Interview with Ella Curry | Sound Authors Radio

December 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is August 29th, it’s the anniversary of many things today but of course this week has been very interesting as it was the anniversary of women’s right to vote and the I have a dream speech yesterday. My next guest on the show is the host of the black authors’ network radio and has done many other things, including web design and other creations. Welcome to the show Ella Curry.

Ella Curry: Hello, how are you?

Dr. Kent: Very good. Give me a nutshell of what you do for the world.

Ella Curry: Okay; I’m the CEO and president of EDC Creations and that’s a graphic design firm in Maryland. I’m also the founder of the Literary Society Bookclub and I’m the founder of the black authors network radio show. That pretty much covers all 24 hours of my day!

Dr. Kent: I’ll bet it does. Now tell me a little bit about how important to you is this week in history?

Ella Curry: This week in history is very important for me because I guess you can tell from my accent that I’m from the south. My family worked years in the civil rights movement and actually we have four generations to watch Barack Obama accept the nomination to run for the presidency last night and that was phenomenal because two generations were very active in civil rights and never thought they would be living to see this day.

Dr. Kent: I watched the entire speech last night and it was so well choreographed with the fireworks and the music beforehand and just it was amazing to see that every time they panned to faces, everybody in the audience, all of those thousands of people were just transfixed watching the stage.

Ella Curry: Yes, I think everyone there and I don’t even think it was the décor; it was just soaking in the fact that there is this many people here to see an African American man accept this kind of honor. I think they were just really soaking in the vibe, the feel of the event. I don’t even think it had anything to do with the glamour of the stage. It was the message that he was bringing about change.

Dr. Kent: People really had tears in their eyes, it was good to see. Now you’ve got some radio shows, you work with this graphic design firm; what drives you?

Ella Curry: I have a love for literature. I’ve been reading ever since I was a small kid and I have a collection that’s phenomenal of books. And I worked at the ### Bookstore before they went out of business as a buyer and a lot of people submitted their books to the bookstore for review or sought placement on our bookshelves. I was the head buyer’s executive assistant and it was my job to turn these people down. I wasn’t allowed to tell them why, I was supposed to send out a form letter. It was heart-wrenching because a lot of times they would email me back because I was the only contact they had or they would call me and it’s like I had just killed their dream. So I turned my marketing company around and focused primarily on the literary world so I could help these people see where they went wrong.

Dr. Kent: Give me an example of that.

Ella Curry: We had a certain protocol for submitting books. You had to download our submission form and you had to send all the required items and one of those items was a professionally prepared press kit. A lot of people never researched ### bookstores to know that we had guidelines on submission so when they didn’t follow them, that said that they didn’t really take interest in what they were trying to put out. We didn’t spend a lot of time researching for them and another thing was a lot of the people that submitted books didn’t know what a press kit was or didn’t take the time to prepare one and that said a lot about them. They weren’t industry savvy. So with EDC Creations I started reaching out to authors to teach them how to come across as a professional industry savvy individual.

Dr. Kent: Have you ever thought of getting in there yourself and writing a book?

Ella Curry: You know I don’t think I have the heart to write one. Now that I’m on the promotions side of it and I’ve been on the retail dividing side of it. Its kind of a tough industry, I don’t think I ever want to write one, because it’s not writing that’s hard, it’s actually promoting it and getting it out to the reading public.

Dr. Kent: I’d like to sit here and talk some more about Barack Obama if that’s okay with you. I feel like the whole world should be abuzz about this thing and I was actually kind of amused. I always watch CNN and CNN sometimes has a little bit conservative approach but last night they were just like kids in the candy store, they loved it. I really loved that too. What network did you watch?

Ella Curry: I watched I think Fox network. I watched it on channel 7 so I’m almost certain that’s Fox News Network.

Dr. Kent: Was it pretty much the same?

Ella Curry: We were a few minutes ahead of CNN for some reason because I was watching it and my family in Alabama was on the phone and we were all watching it and it came on here in DC before it did there.

Dr. Kent: Wow. When he talks about a message of change, they said he really needs to and if we thought about Barack Obama as an author with that incredible speech, did he pass the grade? Did he fit the bill?

Ella Curry: I think so and I’d read his other books and he has a new one that’s going to release. So I think he did incredible. He did a fantastic job because there was some doubt in a few peoples minds if he had the political maturity to hold this position. He came across very confident and the one thing right now in this society we need to hear is that somebody understands us and where we are. The one thing that stood out the most for me and it almost had me teary eyed was when he said his mother was lying in the bed dying of cancer and she was on the phone fighting with the insurance company. That broke my heart because there’s a lot of people in the south, that’s where I’m from and know the most about, that have no healthcare. And a lot of them die from tragic death because they don’t have money to get their medications or to have surgeries that they need and that kind of thing, so that was what brought tears to my eyes. I’ve had people dear to me to die because they didn’t have healthcare.

Dr. Kent: It was such a moving thing for him to say in a public speech like that. I can’t imagine not tearing up talking about personal stuff like that about myself. I was really moved by the speech, I’m really moved by a candidate. I don’t usually come out and talk about it on the show, but it was really a special night last night. I feel like my grandchildren are going to be watching that speech.

Ella Curry: I had my 13 year old watching it and she was very nonchalant because she’s grown up in a time and place where there’s not much racism in her life. She’s not affected by it or nothing tragic has been brought to her attention about racism. She attends school here in Maryland and African Americans and Caucasians are the minority in the school. There is all sorts of races, I’m serious, it’s all the Asians, India, Latinos from different countries, so she is not really, this doesn’t mean a lot to her now at 13 because she’s grown up with it. She doesn’t see black or white, she doesn’t see any of the different prejudices that I see at 43. I’m thinking that when she looks back at this at a later date as an adult, it’s going to have a significant bearing on her at that time.

Dr. Kent: Oh I think so. You also have black author’s network radio so it is important to you to focus in on black authors. It’s fascinating in the industry there are a lot of authors, something like hundreds of thousands every year. How is it to focus on black authors?

Ella Curry: Well you know when I started black authors network radio, I wanted to give the self-published and the new authors a platform because the publishing houses they get a lot of energy, they have a lot of publicity, but I wanted to give the people who were just entering the industry a fighting chance to get their work out there. Over the past month, we don’t always have just African American authors on the show. We have American community leaders, educators, and people in the media, but we also bring in people that aren’t African American because we need to know their perspective, their take on what we are saying. a lot of times with black people, we blame everything that’s happened to us on the government or white people or anybody but ourselves and a lot of times when we have shows like radio shows, we beat up other races and the government but no one is ever there to speak out for the other side. So doing my show, I sometimes bring on non-African Americans so they can stand up and answer these challenges.

Dr. Kent: It is such a fascinating time. I grew up partially in the south in Louisiana and Shreveport and it was such a divided city, and just a horrible thing to see how divided people were. Now I live out on long island and I teach here at the university. It’s so diverse and again the kids don’t see a different race when they look at each other but where I grew up in Louisiana you sure did. It was a big issue. What’s your take on that; the difference between north and south with respect to race?

