world; our weapon of choice is BackMyBook.com; our strategy is one of empowerment of the individual and building communities at a grassroots level."