Kim Kohatsu

Kim Kohatsu is the chief marketing officer at PickFu and the founder of Charles Ave Marketing. She began her career as a copywriter for several leading ad agencies. While working in advertising, she spearheaded award-winning print, radio, TV, outdoor, and guerrilla campaigns for clients including the California Avocado Commission, AAA, The Orange County Register, The Hilton Family of Hotels, Yamaha, Wienerschnitzel, KFC, and Power Automotive, among others. After several years, Kim shifted her specialty into online marketing, helping tech startups improve their online presence through PPC, SEO, email marketing, reputation management, blogging, and social media. Today, she combines her traditional and new media experience to create and strengthen brands like PickFu. Kim and her team help others use PickFu to write better copy, present products in their best light, and position themselves as market leaders.

8 Crucial Tips for Book Titles

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A book’s title is its calling card. It’s how a potential reader finds your book. It’s how a satisfied reader talks about it to a friend.

So when it’s time to dream up a book title, what must you consider? We turned to five experts on the topic, who shared these tips:

Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is still the number one reason readers buy books. If you want to maximize your sales and earnings as an author, you need to understand the word of mouth sales process. It all starts with your book title.

Every word of mouth sales process has three simple steps: … Continue reading

Know Your Audience: How Smart Demographic Targeting Yields Better Insights

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Exactly who likes your product or design should never be a mystery to you. Knowing your audience means understanding their needs and desires, and knowing how best to address them.

On PickFu, you always know who answers your polls – each result includes a demographic breakdown of gender, age, income, ethnicity, and education level. But you can also target certain demographic groups so that only certain subsets of the population respond to your poll. … Continue reading

Getting the Most from Your App Icon

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When Steve Jobs talked to Fortune in 2000 about the Mac OS X’s Aqua interface, he delivered a classic line:

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”

Today, an app’s icon needs to meet that standard if it’s going to gain traction with users. We reached out to app creators and UX designers to understand how to think about your app’s icon. Here’s what they shared: … Continue reading

5 Tools to Format Your Manuscript Into an E-book

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It started with an idea. Then it turned into a manuscript. Maybe you used one of the eight tools we highlighted to write and edit that manuscript. Now it’s time to publish. How can you transform and format your text into an attractive, sellable e-book? Whether you’re a design pro or a design no, these five tools will help you create a stunning, professional layout for ePub and Kindle formats. … Continue reading

8 Tools to Help You Write and Edit Your Next Bestseller

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At its most basic, writing only requires a pen and paper. But these eight tools will help you take your writing further – from composition to grammar checking, from workshop groups to professional editing.

Google Docs

google-docs

Google Docs just might replace Microsoft Word, especially if you’re collaborating with co-authors or an editor. Everyone can access and edit a document in real-time, and there are chat features and comments to hammer out any sticking points. The real-time nature of Google Docs spares you the confusing process of emailing different versions back and forth, keeping everything centralized. Your work is stored in the cloud, meaning you can work on your book from any device when you’re on the go. Best of all, it’s free. … Continue reading

Clarity Over Cleverness: An Author’s Journey

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAPamela Wilson is the Executive Vice President of Educational Content at Rainmaker Digital, the company behind the popular content marketing website Copyblogger. She co-hosts a biweekly podcast called ZeroToBook with bestselling author Jeff Goins. The show follows Pamela’s progress in self-publishing from start to finish.

In June, Pamela was anxious to give her work a name so that she could start sharing it with people. During an episode of the podcast, she and Jeff discussed the importance of a book’s title and Jeff explained a methodical process for ideating titles and getting unbiased feedback from potential customers.

At the heart of his process – PickFu. … Continue reading

When a poll ends in a tie, how should you pick a winner?

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As Americans, we often scratch our heads at the legions of international soccer fans who can live with a tie. A score like 2-2 (or even worse, a 0-0 draw) is so inconclusive – we like the clarity of winners and losers. When a game ends tied, how are we supposed to feel?!

But a tied game is still hard-fought. The players still put it all out on the field, exert huge amounts of effort, and in the end, are shown to be evenly matched. Alan Jacobs wrote an impassioned defense of ties a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal. In it, he writes,

Since scoring is so rare, many matches end 0-0 or 1-1. And this is something that we soccer fans don’t just accept about the game: we love it. We love that scoring is so darn hard, that, most of the time, many interlocking pieces of game action have to fall into place just so in order for the ball to make its way into the back of the net. We want it that way.

This is a good lesson when your PickFu poll ends in a tie. It’s difficult to score big with an audience. You probably know (or are) someone who will only drink Coke or only drink Pepsi. These are passionate, insistent customers. But you also probably know someone who doesn’t have a cola preference, or even can’t tell the difference. (These people are crazy, by the way, because obviously Coke is superior). … Continue reading