Ella Curry: Let me tell you, back in the day my mother was the first African American woman in my county that openly dated a white man so I have to say my childhood was very difficult. Black people didn’t like us and white people didn’t like us. Where I lived there was a clear divide. There was white people in their section and black people in their section. And I don’t care how affluent the black person was; they didn’t cross that line and live anywhere but in our section. So I had issues that arised with the KKK and a number of other things in our community. So I grew up I have to admit quite a bit racist. I had some hard opinions about white people, but they were formed due to things that I had been through.

I worked in the textile industry as a manager and I was one of the few black people to be a manager. I am sure I was not paid half what my white counterparts were paid. So I had reasons to be racist but I’ve moved to Maryland and I brought my daughter and my child introduced me to another way of thinking. She now has white friends and Indian friends and I didn’t want to teach racism, I didn’t want to teach her to have these hard feelings I had. So these people started coming into my home and therefore I had to meet their parents. So now I seen that some of them had the same challenges that I had.

Dr. Kent: That’s what’s so fascinating about last night looking at all the faces watching Barack Obama, you know?

Ella Curry: I’m now I don’t guess you don’t really call Maryland the north, but it’s northern for me coming from Alabama. Its different mindset where I’m at now. My neighbors are its like I live in the United Nations. I have people from all nationalities living in my community and I have to intermingle with all sorts of races because of my child. I don’t have any of those hard feelings I had when I was in Alabama because I was continuously exposed. It was in my face every day that people didn’t like me because I was black. But here I feel like I stand a better chance here. I own my own company, three companies and they are very productive and we offer a lot to the community. I could never run the business I run here in my hometown in Alabama. And that’s sad.

Dr. Kent: I think that’s what I see a great deal of hope in Barack Obama. What do you see possibly happening if he’s elected president? I sure think that he will be but what do you see happening for healthcare and for human rights and those things?

Ella Curry: The main thing with healthcare, he may not be able to get the universal healthcare passed, and I’ll be okay with that. But if we can just get help, supplements for people who cant get their medicines. If he can just get insurance; you know during Hillary Clintons reign, she got the first kids and that most of all the kids in the rural America was able to have health insurance. It didn’t pay everything, it was based on your income, but it was more than we had. The kids were being taken care of.

If Barack Obama can get something on that level, lovely. But the one thing I see that’s going to change for the African American community if he’s elected president is this: All African American kids now have hope. Our young black men can see another black man as president, that means that anything is possible and that’s the most powerful thing for me is now we have young black men in droves registering to vote. They have hope now, they can see it happening.

Dr. Kent: I sure do hope if the whole African American population comes and votes, man that’s going to be a wash. It would be amazing. Even in Florida I heard that if the African American population comes out, that might decide Florida.

Ella Curry: If he gets that crew, that’s phenomenal.

Dr. Kent: Well this has been a real honor speaking with you. We can find you on the web, the marketing work you do and the design at edccreations.com. Where else can we find out about you?

Ella Curry: Actually its edc-creations.com and you can also find my work, my book club and the literary work at the sankofaliterarysociety.org.

Dr. Kent: I really hope you continue to do what you’ve been doing for authors. It’s a rough world out there for authors and of course hosting a radio show is the best thing in the world so I love that you’re doing that as well. Gosh, I sure hope Barack Obama wins this election.

Ella Curry: Oh most definitely; he’s going to win. And when he does, I’m going to put it on the front page of the Sankofa literary society – all over.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Ella Curry. We can find out about her on the web at edc-creations.com or sankofaliterarysociety.org. Talk to you soon, thanks for being on the show.

Ella Curry: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: My next guest after the break is going to be Leonard L. Berry. He’s the co-author of Management Lessons from the Mayo Clinic: Inside one of the world’s most admired service organizations. There’s a lot of insight in that book, especially how to run businesses and so forth. Come on back for that.

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Interview with Paul Kingsman | Sound Authors Radio

December 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is 8-8-08; it’s an Olympic Friday. Tonight is the day everything starts at the Olympics in Beijing. I’m excited to watch, my whole family will be watching. It’s a real tradition for so many of us to turn on the TV and see all of the athletes win these medals. It’s a lucky day for the Chinese; 8-8-08, and a lot of the athletes are hoping it will be a lucky day for them. I’m very lucky today to have a man named Paul Kingsman on the line today and he is going to give us some insight about China and about the Beijing games. He competed in 1984 in Los Angeles and again in Seoul where he won a medal. He’s from New Zealand and now lives in California and he travels the world as a professional speaker and executive coach. Welcome to the show Paul Kingsman.

Paul Kingsman: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your Olympic adventure. I need to know what did it feel like for you?

Paul Kingsman: Well 1988 was the year that I was really focused on although you mentioned I went to the 1984 Olympics. I went there when I was very young. In fact I was 17 in 1984 and it’s amazing. the Olympics is such a huge event, its amazing how much you learn the first time and I made a number of mistakes and made sure I was focused on what needed to happen the second time around. Fortunately I got another invite and in 1988 we laid out a great plan. My coach and I did a plan that we believed would win an Olympic medal in the 200 meter backstroke.

So I had a goal time that I’d set to hit bearing in mind that you have no guarantees with that particular time to win a medal but then going to Seoul I was well prepared and was just a fantastic event. Obviously in Seoul after the 1984 Olympic boycott and the 1980 Olympic boycott it was the first real Olympics for 12 years. So everyone knew, I mean it was just a buzz throughout the village that this was the year to really come out and do something. It didn’t matter if you were an Olympic medalist previously or whether you held the world record. No one cared.

The Olympics are the kind of event where everyone there recognizes that you’ve got a front on the day and reputations come from nothing. You still have to produce it on the day. So yeah we had a great time and I won my Olympic medal by four one hundredths of a second. It was a very close race.

Dr. Kent: Do you watch the Olympics in a different way? When you see a television broadcast, when you see a race live, are you watching the same way a writer reads a book after they’ve written one?

Paul Kingsman: It’s funny because the first couple of Olympics after I retired; I retired from swimming in 1990 and the first couple of Olympics I didn’t even watch. I had learned about the performances naturally of our team from New Zealand but I didn’t really get tuned into them. It was one of them even being in Sydney Australia quite close to where I was living in new Zealand but mainly it was so fresh and the experience was so fresh that to know what those athletes were going through and not to be able to take part in it I found quite difficult and so the first Olympics that I watched and really got into was when I came back to the US in 2002 and watched the winter Olympics. I just loved them and actually fell in love with them and I like the winter Olympics better than the summer ones.

This time around I’m going to be watching, in fact even watching it this morning you get a little emotional because you know what these people are going through, you know the pressure, you know the distractions that are there and now its coming down to the final stretch so I’m enjoying seeing the coverage that I’ve already seen this morning.

Dr. Kent: What’s amazing to me is it’s almost like this holy space. It hasn’t been tainted by professional sports too much. These are people that give everything and for what? It’s a day of seeing that one top of the world medal. What drives a person like you to really put everything into this? I was a bit of an athlete growing up but what does it take to push at that extra level? You’re always going into that zone of extra effort and exhaustion. What does it take to be an Olympian?

