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The purchase of the music CD Lift Up: Artists and Authors Unite to Feed America’s Hungry Children contributes to food relief services.

For more than 60 years, independent and chain Christian retail stores have represented the crossroads of faith and community for all denominations and walks of life. Also a safe haven for Christian consumers, these wholesome, family-friendly environments provide the best selection of the highest quality products in the Christian market.

It’s in honor of these retailers’ steadfast commitment to create a store culture of dependability and outstanding customer service that we celebrate Christian Store Week.

Visit the official Christian Store Week website.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you reach the Christian store market with your brand message.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Christian fiction readers now have the first “all-in-one” site to discover the latest information about Christian fiction including updates, recommendations, new releases, commentary, and exclusive articles from their favorite writers.

NovelCrossing.com (@novelcrossing), “the Intersection of Faith and Fiction,” is a website aimed at building a community of Christian fiction readers by being the most inclusive site on the subject of inspirational novels.

Developed by WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group (@WaterBrookPress), NovelCrossing.com features content from all publishers of Christian fiction, allowing readers to discover new titles from across the publishing universe. Currently the site provides data on 10,000 titles from 50 different publishing houses.

“While there are a number of informative sites featuring Christian fiction book reviews and interviews, no one site combines a searchable database of books and authors, across all publishers in this category, with reviews, interviews, features, and a community component,” says Shannon Marchese, WaterBrook Multnomah senior fiction editor. “We built Novel Crossing to fill that gap. We wanted fans of Christian fiction to have a “one-stop” destination for finding authors and new reads, for leaving comments and making friends who love the books they love.” She explains more in the following video.

Read the news release.

See our previous blogposts on book discoverability.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your brand content in the new world of digital publishing.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

In this Fast Company (@FastCompany) article, Ryan Holiday (@RyanHoliday) says authors are increasingly writing non-fiction books, not as a means unto themselves, but as a means to the end of being a professional introduction of themselves for speaking, consulting, and deal-making.

Faced with declining sales and the disappearance of book retailers like Borders, authors have diversified their income streams, and many make substantially more money through new business generated by a book, rather than from it.

Today, authors are in the idea-making business, not the book business. In short, this means that publishing a book is less about sales and much more about creating a brand. The real customers of books are no longer just readers but now include speaking agents, CEOs, investors, and startups....

Call it a business card, a resume, a billboard, or whatever you choose, but the short of it is that books are no longer just books. They are branding devices and credibility signals.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you communicate your brand message.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Whenever you communicate, start by keeping your audience in focus. Your main message will only be well received when you position it in such a way as to clearly answer your audience’s ever-present question, “What’s in it for me?”

In this Forbes (@Forbes) article and video, communications coach Carmine Gallo (@carminegallo) emphasizes the importance of message-mapping to ensure that you strategically and effectively communicate the essence of your brand or book.

Step 1: Create a Twitter-friendly headline.

Step 2: Support the headline with three key benefits.

Step 3: Reinforce the three benefits with stories, statistics, and examples.

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) coach you in media & presentation skills and help you craft your core message so that it stands out in today’s media-saturated environment.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The American Christian Fiction Writers (@ACFWTweets) conference (@ACFWConference) (#ACFW) is being held in Dallas, TX and Somersault (@smrsault) is here telling authors, agents, and publishers about

• our online dashboard for publishers and marketers, SomersaultNOW
• this blog as a telescope helping industry professionals “see around the corner” to prepare for the future of publishing
• and SomersaultSocial, our new program to educate authors and speakers in the strategic and effective use of social media marketing.

Congratulations to Allen Arnold, winner of the ACFW’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of his impact on the Christian fiction industry, its authors, and its readers.” He’s the former publisher and senior vice president of Thomas Nelson Fiction, having launched the Fiction group in 2004.

ACFW’s other awards are Julee Schwarzburg - Editor of the Year, Nicole Resciniti - Agent of the Year, Allison Pittman - Mentor of the Year, Genesis winners for the best unpublished Christian fiction projects, and the Carol Awards for the best Christian fiction published in the previous calendar year.

If you’re attending the conference, please come to our exhibit booth and say hi!

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A report by Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) for paidContent (@paidContent) says, “On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso Book Machine (@espressobook), and Kodak (@kodakCB) are partnering to add print-on-demand technology to Kodak Picture Kiosks (@KodakKiosks) [of which there are 105,000 nationwide]. That means consumers will be able to print paperback photo books, self-published books, and the seven million backlist and public domain titles in On Demand’s catalog from retail chains such as CVS (@CVSCaremarkFYI).”

Read the paidContent article.

About 30 Espresso Book Machines are installed in stores around the US, with 30 more being readied for installation.

HarperCollinsPublishers (@HarperCollins) says it will make about 5,000 current paperbacks available through the Espresso Book Machine.

Read The Wall Street Journal article.

On Demand also announced a partnership with ReaderLink (@Readerlink), which distributes books to grocery stores, drugstores, mass market and club stores, to make more titles available through the Kodak Picture Kiosks.

“We envision an integrated solution that can substantially redefine the publishing industry and bring exciting new solutions to customers," says Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books.

Read the news release.

But according to USA TODAY (@usatodaytech), "this all comes with one huge catch — Kodak is in the midst of selling its photo kiosk business as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy."

Neller said the Kodak agreement, though announced [Sept. 12], was signed before the Rochester printing and imaging company announced last month it had decided to sell a set of businesses that include its photo kiosks, document scanners and still camera film operations. He said On Demand's hope is that whatever company buys Kodak's kiosk operations would also continue the Espresso arrangement.

Read the USA TODAY article.

See our previous blogposts “Mardel Acquires Espresso Book Machine” and “3D Printing a Gun.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate the fast-changing world of book publishing.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) program The Forum (@BBCTheForum) featured an interview with Dr. Robert Heath, senior lecturer in advertising at University of Bath School of Management (@BathSofM), board member of the Wharton (@wharton) global Future of Advertising project, former advertising executive who worked for some of the world’s top brands, and author of Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising (Wiley-Blackwell (@WileyNews & @WB_Business), 2012). He argues that advertising today is no longer about providing information but works more subtly through subliminal emotional meta-communication to increase consumers’ positive and enduring feelings towards the brand.

He uses approaches from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to outline his theory of the subconscious influence of advertising in its audience’s lives. In addition to looking at ads’ influence on consumers, Heath also addresses how advertising is evolving, noting especially the ethical implications of its development.

Listen to this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically and effectively communicate your brand message.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Occasionally publishing professionals may tend to view books as commodities rather than the individual works of value that they are; especially with the onslaught of nearly 1,000 books being published every day. The sheer volume can make marketers lose focus. And if that challenge isn’t enough, today’s market is demanding more and more personalization and customization. Marketers must appeal to consumers needs in more personal and social ways.

The above video offers a lesson in innovative “custom mass-marketing” from the marketers of the vodka brand, Absolut. Engineers and designers created rules that allowed machines to behave randomly to create 4 million uniquely designed (“personalized”) bottles.

What can we learn and adapt from this marketing approach? Write your comments below.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you create innovative ways to strategically communicate your brand’s message.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

CMO.com’s (@CMO_com) latest Guide to The Social Landscape (interactive version; pdf version), developed by 97th Floor (@chrisbennett), offers helpful analyses in the categories of
          • Customer Communication
          • Brand Exposure
          • Traffic to Your Site
          • and SEO
for the social media marketing sites of
          • Twitter
          • Facebook
          • StumbleUpon
          • Google+
          • Pinterest
          • Reddit
          • YouTube
          • SlideShare
          • Delicious
          • Digg
          • Flickr
          • LinkedIn
          • Quora
          • and Instagram.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you leverage the power of social media marketing for your branded content.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.