The Perfect Book Promotion Webpage

Below is an example of an ideal book promotion website. Featuring Dr. Eric Maisel's newest release, The Atheist's Way, the website to promote the book demonstrates all the elements required to inform the reading public, the media, and anyone else interested in the book. It also provides details about the author and his other works, as well as offering a book trailer and contact information.

First, make note of the strong visual connection via color and design of the book cover and the webpage.


Viewed up close you'll see the various categories that direct to added pages of interest to the viewer. In the left column are links to learn about the author, talks & appearances, invitations to speak, a sampling of other books, information about becoming a "meaning coach", his blogs, his podcasts, and a link to his main website.

In the right column, the reader can find information about this latest book, what readers are saying, the first chapter of the book to sample, book group & study questions, free group telechats, a link to join the virtual book review tour, a telesummit, and a discussion forum.

If you've decided to join the virtual book review tour (which eliminates author participation in the usual aspects of a blog book tour, such as interviews and guest blogs), you'll find the page below with links to a biography, photos, questions, and an appearance schedule, all in one handy spot.

When you link to the author bio above, you get the page below which gives you loads of information about Dr. Maisel, as well as enough information about the book to discern its focus, and embedded are links to various points on the site that offer more information.

It's hard to imagine a more well-designed and informative web page for a new book, and no doubt saves the author as well as book reviewers an enormous amount of time tracking down or supplying information. Use it as a guide for your next book promotion. I might make one small improvement and that is to put a Buy-the-Book link in a very obvious place on the main page. Other than that, this website about covers it all in an attractive and concise way.


Still to come, our review of the book - watch here for links and times of broadcast.

The Van Gogh Blues by Eric Maisel

Early last year, I was honored to host Eric Maisel during his blog book tour for Ten Zen Seconds. I received the added benefit of surviving a dreadful cataract surgery thanks to the tips and inspiration in the book! Today, our tour spotlights the softcover reprint of Eric's highly popular book, The Van Gogh Blues. And again, I find myself with a tool to navigate changes in my life, this time dealing with the stresses of switching careers and life meaning from painter and gallery owner to writer, a shift that has proven much more challenging and distressing than anything I might have imagined. Read on for some comments from the author:

HBP: Eric, can you tell us what The Van Gogh Blues is about?

E: For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or idea began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way—they see themselves as active meaning-makers rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them—if, in their own estimation, they aren’t making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this “simple” dynamic helped explain why so many creative people—I would say all of us at one time or another time—get the blues.

To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren’t really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.

HPB: Are you saying that whenever a creative person is depressed, we are looking at existential depression? Or might that person be depressed in “some other way”?

E: When you’re depressed, especially if you are severely depressed, if the depression won’t go away, or if it comes back regularly, you owe it to yourself to get a medical work-up, because the cause might be biological and antidepressants might prove valuable. You also owe it to yourself to do some psychological work (hopefully with a sensible, talented, and effective therapist), as there may be psychological issues at play. But you ALSO owe it to yourself to explore whether the depression might be existential in nature and to see if your “treatment plan” should revolve around some key existential actions like reaffirming that your efforts matter and reinvesting meaning in your art and your life.

HBP: So you’re saying that a person who decides, for whatever reason, that she is going to be a “meaning maker,” is more likely to get depressed by virtue of that very decision. In addition to telling herself that she matters and that her creative work matters, what else should she do to “keep meaning afloat” in her life? What else helps?

E: I think it is a great help just to have a “vocabulary of meaning” and to have language to use so that you know what is going on in your life. If you can’t accurately name a thing, it is very hard to think about that thing. That’s why I present a whole vocabulary of meaning in The Van Gogh Blues and introduce ideas and phrases like “meaning effort,” “meaning drain,” “meaning container,” and many others. When we get a rejection letter, we want to be able to say, “Oh, this is a meaning threat to my life as a novelist” and instantly reinvest meaning in our decision to write novels, because if we don’t think that way and speak that way, it is terribly easy to let that rejection letter precipitate a meaning crisis and get us seriously blue. By reminding ourselves that is our job not only to make meaning but also to maintain meaning when it is threatened, we get in the habit of remembering that we and we alone are in charge of keeping meaning afloat—no one else will do that for us. Having a vocabulary of meaning available to talk about these matters is a crucial part of the process.

HBP: This is the paperback version of The Van Gogh Blues, How was the hardback version received?

E: Very well! The reviewer for the Midwest Book Review called The Van Gogh Blues “a mind-blowingly wonderful book.” The reviewer for Library Journal wrote, "Maisel persuasively argues that creative individuals measure their happiness and success by how much meaning they create in their work.” I’ve received countless emails from artists all over the world thanking me for identifying their “brand” of depression and for providing them with a clear and complete program for dealing with that depression. I hope that the paperback version will reach even more creative folks—and the people who care about them.

HBP: How does The Van Gogh Blues tie in with other books that you’ve written?

E: I’m interested in everything that makes a creative person creative and I’m also interested in every challenge that we creative people face. I believe that we have special anxiety issues and I spelled those out in Fearless Creating. I believe that we have a special relationship to addiction (and addictive tendencies) and with Dr. Susan Raeburn, an addiction professional, I’ve just finished a book called Creative Recovery, which spells out the first complete recovery program for creative people. That’ll appear from Shambhala late in 2008. I’m fascinated by our special relationship to obsessions and compulsions and am currently working on a book about that. Everything that we are and do interests me—that’s my “meaning agenda”!

HBP: What might a person interested in these issues do to keep abreast of your work?