Paul Kingsman: Well it starts with passion and I’ll come back to that point but you made a great point as far as not really being tainted. I remember in 1988 when they introduced tennis to the Olympics. They had it at the previous games but was starting to grow in popularity and speaking to tennis players and even some of the tri-athletes, their response was I don’t think tennis really needs the Olympics. They have their four match tournaments and then they go on after the Olympics into another million dollar event and earn more money in that one tournament than some of the Olympic athletes will ever see in their lifetime.

So it was interesting to see how the other professional coaches responded to actually being in the Olympics. Some of them were kind of a little standoffish wondering how they feared some of the other athletes were going to receive them. So its interesting hearing a different perspective and what drives a person to get there is firstly passion. It’s not so much these days about finding what you’re passionate about it although it’s important. The biggest issue today facing people is actually protecting what their passionate about because there are so many distractions out there now in our environment that its actually being able to focus on something for the long haul. Obviously as an Olympian you’ve done this.

Any person who gets to the Olympic games have focused on something, have locked onto something over the long haul, have done the hard yards and have still kept that passion, have still kept that desire, you know white hot every day. So that’s the first thing I think that one of the points that sets Olympians apart from other people is that they keep that passion first and foremost every day and all their actions are predicated upon that one thing. Its not that things get done if there’s a chance it’s that the priorities are the things that need to get done. That’s what these athletes have taken care of.

Dr. Kent: Let’s say you just arrived in Beijing last week, you’re in the middle of China, a place you’ve never been before. You’re a first time Olympian at age 17, what’s going through your head?

Paul Kingsman: Well I can tell you what was going through some of the heads and what shouldn’t be going through your head. First of all what’s going through your head and what should be going through your mind is I was doing this since when I was nine years old and now is my chance and I need to make sure I don’t blow it. I need to make sure I don’t blow all those years of training in the last couple of days.

For instance in the 1984 Olympics I was young and a little silly and you go from training for six hours every day all of a sudden into a tape situation where you’re only going into the pool maybe ½ hour 45 minutes a day. You’re body’s not burning all those calories and all of a sudden you got a 24 hour buffet in the games village with everything imaginable. So very quickly in 1984 I stuck on probably four or five pounds in five days just through lack of discipline.

What’s key now is for the athletes to realize it’s going to be hot, it’s a dry muggy atmosphere, we need to keep off our feet, we need to be staying indoors, and so if you combine the fact that now you’re tapering, you’re not training six hours a day, you’re just touching the water. At the same time you have to train yourself to lie still and rest when your body is feeling like its ready to bounce off the walls. It’s very difficult and so you’ve got to be very disciplined to handle that and stay focused and avoid those distractions.

Dr. Kent: What event was it when you won your bronze and take us through it? Were you expecting it? Was that your goal? What happened?

Paul Kingsman: My goal time was to swim a time of two minutes. When I was nine years old I saw the 1976 Olympics and I actually wrote down that I wanted to go to the Olympics and win a medal. So I had that goal right from when I was nine. By the time 1988 came around I was 21 and I had been swimming over here at Cal Berkley in northern California for a couple of years and so I’d been watching the world rankings. I knew who was doing what and our goals was to swim that two minute event but there were no guarantees.

I think that’s something that you need to understand going into an event especially like the Olympics. There are just no guarantees and anything can happen. Any one of the finalists can come out and win a medal but we believed that two minutes would be good enough to win a medal. So that was the objective. I was racing the first day of the swimming competition. I marched in the opening ceremonies because it was six days before I swam. So during those five days you’re trying to get out of the environment, you don’t want to go along to the swimming pool to watch and it’s a tough one because you hear about team spirit but at the same time if you go along to the pool, the atmosphere is such that it just saps you.

Over those five days I was very measured with everything I did. I swum my heat in the morning and made the final to come back and swim at night. Then I rested during the day and that’s very difficult because your body is still very tired, its sore from the morning swim and you know now you’re in the top eight in the world. A lot of people at that stage will back off and say hey top eight in the world is pretty good. A lot of other people won’t do it and so that’s when they settle at that point for a lesser performance than what they could do. So I came back that night to swim. I didn’t feel great when I was warming up and that’s something else these athletes will have to battle.

You have to plan for years and years before the actual point and things just don’t feel as magical as what you’re expecting them to feel. But I got through that point. I qualified seventh in the final so I was out in lane one. It was a four lap race, the world record holder, the top three guys went through the first lap in under world record pace and watching the footage you can see the video on my website they were way ahead of me. At the end of the second lap I turned in fifth place so it was, you know you’re starting to get tired, you’re starting to get sore but we’d prepared for that third lap especially. Down the third lap I still remember that point in the race and you’ll see the athletes go through that point when you watch the Olympics.

The question hits you, what are you going to do now? And you ask it and you answer it in a split second. The body is fatigued and you got to make that call. Are you going to go and just take the pain for the next 40 seconds or are you going to hold off and have a decent swim. And I remember thinking, just go. Just go. When I turned off the third turn, as soon as you hit either end of the pool you hit the touch pads and the score board lights up and because I was out in lane one I was at the top of the scoreboard so when I pushed off the third turn I accidentally saw I was in fourth spot and I remember thinking someone’s going to die but its not going to be me. Just keep going and going.

I remember seeing the first guy hit the wall, I saw the scoreboard light up which meant somebody won the gold and then saw the scoreboard light up again so the second place was gone. In coming into that wall on the last stroke you’ll break your fingers, you’ll break your hand, and you don’t care. I remember lunging and just hitting and looking up and seeing the scoreboard and looking up and seeing lane one P. Kingsman… 3 and it registered that I’d won a medal. The feeling of excitement and then just exhaustion. It was like somebody dropped a piano on you, just this heavy hit of fatigue. They took the three of us out to get us ready for the medal presentation and one of the guys from radio new Zealand came bursting into the room where I was at.

He told me then that I had won that medal by four one hundredths of a second. When I’m talking to large groups of people you just hear this huge sigh and a whole bunch of people are sitting there just shaking their heads because basically what I had done was swim for 13 years. I hit my goal time, which was two minutes and that medal was decided by four one hundredths of a second. So there’s a big commitment to that race and to that medal and that’s what I speak a lot about now is overcoming distractions and staying focused. The reason why is because again if you see the video of my swim, the guy that came fourth to me right at the very end literally on the last three strokes looked across at me. On two of his last three strokes, he was a German swimmer, very talented swimmer but he looked on the last couple of strokes and that cost him easily four one hundredths of a second.

So you see the price of distraction, you see the cost of distraction and we do that in our lives every day. In fact I was talking one time to a group and I had a young student stand up. He said to me, “So what you’re saying is that basically if he hadn’t have looked you wouldn’t have even had a medal.” To which I said, “Yes, that’s exactly right.” And that’s what we do everyday in many different ways. We’re trekking along one path, we know we need to tend to things and we just get distracted. So that’s how I’ve used that story now because I see the price of distraction and for me fortunately it turned out well with a bronze medal in the Olympic Games.

