Your book is done and you finally have time to come up for air. You’ve even changed out of the yoga pants, and eaten dinner with your family. The hard lifting is over, right? Well, not quite. Now you need to find a way to connect with and engage readers. As the digital publishing age continues to grow, your options for promotion have grown to a mind-numbing din. How can you find the best way to reach your audience?
I’ve teamed up with Sherisse Hawkins, CEO of Beneath the Ink , a company that is putting together a tool that lets authors give their readers an enhanced experience and Paul Agostinelli, co-Founder of Find My Audience, which seeks to help authors easily find the perfect readers for their books to help you sort through your options. We’ll talk about trends in digital publishing to increase reader engagement, including digital storytelling, content curation and enriched content.
Sunday, May 18, 2014 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the Alfalfa’s Community Room, 1651 Broadway, Boulder. The entrance to the Community Room is from the parking lot, on the southwest corner of the building.
Please note: You must preregister for this event at the bottom of this page.
This Boulder Writers’ Workshop members-only educational event is free. Professional Membership is $99 per year, and Standard Membership is only $49 per year. Invest in your future as a writer. Become a Member today!
About the Panelists:
Sherisse Hawkins has a passion for large-scale projects that mesh creativity and technology. With 25 years worth of experience in the high-tech world, she graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Arizona and a Masters in Engineering Management from University of Colorado at Boulder. She worked as a Walt Disney Imagineer, building theme park attractions around the globe, and as a system architect for DiviCom. Most recently, Sherisse held an executive management role (Vice President of Subscriber Equipment and Navigation) for Time Warner Cable, where her team’s product was deployed to over 13 million subscribers. Sherisse has been recognized as Woman of the Year in Technology by the Women in Cable and Telecommunications, Top 50 Women in Cable, and was a Betsey Magness Leadership Institute Fellow. Her volunteer work includes service on the Board of Directors for regional YWCA and SCTE, National Society of Black Engineers Alumni, and the national NAMIC board.
Paul Agostinelli has been working in the heretofore non-overlapping fields of literature and technology for over two decades. He earned a Master’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Chicago where a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities supported his graduate work in literary analysis and genre theory. His writings include four unproduced screenplays, a novel in progress, and an evolving blog on Zen Buddhism and modern culture. Paul has also been working with a variety of early stage startups and emerging technologies for over a decade. In 2000, he co-founded Kaivo Technology with $2.75M in venture funding; Kaivo still operates as a boutique web development consultancy providing Open Source technology solutions to non-profits, media and academic institutions. He co-founded Find My Audience in 2013 with fellow tech-savvy writers, motivated to bring cutting edge social outreach tools to writers across the world.
Lori DeBoer is an author, freelance journalist and writing coach whose work has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, The New York Times, Pithead Chapel, Arizona Highways, Gloom Cupboard and more. She has contributed essays on writing to Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts, Keep It Real: Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About Research and Writing Creative Nonfiction and A Million Little Choices: The ABCs of CNF. She founded the Boulder Writers’ Workshop, is a contributing editor for Short Story Writer and is a homeschooling mom. She and her husband Michael and son Max live in Boulder.
