Two Great Books For Writers, Bloggers and Freelancers

As most of you know, I’m an avid reader of pretty much anything I can get my hands on. That’s why I’m always happy to review new books/ebooks that come my way. Of course, I don’t always get around to publishing the reviews quickly, but I’m working on it. Here are a couple of books I liked that crossed my desk recently.

The Smart Business Guide to Winning New Work

The Smart Business Guide to Winning New Work (aff) by Pawel Grabowski offers some great tips for beginners taking their first steps into self-employment. Small business owners and freelancers are the main target market.

The 50 page ebook is divided into several sections, answering key questions about how to market yourself in order to win new work. Issues covered include:

• What is sales?

• The three traits of a successful salesman

• The 3 characteristics of a good prospect

• Where do you find prospects

I found this book an easy read which will give those starting out plenty of ideas for selling themselves and their services. However, this is not a get rich quick book. Pawel warns readers both at the beginning and the end of the book that putting these lessons into practice in order to achieve success will take hard work — and I like that lesson best of all!

Update: The Smart Business Guide to Winning New Work will be on sale at a 30% discount on April 1, 2011 ONLY!

Guest Blogging Guide

I got this book when I signed up for Pro membership of MyBlogGuest. This is a site which automates guest posting — not in a bad way, but by providing a one stop shop for guest bloggers and those seeking guest posts to get together. This 35 page ebook provides tips on guest blogging. It covers:

• What is guest blogging?

• Benefits of guest blogging

• What guest blogging is NOT

• How to find great guest posting opportunities

• How to approach the blog owner

• Guest blogging best practices

For me, the most useful section was a search tip in the section on finding guest posting opportunities about using wildcards to help you identify the opportunities. It’s not that I didn’t know about wildcards — I do, I do! — but Ann’s examples showed me how I could improve my searches not just for blogging opportunities but for writing work.

Those were the non-fiction books that made the most impression on me recently. What have you been reading that you’d like to share?