Dr. Kent: Talk a little about your career now. You talked about your speaking and you’re a coach and motivational speaker and you’ve worked with many corporations over these last years. How does this tie into your life plan? You’re such a focused athlete and then you went into corporate America and now you’re speaking. How does all that tie together?

Paul Kingsman: Well when we came back here to the US I got involved in the financial services industry starting at Morgan Stanley and I’ve been speaking since I was 17. I’ve probably been speaking a lot longer than that but started speaking professionally to groups when I was 17 and loved being able to teach groups and talk to people and help them. I always thought if I was 24 years old and I could talk with a 16 year old about different issues in life or swimming issues I’d save that kid eight years of possibly banging his head against the wall. So

I’ve always enjoyed teaching people and having them realize hey, what I did in swimming I did because I had God given talent and that but you also have abilities in different areas. It doesn’t have to be necessarily as glamorous as the Olympics, that’s not the point. The point is whatever you’re going to do, do it well and do it excellently and figure out what’s involved in doing it excellently. It has no relationship to beating anyone. When I’m speaking this is a point that I make. That I never wanted to go into a race doing anything less than to win but I’ve never gone into a race wanting to beat anyone. They’re two different things.

So when I’m talking to people I enjoy talking with them about how to bring out excellence and in today’s culture that is just not going to happen unless you can stay focused and get rid of those distractions. So when I’m talking with groups its normally groups within the financial services industry, but I talk to different business groups all over the country about those very things. They then understand, hey if this is the same thing in business then they realize why I also address the issues in family life. Whether it be careers, whether it be in relationships. It doesn’t matter, the main thing is to keep focused on those things that you really want to see happen in your life and then be prepared to do the work. So that’s how that now fits into what I’m speaking about and talking to various groups about.

Dr. Kent: Now do you have a book?

Paul Kingsman: Currently I’m working on a book. It’s about overcoming distractions and you’ve heard about the book The Law of Attraction? This one is going to be predicated on the Laws of Distraction and how they hinder us and ways to overcome them. Because the people that I’m speaking to out there as soon as I mention distraction, the very first thing they say is boy if you can help me get through this or help me get through the amount of emails I’m bombarded with or help me set up a system where I stay focused everyday on what’s important. How to prioritize properly and follow through.

So that’s the book I’m currently writing. While it will be obviously for the financial services industry, it’s applicable to everyone. Whether it be relative to raising family, bringing up kids, relationship issues, it’s coming back to not getting distracted. How do we avoid getting distracted and in our culture that’s the biggest obstacle today. Because companies are getting better and better at getting their messages out and our attention spans are getting reduced all the time. It’s not their fault for advertising or anything like that; it’s our fault for not being disciplined. So those are the kind of things I’m going to be dealing with when the book comes out.

Dr. Kent: I find it fascinating to speak to an Olympian of course you always get that but I’m curious about a person like Michael Phelps. He’s gone from sort of no one knew who he was until last Olympics and he’s kind of come in and out of the spotlight. How does a person like Michael Phelps be a celebrity while at the same time still be at the top of their game?

Paul Kingsman: That’s a great question and fortunately with what we’re seeing so far in Michael Phelps is we’re seeing that happen. I was watching him interviewed this morning and he has tremendous poise which is something you don’t find or rather something you find in athletes that sets them apart. Guys like Tiger Woods have it. Ali was another one that had that poise, that presence of mind and that high level of self awareness. When I’m coaching people and coaching groups those are some big key areas and Phelps clearly has poise. He’s aware of his environment, he’s aware of his situation, but just like Tiger Woods, its hey this is only going to have so much influence on me because first and foremost this is what I’m about.

I’m about swimming fast and I’m about getting the job done. So he hasn’t lost that. You can tell that by how he’s speaking. You can tell it by how he’s focusing on things. Obviously people, it’s a tough one because when people talk about winning eight gold medals he’s in a tough position because if he wins eight gold medals he’s done what everybody expected him to do. If he wins seven gold medals and a silver medal, he missed. So that’s a tough situation to be in.

Having said that, I think he’d be the last to see it that way. I think he’s a very focused athlete and I’m hoping he has a dream performance in these Olympics. But I mean it’s incredible to think if he wins eight gold medals over two Olympics he would have 16 Olympic medals, which is phenomenal in this day and age.

Dr. Kent: A question for someone like you, I’m speaking with Paul Kingsman of course and you have a bronze medal. There’s such a difference between I guess the media coverage in this country and in other countries. In one of the Olympics I was fortunate enough to be in the Middle East and there was no commentary. We got to watch the Olympics and there was zero commentary. It was uncommon because I got to hear the actual announcers at the events and there’s so much stigma attached to these events. Oh, will Phelps win all of the gold and yet a bronze medal. If I had a bronze medal that would shape my life just as it in some way shaped yours.

Paul Kingsman: I preach like that and that is the label of competition at the Olympics. When you go to the Olympics its an historic event and then to go to that next level up where you become an Olympic finalist and the top eight in the world and then an Olympic medalist which very people do and then obviously a gold medalist, yeah it’s a special thing and that was one of the aspects I did appreciate it a lot more when I came to the US. There tended to be a lot more recognition over here than probably in new Zealand even though it’s a smaller country of the fact that winning an Olympic medal.

So yeah, when you compete against the best in the world, I’ll never forget the feeling at the opening ceremony where they say “ladies and gentlemen, gathered before you are the greatest athletes on the planet” and that’s like whoa! And I’m one of them and that suddenly starts to sink on. Hang on we’re talking about the best athletes in the world here. So yeah it’s a big deal but you’ve got to remember too that once your events finished the next day, you’re a normal person and life goes on and the sun shines and away you go again.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little more about what you do everyday with speaking and coaching and how we can find out more about what you do online?

Paul Kingsman: Typically with speaking I go in and speak to sales teams or speak on awards trips or speak to companies that are looking for ways to stay focused, to overcome those distractions and I talk a lot about passion. Obviously protecting it and I talk about priorities. People can say they’re passionate about stuff but how do you prioritize and then follow those things? Then I talk about practice. What does practice look like for you? What does it need to look like for you?

For an Olympian it’s a six hour day and its hard work but what does practice need to look like for you? Then we get to performance. What happens on the day of performance when you sit in front of a prospect that you want to make a client, when you get to pitch for a big deal out there? What’s going through your mind on that day of the performance and how do you cope with those kinds of things happening? I speak to groups about that and some people that specifically want to look at coaching and say look, these are my priorities and I’m struggling to keep on track, or these are my priorities and I want help and I want assistance and so that’s how I work when I’m coaching.

My website is paulkingsman.com. That’s the site and it has actually the video footage, the Olympics swim on there. If you watch closely right at the end you’ll see the guy in lane four actually look across at me. So that’s what I’m involved in doing now and I’m loving it.

Dr. Kent: It’s so amazing that four hundredths of a second plays such a big role in your life.

Paul Kingsman: It’s a great point and it’s a point often that people make when I’m speaking is that it changed my life. When I think if I was five one hundredths of a second slower that medal would now be in Europe and life would be very different. But having said that, I didn’t realize that guy actually looked until only four or five years ago when I was watching the video of the race.

Now it makes a big difference and I wonder and this is what drives me when I’m speaking, I wonder how much of a difference distraction has made on other peoples lives and that’s what I really want to help them overcome because I’m sure when I meet the people that I meet out there. You see incredibly talented people that could go on and do great things, it’s just a matter of avoiding those distractions and staying focused.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been an honor speaking with Paul Kingsman. He’s got a book coming out at some point about the laws of distraction and he has a website online paulkingsman.com. I’m really excited for the Olympics and I guess you must be too.

Paul Kingsman: Oh I am yeah. I’m looking forward to watching. I think there will be a few late nights and a few early mornings.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, well it’s been such an honor and come on back after the break we’re going to speak to the musician Marcus Rill. Have a wonderful day Paul.

Paul Kingsman: It’s been a real pleasure, you too, thank you.

Dr. Kent: Come on back in just a minute, we’re going to listen to a little of one or Marcus Rill’s songs called Straighter Road. Come on back to hear him talk about it.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Motivation, Sports, TRANSCRIPTS, Inspiration, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Business, PODCAST

Interview with Stephanie Chandler | Sound Authors Radio

November 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest on the show is Stephanie Chandler. She’s got a book that’s all about being an author and building an online platform. It’s called The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books. Welcome to the show.

Stephanie Chandler: Thank you so much.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about what your mission is. Of course you’ve got a website devoted to writers and things like that. Give me a sound bite about what you do.

Stephanie Chandler: Well I wrote the book on how to build an online platform because that’s exactly the process that I used when I ventured into publishing back in 2003. I had wanted to write a business start up guide and I was getting doors closed in my face left and right. A wonderful agent called me and said he loved my work, that I needed to be reaching tens of thousands of people. And I said isn’t that kind of putting the cart before the horse? Once I publish a book I’ll be invited to speak and he said, well its kind of your problem to solve. You got to figure out how to build your platform.

I didn’t want to travel extensively and I thought what’s the quickest way I can do that and I launched a website targeted towards my audience, which was entrepreneurs. That was businessinfoguide.com and I started working on building traffic and driving people to the site. I was publishing a monthly newsletter. The first one incidentally went out to eight people and after several years I have thousands of subscribers. I self published my first book The Business Start up Checklist and Planning Guide and it started selling a full two months before it was in print. I thought, okay I get it; this is why they want you to have a platform - so that you have an audience for your book.

Dr. Kent: What’s the big secret? How do you create? Of course you certainly have connections already and to a certain extent because you had founded several websites, is that correct?

Stephanie Chandler: Well I did that because I wanted to build a platform. So what I did was I thought about who’s my target audience for my book? And I wanted to write business and marketing books. So the first site businessinfoguide.com in an effort to bring in an audience. So what happened after I self published the first book, I had built a high traffic website.

So when I wanted to publish my second book, I sent out a whopping two proposals to two different publishers and I had a contract in 30 days with John Wiley and Sons for my second book, which was From Entrepreneur to Intrapreneur. And I would argue that they took me because I came to the table with a platform and it was a beautiful thing.

Dr. Kent: I’ve heard a lot of people tell that the easiest way to get published these days is to prove that your book is already selling self published and then publishers will pick you up.

Stephanie Chandler: Definitely and there’s so many opportunities with the internet and for authors to excel. You’re doing this with your radio show, blogs are just so hot. They are a wonderful opportunity to build an audience and so what happens is you want to go get published with a major publisher and you can say, hey I have tens of thousands of people visiting my blog every month or receiving my newsletter or listening to my radio show and that is probably the quickest way to get publishing success.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about the book itself; The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform. How many secrets do you actually reveal?

Stephanie Chandler: I reveal it all, I have nothing to hide. I’m all about sharing what I know and in addition to that I interviewed several successful authors who have used the internet as well to build their platform and that was really helpful. There’s some really great people in there like Dan Kennedy who’s really well known in the business world and great stories in there about how they used the internet to really build a platform to sell more books and really build a career around your book. There’s other ways you can do that like selling e-books and information products and those types of things.

Dr. Kent: It’s a complicated thing I guess for most authors is they might not be as savvy as you seem to be with businessinfoguide.com for example. It looks pretty complicated for your average author.

Stephanie Chandler: It looks complicated but I built that site on a $20 template I got on the internet. I taught myself how to use Microsoft FrontPage and I built that site from the ground up just with useful content. My goal is to share as much information as I can and really am a big believer of giving away free information. That’s how you build an audience, that’s how you build a fan base. So I share everything I know as much as I can and that’s what brings people back and inspires them to sign up for my newsletter and my programs that I offer.

Dr. Kent: Were you in business before all of this started?

Stephanie Chandler: No I was in the Silicon Valley for 11 years. I got an ulcer and decided to leave that behind and I moved to Sacramento and I wanted to write novels quite frankly. I opened a bookstore in Sacramento and in that process I really fell in love with small business marketing and wanted to help other people do what I did, realize there was life after corporate America. So I put a staff in my store and instead of writing novels I started writing for business magazines. I started writing my own book and like I said building content for business info guide. So I really just learned through trial and error, studying how other people do it. I’m an avid reader and my goal is always to share with other people what I’ve learned.

Dr. Kent: When’s your first novel going to be coming out?

Stephanie Chandler: You know what? I’m not even touching novels and it was an accidental discovery of a passion I didn’t know I had and really educating small business owners is wonderfully rewarding and I think I’d be a very frustrated novelist. I’m grateful I figured it out.

Dr. Kent: Do you get on the road with John Wiley & Sons or with Quill Driver Press? Did they put you out there?

Stephanie Chandler: I have to say they really don’t, most publishers aren’t going to a lot of the marketing. They certainly have booked me some radio gigs and things like that. I definitely take the initiative myself to market my book and I’m speaking at writer’s conferences and things like that. But I think that’s true no matter what your situation; whether you’re self published or you have a major publisher backing you. It’s really up to you to be successful and if you want a long term career as an author, you have to take the initiative to promote yourself. And that’s what I also talk about in the book, ways to do that. Through the internet from the comfort of your home or office.

Dr. Kent: There’s something like 300,000 to 400,000 books a year in this country. There are many aspects to publishing but how do people make themselves stand out? Is it going into another market or finding their target market or making sure their cover is nice? What’s the first step for an author?

Stephanie Chandler: I think its finding your market and I think it’s with a website. Any author who doesn’t have a website is really missing an opportunity and like I said the blogs are really wonderful right now. If you’ve got something to say, get on there and have fun with your blog. We’re writers; we should have no problem coming up with content. A blog doesn’t need to be a big deal. You write one to three paragraphs several times a week and you can schedule those out so you can sit down on Sunday night and write your three posts for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of that week and you’re done. And you really start to build an audience, but to me the number one key is to build your web presence. That’s the quickest way.