E: They might subscribe to my two podcast shows, The Joy of Living Creatively and Your Purpose-Centered Life, both on the Personal Life Media Network. You can find a show list for The Joy of Living Creatively here and one for Your Purpose-Centered Life here. They might also follow this tour, since each host on the tour will be asking his or her own special questions. Here is the complete tour schedule. If they are writers, they might be interested in my new book, A Writer’s Space, which appears this spring and in which I look at many existential issues in the lives of writers. They might also want to subscribe to my free newsletter, in which I preview a lot of the material that ends up in my books (and also keep folks abreast of my workshops and trainings). But of the course the most important thing is that they get their hands on The Van Gogh Blues!—since it is really likely to help them.

Ten Zen Seconds with Eric Maisel

Hotbuttonpress: Welcome, Eric. I'd like to start off by saying how elegant your new book Ten Zen Seconds is, and how graceful a read. It's a beautiful piece of work. As I thought of questions to ask you about the Ten Zen Seconds technique as applied to the writing life, of course I focused on my own challenges. Like many artists and writers, I struggle with persistent procrastination. Is this more prevalent in creative personalities or is it just part of the human condition?

Eric: Procrastination is an anxiety state and if something makes us anxious and we have the opportunity to avoid it, then we avoid it. Creating is one of the things that make people anxious, because it is hard work, because it demands that we think and feel, and because the likelihood of making “mistakes” is high, so we are likely to simply avoid the encounter. Two things are going on: that creating makes us anxious and that it is easy to avoid it. This same phenomenon occurs everywhere in human affairs where anxiety is present: it is entirely a feature of the human condition.

Hotbuttonpress: If we divided up the writing process into roughly three categories as follows:

Beginning - noodling/imagineering/brainstorming and freewriting/getting down the bones
Middle - rewriting/revising/editing
End - publishing/promoting

What advice and specific incantation(s) would you recommend to prepare for the entire process.... sort of an overall incantation to set the tone?

Eric: First is always “I am completely stopping.” We can’t rush around with our monkey mind and our endless to-do list and also write. For the beginning writing process I think that remembering that we matter and that we are intending to make meaning are the most important things, and I would focus on “I make my meaning” and some version of the “I am doing my work” incantation, for instance “I am writing Chapter 3.”

For revising, which some people find a pleasure but most people find to be nothing but hard work, I would try “I trust my resources” and “I am equal to this challenge.”

For publishing, the biggest challenge is simply to do the things required of us, whether that’s writing the novel synopsis or querying six agents with a tight query email, and here I would make use of “I am taking action,” as getting published requires “one focused action after another.”

Hotbuttonpress: What specific incantation might be used to jumpstart the beginning of a writing project, when the writer is staring at a blank screen or sheet of paper?

Eric: I think that there are many viable approaches. One is to use incantation 2, “I expect nothing,” to help let go of the need for outcomes and to open up to whatever ideas and images want to come forward. In this way you help yourself avoid thinking “the same old thoughts,” the safe thoughts that are lurking around waiting be employed. If you are heading in a new direction, it might be useful to start out with “I am free of the past,” in this case your “writing past,” so that you can gain real permission from yourself to write something new and not something like your last book or your most popular book. I think that each of the 12 incantations can be used at such a moment, each in its own idiosyncratic way.

Hotbuttonpress: What incantation would help with the dreaded Middle stage.... and this is so important to me because rewriting is my nemesis, and I could use all the help I can get with revising and editing?

Eric: Revising is an act of will, not an act of craft. It is the writer saying to herself, “I did something which is not yet done and now I must face the music and turn this draft into something excellent and complete.” Helping yourself remember that courage is what’s required is tremendously important and so “I make my meaning” and “I am equal to this challenge” are probably the two most useful incantations in this context. You must take responsibility for turning the draft into a finished thing—that is exactly what “I make my meaning” connotes and demands.

Hotbuttonpress: Finally, what incantation could help a writer get the work "out there", and once it's published, aid the writer in marketing the book?

Eric: I think that getting down to the business of publishing, which has to do with networking, entering into relationships with agents and editors, creating good products and also good ancillary materials like email queries, and building your platform all require the kind of attention that an incantation like “I embrace this moment” or “I am taking action” promotes. This is work, not pleasure, and requires action, not inaction. And between each piece of business, “I am completely stopping”—so that you come to the next thing centered rather than in a lather and in a rush.

Hotbuttonpress: Are there any writers out there who are really good at all the aspects of writing, or is it normal to resist one area more than another?

Eric: It is normal to resist one area or another. I think that, broadly speaking, there are the “real writers” and the “real marketers,” but I have met enough writers, often bestselling ones, who embrace both aspects of the writing life with equal energy and attention and who have learned—whether or not it came naturally initially—how to integrate these various parts into a seamless whole. So it looks like the integration is possible—if you work at it.

Hotbuttonpress: You give advice in Ten Zen Seconds on how creatives can modify the incantations and even create their own. I'd like to suggest another because creative folks tend to be so hard on themselves. How about "I am doing very well." What do you think of that as a ten-second incantation when the inner judge is present?

Eric: Love it! Creative people virtually NEVER celebrate the fact that they have just spent two arduous hours birthing a whole universe—they are much more inclined to say, “Well, I could have spent three hours. Bad me.” It is very important that we honor our good efforts, so, yes, “I am doing very well” is a winner!

Hotbuttonpress: Before you leave, Eric, I notice that you have an Affiliate Marketing program for your publications. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works?

Eric: That is for the ebooks that I sell from my site—there are three ebooks currently and the one that people buy most often is “Becoming a Creativity Coach.” You can sell that book from your site, too—that what’s the affiliate program is about, you selling ebooks that I provide, which, once you get the hang of it, is a pretty simple process.

Hotbuttonpress: Thank you for joining us today. Great success in this latest endeavor!