Publish Your Own Magazine On Flipboard!

Create Your Own Magazine And Share It With The World, Or Just Your Friends

This is great! Have you ever wanted to curate your own magazine? Flipboard recently added the tools to enable you to do just that. A.J. Dellinger writes:

You can now take that custom built collection of stories that matter to you and share it with your friends as a digital magazine, essentially making you editor-in-chief of a paper made up of just things that interest you and distributed to an audience of likeminded readers. Creating a magazine is just as easy as the rest of the app, as you simply tap the “+” icon on an article and the option to add it as the page of a custom magazine comes up. You also get to title the personalized publication and set it to public or private. (Hands on: Flipboard 2.0 lets you create and share your own digital magazines)

How To Create Your Own Magazine On Flipboard

The good folks at Flipboard emailed me the following:

Flipboard has recently launched a new self publishing feature called Magazines ....

Magazines can incorporate content from virtually any source, including your website, blog, RSS feed and anything you share on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, LinkedIn and Tumblr.

You'll need to:

1) Setup an account

2) Go to share.flipboard.com and install the 'Flip it' bookmarklet. The bookmarklet will allow you to add content to your magazines directly from your web browser.

3) Start browsing the web, and when you find something you want to add to your magazine click the 'Flip it' button. You'll be prompted to login the first time.

4) Click 'Create a magazine', then customize it by adding a name and description, and simply start adding content.

You can also easily create a magazine from within the app.

Once done, check out your magazine on Flipboard, where you'll see your “flipped” items in a print-style layout. You can also tap into any item and promote it to the cover.

You can keep track of your magazine's popularity via it's cover. There you'll see it's number of Readers (Subscribers) and Page Flips.

You'll also get notifications in the app when people like, comment or subscribe to your magazines - so be sure to check.

You can tell people about your magazine by clicking the “share” button on the cover. You'll be able to post a custom link to Facebook and Twitter or have it sent via email.

I set up a magazine to test out Flipboard's new functionality and published some of my most viewed posts to it, along with a scattering of articles from my Twitter feed. It's here: Karen Woodward: The Art of Writing.

What Is Flipboard?

For those of you unfamiliar with Flipboard, it is the Swiss Army Knife of social media aggregators. It is also the Vogue of aggregators since it has a beautiful, magazine-like, interface.

In order to view Flipboard you need to download the app. You can get it here: Flipboard app.

Share Your Magazine!

If you create a Flipboard Magazine, please share the link in the comments. :-)

Other articles you might like:

- 5 Rules For Writing A Murder Mystery: Keeping the Murderer Secret Until The End
- How To Write Episodic/Serialized Fiction, Part 2 of 2
- How To Write Episodic/Serialized Fiction, Part 1 of 2

Photo credit: Karen Woodward: The Art of Writing.

What's An Author Brand?

What is an author brand? I've been asking myself this but haven't had much of a chance to research the question. One of my Google Alters sent me a link to Laurel Marshfield's article, What's an Author Brand?

She writes:

Brands are those vague but persuasive associations we conjure up whenever we think of any well-known product. Mac computers. TIDE laundry detergent. Nike running shoes.

Brands are also the far more complex associations that come to mind whenever we think of well-known authors. Often, they’re a flash of images mixed with a dominant feeling, or a scene from a particular book montaged with memory fragments.

Here’s a small demonstration. Does the name Stephen King conjure something different for you than the name J.K. Rowling? What about Dan Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jodi Picoult? Or Malcolm Gladwell, Joan Didion, Seth Godin? What association appears for a second or so when you first see each name?

People Aren’t Products

Whatever that instant of recognition is composed of, it’s there because that author’s brand put it there. Each association is complex and meaningful — unlike the association you’d experience for a brand of laundry detergent.

In fact, it’s that much-ado-about-nothingness which characterizes many product brands that makes it easy to imagine authors rejecting the B word as too schlocky, too commercial, too huckster-esque. So let’s substitute the word “story,” instead.

Your Brand Is Your Author Story

The author story (aka brand) refers to the complex messages authors put out into the world about themselves and their books — which we then absorb and retain in a highly individual way.

Suppose that you, like author Michael Cunningham, were interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” You talked about your struggles with writing, as well as your then-recent book, The Hours (later made into a movie starring Meryl Streep). You were articulate, charming, fascinating — someone any listener would want to know more about, because what you had to say was vivid and substantive.

So, you think, is that Cunningham’s brand?

Read the rest of What's an Author Brand?