Having owned a bookstore, which I eventually sold, I met authors every day who were out pounding the pavement looking to do book signing events. That’s all great but the average author sells eight copies of a book at a book signing event. So you’ve got to do a lot of book signing events to really make that pay off. If you get on the internet, you can do things like virtual book tours, you can do internet radio shows; you start getting seen and heard everywhere and you’re going to have no problem selling your books and getting the attention of the publishers.

Dr. Kent: So what is your next big project?

Stephanie Chandler: I am working on my fourth book which is all about small business growth and my goal in my new book is to write the books I want to read. So for several years I’ve been looking for a book on how to take my business to the next level and it doesn’t exist, the books that I want to read. So that’s what I’m working on and I’m really excited about it. I’ve been working with my agent, I have an agent now and hopefully we’ll see that in 2009. We’re working with several publishers to see who’s going to invest with it.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a real honor speaking with you Stephanie Chandler, the author of The Authors Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books and clearly she’s done a great job herself of leveraging the internet.

Stephanie Chandler: Thank you it’s an honor to be here today.

Dr. Kent: Thanks, it’s been fun being with you. My next guest on the show is Yolanda Renee, author of Murder, Madness and Love. Come on back for that, it will be fun to talk with her.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Business, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Susan Benjamin | Sound Authors Radio

November 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, June 20^th, the first day of spring. It’s an exciting day outside and it’s an exciting day in here as well. I have four guests on the show today. My last guest will be the author Jeanie Ransom with her book What Do Parents Do When You’re Not At Home; I got the clever title. We’ve got Raymond Benson on the show, an author of the James Bond 007 novels. My musical guest is coming on early today. He’s stepping on an airplane in Canada so we moved him on earlier on the day. His name is Mac Morin, he’s a wonderful piano player and we’re going to speak with him. My first guest is Susan Benjamin. She’s a writer, presenter, speaker and marketing expert, talk radio host, all sorts of things. Her latest book is wonderful; it’s called Managers Answer Book: Practical Answers to Questions Every Manager Asks. Welcome to the show Susan Benjamin.

Susan Benjamin: Hello, how are you?

Dr. Kent: Very good. So tell me a little bit about this guide book. It’s for managers only?

Susan Benjamin: Well it tends to do what a guide book tends to do and hopefully it does. It addresses some of the questions that managers have that generally no one is able to answer. A lot of the times the reason they don’t get the answers they need is that the issues may appear to be soft, may be gray or it may be sensitive so in the book I try to address them and really think too, what do people want to know? And get to that.

Dr. Kent: In the workplace today the role of manager has so much attached to it. What does it mean really?

Susan Benjamin: Well it’s a really weird thing because managers at one time were primarily male and they had a whole lot of power. Essentially everybody did what they said, I mean it was really hierarchical and life went according to plan. The plan wasn’t necessarily a good one. Women couldn’t excel for example, minorities couldn’t excel. It would really depend on the organization of course and there were problems.

A manager can be a pretty smart person but they don’t know everything. That role, that model has really shifted. Now you find that younger people are managing older people, women are managing men, peers are managing each other, which is a whole new interesting little turn of events. And of course as I’m sure you know, the virtual world has taken over. So we have managers managing employees who they never see. Can you imagine the changes in what the manager has to do and the managers relationship with the people involved as well.

Dr. Kent: Let’s talk a little bit about the differences between, you brought up maybe the way things used to be because you talked about women and men, you talked about older and younger. How did it used to be and how is it now?

Susan Benjamin: Well wouldn’t you think or the situation I remember is that in the olden days, long, long ago, that managers were basically men. And there was a really clear style that was hierarchical. If the man said something then everybody would follow suit and do that. Now what’s happened, I believe anyways, is women have brought in a more collaborative style so that if there’s an issue a woman manager is more likely to sit down with a group and get input and try to manage by consensus as well as by party. So that would be one difference.

Another difference which I think is really posing a lot of difficulties is that you have men, particularly, well not men because it’s both men and women but in many cases men who have retired and then they go back to the workplace. What they’re facing is these young upstarts who walk into work and then in a couple of years wind up being in higher positions than the employees of the past ever dreamed of, or at least in such a quick amount of time. So you see these older people being managed by people who are their children’s age and who know more in some ways about some of the fundamentals for working in the workplace.

Dr. Kent: When they’re being managed by someone as old as their children they think oh, how entitled are they to think they’re better than me? Entitled being the key word. What do you do?

Susan Benjamin: Well what I would do and what I recommend everybody does. If you’ve got to figure out what is going on in the workplace, right? I mean if you’ve got a younger person, what are they going to know that you don’t? In many cases, they know about the web. They know about working the online networks, they know about finding information that way. They’re less likely to speak to their colleagues or their employees in person and more likely to speak to them in email.

So if I were an older employee coming in I would learn what I don’t know and that will help make you better overall and of course find the place where you want to be in the workforce. I would also be really cognizant of common information you have based on your experience and based on trial and error, and everything else that the younger manager doesn’t have and make that really clear that you know what? All the time you spend in the workforce has given you something that’s really special. It’s really important and it will drive the organization to figure out what is that? And don’t be humble, be real. Then just let your manager know that here is what I can contribute that nobody else can.

Dr. Kent: When we’re talking about, because younger and older generations and different kinds of people and things like that; you know I had some other folks on the show. One woman did etiquette with business and I brought up the point that a lot of these younger folks, myself included, I’m just about 30 years old and I tend to wear sandals a good many places. I do know the difference between a business meeting and a fun meeting but some of these younger people don’t. What do you do when you have issues with dress and with hygiene and things like that?

Susan Benjamin: Well there are differences I think between issues of dress and hygiene. The issue of dress I think is really about the culture of the organization. For example, if you are working for a kind of shiny, glimmering kind of financial firm and you go in there wearing sandals you may not fit in. It certainly wouldn’t meet the expectations of the client. I know they expect to see oh I don’t know, pointed toes on the shoes of whoever they’re meeting or whatever. So I think in those cases it may be a call to say you know we do have a dress code.

My personal view having been an employer of people for many years is if there’s a dress code issue, get over it, don’t worry about it unless it really will affect your business relationships, then that’s different. Hygiene is funny for managers. I’ve don a whole lot of training over the years with managers and that issue keeps coming up. What if you have employees who smell bad or are really dirty? And their workplace is really dirty? The problem is it does affect the workplace. People can’t be around them. If they’re meeting with clients that speaks badly about you.

There are serious issues there and yet it’s not strictly speaking a professional issue. For example if somebody is always late you can say oh my gosh, you’re supposed to be here at nine and you’re here at 11:30. If somebody smells you can’t say oh my gosh you smell and everybody’s revolted by you, right? So you have to find some strategic ways of addressing that problem, and you really do have to address it. But as I said it’s anything but straight forward whereas dress code is straight forward.

Dr. Kent: So you’ve been doing this for a long time and you have quite a few books.

Susan Benjamin: Yeah, I’m not young like you; I’m old.

Dr. Kent: What are a couple stories of companies that you’ve worked with where you know amusing stories or stories that tell a story about what this means? Working with companies to address these issues.

Susan Benjamin: Do you have an issue in mind or do you want me to just spell out a story?

