• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 3, 2010

Settling down to relax on a nice sun-drenched beach in Southern California, Catalina Island or Maui might call for a good book. I know you entrepreneurial types. The kind of personality that wants to relax, but doesn't feel comfortable, so you go on vacation with your laptop and hide the business books way at the bottom of the suitcase in hopes your significant other won't find them.

Choose your wine, sit back and relax. Among the top selections, "Local Online Advertising for Dummies" and "Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour A Day."

"Local Online Advertising for Dummies" by Yodle Chief Executive Officer Court Cunningham, and local business consultant Stephanie Brown, published April 12, delves into a variety of online advertising campaigns, from organic and paid search to targeting consumers with banner ads and leveraging customer data. The book took eight months to write. Cunningham pitched the idea to Wiley Publishing about 14 months prior.

One of my favorite parts in the book dives into 10 local online marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. Beneath each you will find a description of what not to do.

In Chapter 18, Cunningham and Brown write, "don't assume your customers behave like you, don't create a Web site that no one visits, don't care too much about how many people visit your site, don't contract Google tunnel vision, and absolutely know whether your marketing really isn't working."

Cunningham says the goal to sell 10,000 copies in the first six to 12 months continues to track steady, selling through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, among other book sellers in physical and digital format.

"Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour A Day," scheduled for release in mid-July by Wiley/Sybex publisher, is a must read for anyone wanting to dig through the complexities of paid search marketing to find the simplicities. Written by Clix Marketing Founder David Szetela and his colleague Joe Kerschbaum, the book details pay-per-click advertising, from opening and downloading accounts in Google AdWords to migrating campaigns from Google to Microsoft adCenter.

I'm always fascinated with the nuances in paid search marketing. Szetela explains the consequences of incorrect code intersection. He tells us the small snippet of simple code for dynamic keyword insertion is delicate. Since advertisements can make or break your PPC performance, this advanced feature needs to be handled with care. A small error can be detrimental to how your ads appear. He writes that errors can creep into the insertion code that appears awkward.

Connectual Founder Aaron Goldman's book, published by McGraw-Hill and scheduled for release in the fall, will ship a little late for summer 2010 reading, but perhaps you can get it to read during your holiday vacation in December. The book is titled "Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned From Google." Goldman crowdsourced the topic for the book before presenting the idea to McGraw-Hill, demonstrating a need before writing it, and published portions on numerous blogs.

An oldie but goodie, according to Reliable-SEO Founder David Harry, is "The Art of SEO," written by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C. Stricchiola, and published in 2009 by O'Reilly.