No matter what your politics are and regardless of what you think about Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, you have to admit one thing: He’s been a master at marketing his own online brand.

If you haven’t been to O’Reilly’s website, check it out. From offering a premium membership area, costing $49.95/year (very rare for a personal website to do this, and be successful at it), to behind the scenes clips, articles and selling the many books he’s written.

Billoreilly.com is all things Bill O’Reilly, building on the image he created through years of television shows, radio and other media. You don’t have to be a celebrity to follow his example though. It just takes a few loyal followers to successfully build your own brand.

Below are just a few examples of how he is cashing in on his name. While not every example below will work for you, it will give you some ideas about how to improve your website/blog to increase traffic.

Continue Reading

Borders Booksellers is crumbling, and fast. The news just keeps getting worse. If the chain doesn’t find a buyer by Sunday, Borders will be liquidated.

For the past few months, private equity investor Jahm Najafi appeared to be a buyer, offering $215 million for Borders, and would assume $220 million in liabilities.

But creditors, including publishers and landlords, are worried that if Najafi’s group buy Borders, they will immediately liquidate the company, making a tidy profit, but leaving creditors in the dust by the low-ball offer. The option to liquidate is part of Najafi’s offer to buy.

Continue Reading

People tend to read more ebooks than they did with print. At least, that’s what my own anecdotal evidence has shown. I know I’ve been reading a lot more since I began reading ebooks back in 2007.

What kind of ebooks are people reading? It seems that genre fiction is winning – that guilty pleasure we indulge in to take brief escapes from our daily lives.

Continue Reading

Somehow this NYT article about using ebooks to sell more print books slipped through the cracks of my Instapaper reading list. The idea about using ebooks and print together is hardly new, although it hasn’t received much attention and publishers haven’t appeared to take it seriously.

Until now.

According to the article, Algonquin Books will be giving away discounted ebooks when customers buy their trade paperbacks:

Continue Reading

July can be the ‘make or break’ month for the Borders book chain. If they don’t get a buyer soon to take over their debt, then the chain will start liquidating by July 29.

Borders entered into bankruptcy earlier this year. Since then, over 200 stores have closed, and there are more on the chopping block. Actually, the entire company is on the chopping block right now.

Publishers Weekly gives the dirty details:

Continue Reading

If there’s one thing JK Rowling is good at, it’s keeping her fans guessing about what she’s going to do next. With the new Harry Potter movie opening on July 15, the internet is gushing with new rumors.

The newest clue to more Harry Potter is the mysterious website Pottermore.com. According to Digital Spy, this could mean more Harry Potter for his legions of worldwide fans:

Continue Reading

If you own an iPad or iPhone and are a blogger of any kind, then Pulse News (iTunes link) is a must have. Best of all, it’s free!

In a nutshell, Pulse is a news/blog aggregator that allows you to read all your favorite websites in one convenient, clean, simple app on your iPad. Pulse also makes it easy to to post stories you like to your Twitter account, or even save them to Instapaper (iTunes link) – another app every blogger needs.

Continue Reading

Borders won a very small victory today when six landlords granted the struggling bookseller a reprieve, giving Borders more time to think about canceling the leases on those stores.

Borders was supposed to close an additional 51 stores, but that has been reduced to 45. This is on top of the 237 stores they closed in February after filing for bankruptcy.

This Bloomberg article explains:

Continue Reading

Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest bookseller, is exploring the idea of buying their competitor Borders Group. This comes after a tough year for Borders, which declared bankruptcy earlier and had their stock delisted on NYSE.

There has been previous rumors of Borders acquiring Barnes & Noble with the help of investors, but so far those rumors have been unfounded.

According to this post on thebookseller.com, a B&N takeover of Borders could pose antitrust issues:

Continue Reading

Len Riggio gave the keynote speech at the Association of American Publishers, giving a very upbeat and cheery picture of the digital book world.

Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest book retailer, has appeared to seemlessly merge their brick-and-mortar stores with their aggressive digital strategy.

Publishers Weekly reports:

Continue Reading