Dr. Kent: I’m especially interested in a couple funny stories if you have anything amusing.

Susan Benjamin: I know there are so many, I haven’t really put together any but what I would say. One of the stories that comes to mind that I think really brings up the issues of the workplace is just how different it is. Men and women really are very different and I want to give you an example that illustrates that, which is I gave a workshop to people in a bank. So it was C-Level managers and I gave them a situation which was in fact about hygiene.

I put them in little groups and I said okay, what I want you to do now is to say what you would do if you had an employee who smelled bad? How would you deal with that? And true to all the stereotypes if you want to say stereotypes; the women who were grouped together and by the way I didn’t do it on purpose it just wound up being that way said, “Well what I would do is get everybody together and I would have them discuss some of the things that are important to them about being in the workplace and then of course we’d eventually start talking about hygiene and they would talk about how nice it is to take a shower in the morning and be really clean.” Right? So they would sort of stumble into it so they would be in agreement and nobody would be embarrassed.

What do you think the men said? “I’d tell them they better straighten up or they’re out of here!” They were really like “The work place is professional and if they don’t take a shower or there’s a mess in their office, they’re out of here.” I said okay, let’s stop now and look at this. The women are going to try to build consensus; the men aren’t. So which is the better? The answer is they both work but in different ways. They both have their hazards and they both have their strengths. Probably the best idea is to merge them and take from both.

Dr. Kent: There are so many issues between I mean men and women have such different I guess cultural norms. So it’s funny to think about all of the different things that could happen in the workplace. Let’s talk about something that’s a little more serious. Right now business is having a really hard time. What is the job of a manager, the job of a marketing person in a time like this of economic downturn?

Susan Benjamin: There is. There’s a lot of anxiety in the workplace right now and what’s interesting is the anxiety may or may not be merited. I have a client and they’ve been worried about the economy for a year, and you know what? They’re not hurting and it doesn’t look like they’re going to be hurting because they have their own clients who are pretty successful and kind of are protecting them from that, they’ll just keep having them as clients.

I think there are a number of things you want to do and one of them is to keep your employees focused on outcomes that you know they can get and that are important to the organization and make a difference. Let them know that they reach those outcomes so they wont be thinking about oh my gosh, if we don’t get any clients my bonus wont be so big. Let them have a sense of continuing to contribute and participate in the workplace that will help their morale stay up. The other thing is to try to be flexible with the employees you do have.

For instance, some people in the workplace aren’t really good at proof reading and graphic design so you may be outsourcing that function and it costs money. What you may want to do is to take some of the responsibility away from that employee and then ask them if they could in fact go ahead and do some of the graphics design. I have an assistant who does research for me. She’s amazing but you know what? I needed new materials so I said do you think you could put something together for me, not really thinking she would do a good job.

She was amazing; she printed the best marketing material I could imagine and that was great because I didn’t have to go out and find somebody else. She was in my office any way, she knew what I was all about so that she could reflect it really well in the design she put together. I think every business could do that.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real pleasure. Everything you say, I feel like I want to talk to you for hours because everything you say is a new enlightenment lets say. You have tons of books out here; the latest is The Managers Answer Book. You have another book coming out in the fall, right?

Susan Benjamin: I do, I have another book which is part two of a series that I contributed to for McGraw-Hill, which is called Perfect Phrases for Difficult Situations. And I’m working on a book that I love to write and this is so cool. The Buzz of Enviro-Marketing; it’s really interesting and something I think everybody should look into. That’s a world that’s fast changing as you being in radio probably know.

Dr. Kent: We’ll visit your website at susansbenjamin.com.

Susan Benjamin: Or you could go to thegreatervoice.com too, both websites will work.

Dr. Kent: We will certainly do that and I will check out your books and I’ll keep The Managers Answer Book on my shelf absolutely. Thank you for being on the show.

Susan Benjamin: Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Kent: My next guest is Mac Morin, an incredible pianist. He’s been touring with Natalie McMaster for years. He plays the piano like no one else I can think of so it’s going to be a real honor to speak with him in a few minutes; come on back.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Business, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Warren Whitlock | Sound Authors Radio

November 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It’s exciting on the show today because I have a co-host, sally Shields and we’ve been chatting with authors from all walks of life here. The filthy rich and how to eat your way to good natural health. My next guest on the show is a fellow named Warren Whitlock and he is a legend in the book marketing scene. Sally, what do you know about Warren Whitlock?

Sally: I am completely overwhelmed and impressed with Mr. Whitlock. I have heard him on teleseminars with my personal guru Rick Frishman and I can’t say enough about him. I think he’s one of the foremost internet marketing entrepreneurs, authors, a fantastic book marketing expert. That’s my area of interest and I’m just overwhelmed that he’s here today to talk to us.

Dr. Kent: We’re both twittering on the show today, which I am sort of amused by still and thrilled by. I love this twitter revolution that’s happening and Warren has just written a book called oh what is it?

Sally: Twitter Revolution: How social media and mogul marketing is changing the way we do business and market online.

Dr. Kent: Indeed and it’s by Deborah Mitzak and Warren Whitlock and they’re handles are coachdeb and Warren Whitlock and we’ll be twittering and so will Warren I hope and so is Sally. If you haven’t twittered ever before you’ve got to check it out and try it and you can twitter along with us. I believe we have Warren now so welcome to the show Warren Whitlock.

Warren Whitlock: Hi, thanks for having me, glad to be here.

Dr. Kent: How are you doing today?

Warren Whitlock: I’m doing fantastic, been listening to your show and excited to talk about twitter, books or whatever you want to talk about.

Dr. Kent: Let’s start out with books. You’re well known for doing some book marketing. You’ve done your own books, you’ve done other peoples books, tell me about how the industry has changed over the last few years.

Warren Whitlock: Well that’s a good question. I think that what we’re seeing with social media, especially the revolution this year is that in everything that we do, in marketing, in business, in personal relationships, everything just a lot of the rules have been taken away. You don’t need to do things in a certain way. You can live, act and work however you want and so we actually ended up making that the first two words in our book, Twitter Revolution, No Rules and I feel the same way about book marketing.

If you think there’s a certain way you need to do stuff its not real life; there’s something wrong with that. You’ve got to follow the trends and figure out what to do that works of course, but you really can do things however you want.

Sally: The thing that I’ve noticed and was surprised about and of course I was probably the last one to know but finding out that the book does not necessarily make you where you want to go financially. What I found is the book is like a calling card and basically it opens the doors to selling your backend product. And as for really where most authors can make their money at least the top two percent of authors. Can you talk a little about that, the back end product and what authors can do to create one?

Warren Whitlock: Sure well that’s just like what we were talking about before about what has changed and really that’s not a change. It’s always been that to make money, you don’t rely on the book. If you go back to famous examples; Edgar Allen Poe for instance died penniless. Most of the great authors throughout history were not big money makers. There were a few that did well, Mark Twain did okay in his time but for the most part authors were either rich people who wrote books or were penniless. Writing a book had very little to do with making money and because of the 21st century version of publishing there’s like so much out there in society.

