So the latest news today is…

• Britney in Psych Ward for Two More Weeks…Though the 72-hour hold on Britney Spears is up, the pop star will be remaining in the psych…
• More proof Angelina Jolie is pregnant
• Eva Mendes enters rehab

[I won't do these headlines justice by giving you the links to the stories. You will have to do your own homework.]

This week as I watched the evening news I heard various stories that were not newsworthy!

• Like the fact that there are now nude airline trips available (What? I don’t even like to share an armrest!)

One of the best marketing books I’ve read is Pyro Marketing.

Author Greg Stielstra says,

I believe the best way to understand the marketing process, the way messages are sent, received, acted upon, and spread, is to think of it as fire. I explain the process in PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life.

PyroMarketing is a new way to think about marketing—one that acknowledges and accommodates human nature and society’s new realities. But more importantly, it takes the mystery out of word-of-mouth by reducing it to a systematic approach anyone can follow. PyroMarketing involves four simple steps:

Today’s article is a by a special guest,  Athena Dean, founder of WinePress Publishing and three-time self-published author.

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The Who, What, Where, and Why of Christian Book Promotion & Marketing
By Athena Dean

So, do you think every Christian needs to read your book? If you do, let us stop for a moment and get real. If you think your book is going to end up in WalMart, on Oprah, and on the NY Times Bestseller List…really, I hate to rain on your parade, but you really are setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment. It will help from the start to have realistic expectations and recognize clearly who your real market is. You must ask your self these defining questions…who, what and where? Then you must prove the why.

What do you have that is the “best ever” that is related to your book or web site? Head on over to Squidoo and quickly create a “lens” to let the world know at The Ever Project: at http://www.squidoo.com/ever/hq .

This project allows you to create your best ever collection on any subject. You could do the best recipe books ever, best quotes ever, best authors ever. I created a lens on the best Adoption Scrapbook Album ever (which happens to be my book…)

Here’s a tip for every person who owns a web site, especially authors and writes. Never use a hyphen in your URL (that’s the www._____.com) unless it’s strictly used as “secondary site” to point search engines to and not used in any of your publicity materials. If your name is already taken add on a phrase or name such as www.greatbooksbymyfirstnamelastname.com.

In my magazine, HopeKeepers, we featured an article and at the end of the article gave the author’s bio and web site. Unfortunately, her web site was www.myfirstname-mylastname.com.

When the paragraph was justified, unfortunately her bio appeared to say: