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May, 2012

  1. New ideas…whats next?

    May 30, 2012 by dbo355446115

    I can’t believe that you have been reading for the last year+ and you have to ask that question, so I’m going to assume that either your new, or you joined AFTER I locked up some of my earlier posts (hey I said I was going to!). SO for those of you who may just be getting to this point for the first time, you have your book written, edited and have a dozen or so copies printed (please do NOT sign anything requiring a commitment for $2000 or 500 copies, just don’t do it, you do NOT have that many friends).

    You also find that you are posting something to a blog on a regular basis and a snippet of THAT to your facebook page and a smaller teaser from THAT to your twitter account.  Well hopefully you did what I did and went into your favorite search engine and typed in your cities name, and service organization and then copied or screen scraped FURIOUSLY for the next few dozen pages. You should now have a list of a few that’s a few dozen pages long, wait yours ISN’T a few dozen pages? Then you have one of 3 problems:

    1)     You live in a teeny tiny town, not that this is necessarily a bad thing, butt move!

    Yes, I am kidding, a little, move you SEARCH to the next biggest town. Even Bithlo, Florida has a large scale neighbor, its called ORLANDO!

    2)     Open your terms a little, look for libraries, clubs, FRATERNITIES and the like. Fraternities? Yes, even though we all KNOW that the inside of a Frat house looks like “bluto slept here” they must maintain the appearance of a business like atmosphere and hence they will have regularly occurring meetings.

    3)     Local/Cable Radio and TV Shows. In my market alone there are no less than 10 TV stations and 15 radio stations who all do some sort of PR/Public Service broadcast one day a week. Yes those guys doing a Stern imitation Monday – Friday are hosting the “flower hour” on Sunday afternoons!

    So, does your list look longer NOW? Great, now the reason I suggested you do a screen scrape is because a lot of what’s there you wont need, but a lot of what’s there you WILL need and it’s much easier (for me) to delete than to type. Now go through your pages and kill everything you don’t need. Leave yourself with the organizations names, addresses contact information and if they list peoples names keep them, kill everything else. Your list is slightly shorter, but that’s ok. Now take that same list and hit the web sites, if they have one it’s probably slightly outdated but some of the contact information should still be good.

    Here is where your elevator speech starts to pay off. Those of you under 30 brace yourselves, I only use the email to verify contact information, I do NOT email ANYTHING of any importance, it will be ignored much of the time. A phone call can actually be perceived as being better by some, but most folks are not in the business of ‘cold calling’ and the chances of talking to the person you need to on the 1st shot are slim to none, and slims already left town. Do NOT EVER leave a message. Trust me, no one can convey the urgency or importance of your information better than YOU can and 90% of the time anyone who tries, will get it wrong!

    So, now you have this really cool new list, NOW what?

    Wait for it…wait for it…Well according to the clock on the wall, that’s really all the time we have today!

    Hey remember you guys were the ones who said you wanted it in more bite size chunks…

    So until next time, keep on reading

    And for heavens sake DON’T stop writing!

    Category author, blog, book, market, NON Fiction, NON Fiction How To, print, publish, resources, website, Whats NEW, write | Tags: | No Comments

  2. Now Here’s an idea…

    May 22, 2012 by dbo355446115

    Ok, you have your book printed and your blog is up and running your facebook is full and flying, what else can you do? Well there are many, many, many avenues open to you, some of which you will find will spread the word like wildfire, and some will just open some additional opportunities for you. So let’s see what we have.

    This weekend I was attending my son’s end of the year sports banquet, and the coach, who does a GREAT deal for the kids and pays for most of it out of his own pocket, was handing out awards. Well he has REALLY worked with my son and helped him a great deal so my wife and I wanted to give HIM an award (they had JUST had the varsity award dinner the night before). So my son (who is 6) and I made an award for him and I took over the microphone as he was wrapping it up. In my presentation I inserted the speech about “the old man and the starfish”, and applied it specifically to how the coach had made a difference to “this one.”

    I love the story, especially when its used right but apparently a lot of folks much younger than I were not familiar with it, so as I wrapped it up, and the coach and several other’s were ‘sweating through their eyes’ I had several folks ask me if that was written down anywhere. “Why as a matter of fact it is, and if you go to AMAZON.com search for me, and buy the BLUE book it’s in the conclusion. (Each of my books in a series has a different color cover so it stands out on the shelf).

    This of course started off a WHOLE line of conversations of “Oh you wrote a book?” (Several actually) “and I can get it on AMAZON (many folks are impressed by that for some reason)” Even my wife was fielding questions from folks who were now to intimidated by “the writer” to ask me themselves. I have been sweating and screaming side by side with these folks all season long and now all of a sudden they are impressed!

    The idea is that this is just ONE of the MANY ways to get the word out once you have given your friends, family, and the mailman and gardener copies of your books for gifts. Now you can actually send folks who may have never found you on their OWN search for your work! Obviously we can’t ALL hope to have a sports dinner to make a speech at, but if you HAVE read any of my other books, this is the concept of the elevator speech. You need to develop a short (2 to 3 LINE) reply to “so what do YOU do” or “Well I never knew you were a published author.”

    If you have an introduction or conclusion that you can insert a GREAT all purpose story into that’s even BETTER. R you want to hit one out of the park, make a dedication page and put it on there. I have one student who is a pastor and he quoted ANOTHER pastor on his dedication page, the quote he used is SO famous EVERYONE wants a copy of it, so he points them to his book, NOW people are real curious to see how it all pans out. Pretty neat EH?

    But again, this is just one or two new ideas to use, the elevator speech is a must, because BEFORE the book comes out everyone who’ll be asking what it’s about. Prepare yourself if you try and give a blow by blow diatribe you will get a LOT of negative feedback. So if you give them something that no one can really argue with, especially if it’s something that will leave them wanting more…..