The 21st century version about amass everything and you hear these stories of it but really the reason why you get somebody a million dollar book advance is because you expect to make a million dollars and so they don’t go around buying books because of the great content, they buy books because they think they’re going to make more money than their paying for it. So it’s always been about what you bring to the table besides the book.

In other words an example is Tom Brokaw. He retired a few years ago and everyone knows Tom Brokaw, the guy was on TV and he writes a book and of course it sells a lot of copies because he’s Tom Brokaw. If you’re Tom Brokaw then you can make a deal based on how many copies of the book you’re going to sell. If you’re just starting out its important to come up with a way to make money so you can sustain your passion of sharing your message through your book.

Dr. Kent: Lets talk about your book Twitter Revolution and what twitter is. I’ve become recently obsessed with twitter as you may know and you’re definitely obsessed with twitter and the amazing thing about it is it really creates community in a way that recent social media hasn’t quite as much.

Warren Whitlock: Right, well there’s a word there I would be careful with, obsessed. I don’t like to become obsessed with anything. I use twitter a whole lot, I also use the telephone a whole lot. I’m not obsessed with the telephone but I might be obsessed with breathing and eating. The reason I use twitter is because it’s a tool and its one of many social media tools out there that helps bring us together. I’ll tell you what really happens with twitter, you go through three stages.

The first stage is you know what it is. You say that’s okay, I’ve seen it and I go over there and look at it and its got a whole lot of messages like what somebody had for breakfast. What do I care what somebody had for breakfast? That’s because you’re looking at strangers’ posts. That’s stage one. That’s acceptable. I’m thinking if you don’t go through that when you first look at twitter, there’s something wrong with you. If you really think all this information is interesting to begin with. Just like somebody else’s water cooler conversation or some other conversation you hear at an airport or restaurant. If you hear strangers talking its mostly boring and if you talk to the person sitting next to you on the plane, its mostly boring stuff to everybody else in the world.

Stage two is your friends all tell you that you got to get a twitter account. You should get a twitter account before your name is gone. It’s starting to grow like crazy, I better check it out. And most of us stay in stage two for quite a long time. We look at it and say yeah, I’m going to have to get around to doing twitter sometime and you figure that when you get to the certain point you’ll figure out how to do it.

Stage three is what you were calling an obsession but I call using it is when you start having conversations with people and you can learn a lot of information quickly from people you like to stay in contact with. The same people that you say hi to in the hall when you pass them. The kind of person you might have a brief conversation with when you see them at the water cooler or the kind of person standing in line or you happen to be driving in the same car. That kind of conversation, you’re just keeping up to date with their life and what’s going on. When you start finding out you can do that with me but no we’ve never met you can follow Dr. Kent and find out what’s happening on the show.

You can go and find a famous person or whatever but more importantly you find out that your readers and customers for an author is very important to find out what the readers are talking about. What we did with Twitter Revolution was we started out with a blog at twitterhandbook.com and started on twitter, coach deb and I would have conversations about what we wanted to put in the book and invited people to comment on the blog so that we could start putting together the chapters for the book. We started getting the publicity for our book before we ever even decided what was going to be in the book. I think that’s very important for any author to do today. Focus on building that community and listening to what your readers have to say.

It’s so easy there’s no excuse to say I’ve got a way for somebody reads my book and then comes back to figure out what’s going on. And I’m going to figure out what’s the next step to take. Instead of writing your books sequentially year after year, you start building your business doing multiple masses actions of effort all at the same time; you find the whole world out there is ready to talk to you. You collect the information, you put it into a book and now that book is proof that you are somebody that knows what’s going on about the topic. So all the publicity and power of our book that’s happening six months before we ever came out with the book and now that the book is out people are finding it and saying wow this is great.

The other thing is a lot of people are able to say hey, I see what I told you and it appeared in the book. So now they tell their friends that they were part of the book and the community grows and grows. One more thing we put on there, we have twit café radio, its twitcaferadio.com. I love the blog talk radio platform that we’re using here. On our show we open up the chat and we have live chat and encourage everybody else to follow the lifetime of people that they find and grow their network. Because we know the larger we all grow our network the more we’re going to be able to get done and we’re really working on spreading means like the need for every person on earth to have clean drinking water and you know good promotional things that will help are networks.

Its so much fun now that everyday I wake up and try to figure out what I can do to help other people and I find that I can get anything I want out of life just by helping other people get what they want. So hope you’ll come by and join me on my show. It’s every Friday night at twitcaferadio.com

Sally: I have a question for you. I had actually stepped in it a couple times in social media accidentally by mentioning my book and having people pounce on me saying we don’t advertise ourselves in this forum. So I’m wondering if there’s any kind of unspoken social rule about twitter where you don’t necessarily want to advertise yourself or really be too self-promoting. Can you talk a little about that?

Warren Whitlock: Sure well first of all I believe in no rules. We are in a revolution and let’s make the rules later but I think that is the revolution, that you can do what you want. There are people I know on twitter and in their blog and in everything they do it’s just me, me, me, come buy more of my stuff. Frankly I don’t enjoy following those people but they do well doing it. Its not that it doesn’t work but I see that working a lot better for me is to be sure I see first who I can help. So you go on that same forum and find the newbie’s asking questions. I always describe this as being what would happen if you were a speaker.

An author, speaker, same kind of thing. When you’re the authority figure even if it’s just you working at your job, it’s that question that the new person will always ask you. I like the idea of speaking before several hundred people, I know when the people come up at end of my presentation, that they’re going to be asking one or two or three questions over and over again. That question that you’re sick of answering and social media in the forum, twitter, any of this can find thousands of people that are asking those same silly questions over and over again.

The difference is they’re asking it for the first time. its that person that comes up to you and says yeah, but my situation is entirely different than what you said in the talk and blah, blah, blah and at the end they’re asking you the same question that everybody else asks and you give them the universal answer. When you do that in a networking forum, then no matter what the technology is, when you ask me a question on twitter and I respond and I include a url to where you can get my book, I’m not advertising, I’m just telling me about my book. Or if I put news about my book. I never say you should read my book.

Dr. Kent: It’s been an honor. I’ll say we should read Warren Whitlock’s book. I can say it for you. Twitter Revolution, it’s a great book. It’s actually how I ended up finding out about Warren Whitlock. My assistant said I needed to check it out and I did and I figured out how twitter worked and it’s been a blast ever since. We need to check him out on blog talk radio. What’s the URL?

Warren Whitlock: Twitcastradio.com

Dr. Kent: I’d love to be a guest on the show and Sally and I are both on twitter and we love being your friends on twitter.

Warren Whitlock: I encourage anybody to log onto with your name and we take impromptu guests all the time so I invite everybody to come on by.

Dr. Kent: Fantastic, well thank you so much for being on the show, Twitter Revolution.

Warren Whitlock: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Our next guest on the show is a musician and both Sally and I are professional musicians when we’re wearing other hats and it’ll be an honor speaking with this musician; Elder is his stage name and Elder Roche is his name. We’ll be chatting with him in a minute and here’s a song from his album we’ll play the whole track. It’s called Dark Place.

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