Archive for March 2011
Meet the Author Podcast: Kim Olver, Author of “Secrets of Happy Couples: Loving Yourself, Your Partner, and Your Life”
March 10, 2011 | 
Author 
This week I talked to Kim Olver, a relationship expert whose new book is called, Secrets of Happy Couples: Loving Yourself, Your Partner and Your Life. I talked to Kim about her book and the research she did with 100 couples. Kim shared some of her best tips and strategies for getting the most out of a relationship.
Kim and I talked about:
How Kim found the 100 happy couples she surveyed.
The four characteristics all the happy couples had in common.
The four stages of the relationship cycle.
Relationship maintenance.
The Platinum Rule (going one step beyond the Golden Rule).
Sex and romance.
The five basic needs and relationship compatibilty, and how to turn turn incompatibilities into win/win solutions.
The empowerment and frustration of realizing that we can only change ourselves, not other people.
Loss and grieving and Kim’s personal experience with the death of her husband in 1999.
Strategies to work through grief at the end of the relationship cycle.
Kim’s experience with publishing her own book.
Here are some related links:
The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex by John Gray
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BookLending.com Sponsor Books Make it Onto the Most Wanted
Two of last week’s sponsored books made appearances on the BookLending.com 25 Most Wanted this week, Kindle Nation Daily / BookLending.com eBook of the Day We Interrupt This Date, by L.C. Evans, and our newsletter sponsor, Her Perfect Revenge, by Anna Mara. Congrats to both authors!
Once again, Water for Elephants tops the list.
BookLending.com 25 Most Wanted
Week of February 28, 2011
1. Water for Elephants: A Novel, by Sara Gruen
2. Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games), by Suzanne Collins
3. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
4. Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games), by Suzanne Collins
5. Middlesex: A Novel, by Jeffrey Eugenides
6. The Hangman’s Daughter, by Oliver Pötzsch
7. My Horizontal Life, by Chelsea Handler
8. Deadly Little Secret, by Laurie Faria Stolarz
9. Freedom: A Novel (Oprah’s Book Club), by Jonathan Franzen
10. The Virgin Suicides: A Novel, by Jeffrey Eugenides
11. We Interrupt This Date, by L.C. Evans
12. The Corrections: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen
13. Bermuda Shorts, by James Patterson
14. UPDATED I Don’t Remember – A Practical Guide to Memory Improvement, by Psychiatric Self-Help
15. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
16. Awakened, by P. C. Cast, Kristin Cast
17. Switched (Trylle Trilogy, #1), by Amanda Hocking
18. Running With The Devil, by Lorelei James
19. The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
20. Her Perfect Revenge, by Anna Mara
21. Ascend (Trylle Trilogy, #3), by Amanda Hocking
22. Saving Rachel (A Donovan Creed Crime Novel), by John Locke
23. West of Here, by Jonathan Evison
24. It’s Not About The Cookies, by K.A. Thompson
25. Where’s My F*cking Latte? (and Other Stories About Being an Assistant in Hollywood), by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff
Meet the Author Podcast: Matt Youngmark, “Zombocalypse Now”
This week I talked to Matt Youngmark, founder of Chooseomatic Books and the author of the choose-your-own-ending book, Zombocalpyse Now. If you liked Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid, you’ll love this choose-your-own-ending book for grown-ups featuring a pink stuffed bunny protagonist battling the zombie hordes.
Not only did Matt and I talk about his book and the process of writing a book with over 100 endings, but we also had an in-depth discussion of the new realities of publishing in the ebook age. We covered a lot of ground:
Our memories of reading choose-your-own-lending books in our youth;
The premise of Zombocalypse Now and what made Matt decide to have a pink stuffed bunny protagonist;
Shawn of the Dead and our cultural preoccupation with zombies;
Whether or not the book is appropriate for older kids;
How Matt organized himself to write a book with 112 possible endings;
The book illustrations and the cover;
The next Choose-o-Matic book, Thrusts of Justice;
Matt’s experiences with ebook self-publishing;
Ebook pricing and marketing;
Changes in traditional publishing and the explosion of independent publishing;
Amanda Hocking’s success;
Crowdsourcing curation of independently-published books through social media;
Matt’s book-pricing epiphany when he dropped the price of his ebook to $2.99 in January;
The evergreen nature of ebooks versus traditional dead tree books;
Google Books;
Why Matt’s books are DRM-free;
Independent record stores and bookstores and the future of print publishing;
Where Matt thinks ebook pricing will settle;
The immediacy of social-media and word-of-mouth driven ebook sales;
E-readers;
The opportunity ebook platforms provide for authors’ formerly out-of-print books;
The growing market for authors’ services in ebook publishing;
Replacing the editor in independent publishing;
Ideas for future Choose-O-Matic books.
Related Links:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Next week, I’ll be interviewing Kim Olver, author of The Secrets of Happy Couples: Loving Yourself, Your Partner and Your Life. I hope you’ll join me, because I’m really looking forward to talking to Kim about what she learned from her interviews of 100 happy couples.