    I can hear the folks cranking up their wordprocessors now, “But J, that’s only working one on one, I’ll NEVER get my book out to the masses.” Well yes and no, if you develop you ‘tag line’ and you are only using it to insert into the occasional conversation or the stranger that asks what your book is about (no, I’m not selling buttons that say “Read my book now, Ask me How!”), then yes you will be talking about your one book for quite some time. But if your tag line, or ‘elevator speech’ or whatever you want to label it, can be inserted into other areas as well.

    Remember that twitter account that you tied to your facebook posting? You do use a signature line in your emails and forum posts right? Just as important, what else are you doing to promote your book? I’m going to make a statement that many folks will NOT believe but over the next few days you will see it come true, there are dozens, if not hundreds of people within 15 miles of where you’re sitting right now, that are DYING for someone to come along and say I have something that you can talk about. Do you have: Talk Radio? Libraries? Service Organizations? High Schools or Universities? Toastmaster Groups? In your town?

    The other day I typed service club and my city in a search engine and came up with over 37 pages of names addresses and phone numbers, not web pages, TYPED SINGLE SPACED PAGES.

    Check back later and ‘ll tell you whats next…

     

    Keep on reading and for heavens sake, keep writing…

     

     

    Category author, blog, book, NON Fiction, NON Fiction How To, print, publish, resources, Whats NEW | Tags: | No Comments

  3. Alternatives to Traditional Promotion

    May 8, 2012 by dbo355446115

    When last we saw our heroes they were exploring the ideas of Promotion as though marketing a box of fish, at least that’s how it was described to me by one reader. So how else could you use you newly found magic to entice others to be interested in your book? Well first off some folks would promote the idea that no one really cares about your book but you. While that may be true in some sense, it may also be said, in the same vein that no one really cares whether you wake up tomorrow or not. It really depends on how you look at your book and its audience.

    For example, if you ask me today how many books I wrote last year I will tell you four, yet if you go to Amazon and pull me up by name you will see THREE. So either I’m not telling the truth or…. My fourth book was immediately bought by a private organization with exclusive distribution rights for the first 12 months. What’s that mean in plain English? That even if you wanted to, unless you went through a specific company you can’t buy my book for another 5 months. Most authors or aspiring authors would look at that and go, “You’re nuts!” and in some cases they may be correct. However, riddle me this, if you could re write your forward and afterward of a book to specifically aim it at one company or group of people and were guaranteed that someone ELSE would pay to MARKET your book to a group of over 1 MILLION people world wide would it be worth not seeing it on Amazon for a year?

    Again, the answer is a resounding MAYBE. If the company asking for this right was asking a ridiculously LOW sum of money for your book, or you have an extremely HIGH ego, than maybe not. BUT, if you were approached by a company that said that last year they sold over 450,000 books every month, through a private label book club, would that make it more interesting? Most folks would JUMP at that kind of a deal, but I know there are still a few folks in the back asking,”What’s MY cut?” To which I answer, “If its only $1 a copy is that enough?” I mean REALLY let’s just get greedy! But let’s be legitimate, if your book retails at $20 a copy, but due to discounts and commissions they want to offer you only $8 a copy, is THAT enough? Well let’s see what Mr. Calculator has to say about THAT.

    450,000 books cost $3.73 INCL shipping/ each total cost

    = $1,678,500.00

    You are going to be PAID $8 per book

    = $3,600,000.00

    I don’t even KNOW how to calculate taxes like that, but lets say you owe uncle Sam 40% (you have a REALLY bad tax attorney) you get to KEEP =

    = $ 2,160000.00

    I would be willing to give up my self publishing rights for TWO years for a deal like that! Now, please, although these figures are based on actual ‘estimates’ that’s all they are, part of my deal with the company is that they pay all upfront costs, now they know how much my books cost, and in return they don’t have to pay me, until after the year is over. It’s still a pretty good deal. Now I know I’m going to get a few hundred emails asking about this company, and all I am going to tell you is this, almost ANY company would allow you this kind of deal.

    I have a friend and mentor who is a professional trainer, he just so happens to have written a book. Now because he did this through a “friend” and didn’t use our method, he doesn’t get to keep 60% of his books sale, however, every time he goes in for a training event he charges the company he is training $50 a head for “supplies” and one of those supplies is a copy of his book. So he’s doing what he would be doing anyway, he gets his book out, he gets top dollar for it, and best of all, at what point are folks MOST interested in buying one of YOUR books with THEIR money? After they have gotten to know you, well spend 8 hours in a classroom and you tend to get to know a guy. My mentor says that not only does he get $50 for supplies but then he sells additional books (that he DIDN’T write) at the end of the training and often earns more than his fee.

    So how does this effect you oh intrepid writer? Well again we come back to the question of why did you write your book in the first place? If it was a vanity or family project than you don’t worry about it, you’re not looking for wide distribution anyway. However if you wrote it because you have something, knowledge technique something that you believe can benefit the world than what you need is to go back to your niche research, remember how we whittled down our subject/came up with our title etc. Sift through it and seek out individuals and organizations that could/would/should benefit from your information. Then start some communication with them. Don’t be a rabid fan, and don’t climb all over them with, “Hey I wrote a book you’re going to love it its gonnachangeyourlifeandmakeyouazillionaireovernight!

    Folks will immediately be hitting the delete key.

    Instead, oh look at the clock on the wall….

     

    Keep on reading and for heavens sake keep on writing.

    Category author, market, NON Fiction, NON Fiction How To, print, publish, resources, website, Whats NEW, write | Tags: | 2 Comments