Welcome to my first blog post on Talking Books with Literary Agent Mark Gottlieb! I've created this blog as a way to share helpful tips and tools with authors to grow their online presence. For this first post, I'd like to focus on one of the many methods I use with my book publishing clients to help further grow their careers.

Today I am writing about Google News Alerts (GNA), since I often use them to track online news stories about the authors I work with, and then share those news stories with that particular author, their publisher, my colleagues and on social media channels for promotional purposes. GNA will deliver news stories to your email inbox, depending on the search terms used, so I often set various GNA for all my clients. For example, to receive news about a particular author's book, at Google News Alerts, I might set the search terms as: Christopher Brown RULE OF CAPTURE.

GNA can then As-it-happens, At most one a day, or At most once a week, deliver to my inbox stories about: Christopher Brown RULE OF CAPTURE. I then choose to receive the results in English, Any Region, and I ask to receive All results, rather than Only the best results. If you do not have a Gmail account where you can receive the GNA, you can set it to your RSS feed.

​Alternatively, whenever you want, you could manually perform a Google News Search by going to Google.com and performing a search for an author name and title, then hitting enter on your keyboard. When the search results come in, under the Google search bar, you would select the News button to see News results about you and your book. Or you may simply visit Google News and perform a search for title and author name to see news results. ​ For instance, a Google News search performed manually for: Kate Moretti IN HER BONES, would yield the following results.

I hope this proves helpful to you in locating online news stories about you and your book (or future book as the case may be) so that you may share with your publisher and and social media followers to increase your author reach.