A Compliment A Day …

How do you feel when someone gives you a compliment? How does it feel when someone puts you down?

A year and a half ago, a high school student in Iowa set up a Twitter account to focus on the good qualities in everyone at his school. Jeremiah Anthony recognized that social media is often used by bullies to make people feel bad about themselves. His approach does just the opposite. He posts sincere compliments about students and teachers.

He started by posting positive comments about friends and people he knew personally. They told other people and the movement grew.

The account description for @westhighbros reads, “Breathe in, breathe out. The original positive account.” And it has over 4800 followers. The tweets are always personalized to the individual, focusing on the person’s achievements, qualities and capabilities.

A video was recently posted that provides more background about his initiative.

Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to change someone’s day for the better? What if each of us chose to give one compliment a day to people we know? How might that affect your home life? Your work place? Your community?

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Writing in the Cyber Age

I did not grow up with a computer in the house. When I was younger, writing was done by hand or by typewriter (the manual kind). So growing into the computer age as an adult, learning about software and downloads and social media has been quite a leap. Writing is much simpler now – I love being able to highlight, cut and paste instead of drawing lines and arrows to different parts of a page to move my thoughts around! Completed manuscripts can be saved on tiny external drives (just where does all the information go?) and emailed off through cyberspace in split seconds. Who knew the life of an author could be this easy?

Over the past three months, since Dream BIGGER was published, I’ve been going through another steep learning curve – marketing and publicity. In the olden days, it was done by posters, phone calls and letters to newspapers, interviews and the occasional book signing, primarily in your local community. Only the really big name authors received much attention. Now, however, thanks to the internet, the market is global and the potential is limitless.

Take the Dream BIGGER contest as an example. In the space of 60 short days, people from 20 countries around the world visited the site nearly 900 times! Whew! There were visitors from the U.K., Australia, western and eastern Europe and Asia as well as across the United States and Canada.

My book has been read and reviewed throughout North America as well as in parts of Europe, Asia and Australia. Today I’m mailing a signed copy to someone in Malaysia who won it through an internet sweepstakes website. One of the books I set free through BookCrossing has made its way from southern Ontario to San Francisco and is now apparently in Spain. Another was set free on a train somewhere in Switzerland. The book itself is doing more travelling than I am these days!

I’m learning that today’s author has to be well versed in the internet and social media in order to get noticed. Since the summer, I’ve set up accounts on Twitter and Facebook, and joined groups in LinkedIn. I’ve done guest blogs on various websites, as well as interviews on Blogtalk radio and book review sites. Every day, I spend at least an hour sending out messages through my social media sites and expanding my following. I never dreamed that this is how I’d be promoting my book.

Authors need to reach their readers where they are. So I’m still doing book signings, radio, tv and print media interviews. But a large part of the world these days is found on the internet, so that’s where you’ll find me, dreaming BIGGER!

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