Interview with Charles Jacobs | Sound Authors Radio

November 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, July 25, 2008. My next guest on the show his name is Charles Jacobs. His latest book is called The Writer Within You; A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing and Publishing in your Retirement Years. Welcome to the show.

Charles Jacobs: Thank you doctor, it’s good to be here.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about the book.

Charles Jacobs: Well the book has been written to guide retirees, seniors, as they attempt to write, as they do what your last commercial apparently said to do. Life is calling; embark on a new task. They have told me time and again as I speak publicly at different organizations that they’re dying to write a book, eager to write a book but they just don’t know how. This book takes them through the process from writing to publishing to actually promoting the book and gives them all of the options. It also gives them an appendix that gives them detailed information and resources to guide them.

Dr. Kent: How did you get into this business of writing?

Charles Jacobs: How did I get into the writing business?

Dr. Kent: Right.

Charles Jacobs: It happened a long, long time ago doctor when I was a youngster. We did not have too much money in the family but I finally got a gift of a little printing press from my folks and I became the town crier of my block sending out little pieces of information on this 4×4 sheet. I loved writing, loved newspapering and continued on with weekly’s as a part timer. I went to college in New York fortunately and I was able to pay my way through college at Columbia by working at the Journal American at nights and I just continued on.

Dr. Kent: What is your day to day right now? You’re obviously targeting retirees with this book and you have many other hats. What do you do from day to day?

Charles Jacobs: Well my primary concern right now is promoting the book. The book has been quite successful and we’re trying to capitalize on that. It’s been named one of the best books of the year by six different organizations and we’re trying to get as much publicity and the word out on that factor but at the same time, I have a coaching operation. I currently am doing some coaching for several clients and also doing a complete rewrite of the book and ghostwriting a book for one of my clients. So I do keep kind of busy.

Dr. Kent: Lets go into the book itself; The Writer Within You. There’s a lot of books out there that say okay, here’s how to make a million bucks, here’s how to get your book into the public eye. Do you work with people from the very bottom end, people who just want to have a book about their family, all the way to people say oh I’m going to sell 100,000 books?

Charles Jacobs: I’m not particular about those who need my book but the book is geared more for the neophyte writer, the relatively new writer but many established writers have bought the book and have sent us comments on it and feel that the resources available in the book are particularly unusual. What I’ve done is not only include the information on my own research and also experience, but we have on almost every page of the book a section called words of wisdom. It’s a special box with quotes, authors, pages, publishers, et cetera on the subject matter that’s being discussed in the main portion of that section. So it gives you not only my perspective but the perspective of somebody that are experts in the field.

Dr. Kent: Let’s say a writers just starting out. Do you recommend that they go by the self publishing route? Writers often hear the word not quite as much anymore but Vanity Press and there’s a stigma attached to that. Do they get an agent? What’s the process for a new writer?

Charles Jacobs: They’re going to have a very tough time getting an agent and going the traditional publishing road. Agents are even more difficult to find than publishers today; however, the choice is not just that or Vanity Publishing. Vanity Publishing has grown and morphed into a whole new world called Publishing on Demand (POD). POD is a result of a new technology that can produce any number of books. You no longer have to take a press run as you did with Vanity Presses that made 2,000 to 3,000 books and you have them sit in your garage and rot.

Now you can sign up, pay a fee to one of these POD houses and they will do everything for you from designing the cover to designing the format inside and actually printing the book. They will even access distribution channels for you. They will print on demand, as the name says, if you personally want for your own use 25 copies lets say, they will print 25 copies. If bookstores or Amazon or what have you require replenishment of two, three four copies of the book, they are able to send it out then and there. It’s a marvelous new approach.

Dr. Kent: Before the printing happens, the writing of a book. There’s so many people that say, “Oh, I’d like to write a book,” the numbers I’ve heard were 300,000-400,000 books published every year now. How do people write a book that’s unique?

Charles Jacobs: There are no new ideas I believe, but there are new approaches to old ideas. For example, there have been almost no books, well there have been hundreds of books on writing, but there have been almost no books written for this niche that I selected, which is geared to older person, the older writer. In every category, every subject, there are new approaches that can be developed. In fiction of course, the stories are all different. There’s a basic format or formula for writing a novel but with a non restrictive area there’s a great deal of latitude to do it your own way and pick your own subject matter.

Dr. Kent: Retirement years; we’re talking about the baby boomer generation just hitting retirement the last few years. It’s a huge market full of people that say okay I’ve got to do something with the rest of my life. How do you specifically focus on these people?

Charles Jacobs: They are a unique group; they are just beginning to retire. Two years ago they were first beginning to go into retirement and they will swell the numbers of retired people and they are looking for something to continue to be productive and active and aren’t willing to settle because they’re in good health. They’re not willing to settle and agree that this is the end of their lives. So the way it can be reached, it can be reached best I feel through targeted work on the internet where I reach out for boomer websites, boomer blogs, and talk about my book and talk about many of the subjects I cover in the book. I also reach out to senior magazines, print magazines as well as senior websites. In that way and senior radio as well. In that way I am targeting a very specific niche and also the people who are buying my books.

Dr. Kent: What’s interesting is you’re actually promoting your book and part of what you teach is how to promote your readers’ book. How someone can promote themselves. So you’re almost pointing the way.

Charles Jacobs: I try to yes. If I’m successful and they follow the path that I suggest, they too should be successful.

Dr. Kent: When are you going to have a chance to retire?

Charles Jacobs: I consider myself retired already and having a hell of a lot of fun. I would much rather be doing what I’m doing than playing golf.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you. The Writer Within You; the website is retirement-writing.com. Where else can we find you on the web?

Charles Jacobs: You can find me on my blog, which is also retirement-writing.com/blog.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful and the book The Writer Within You; A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing and Publishing in your Retirement Years by Charles Jacobs. It’s available all across the web, just like your book can be. It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you.

Charles Jacobs: Thanks so much doctor.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Publishing, TRANSCRIPTS, 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.

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

Interview with Shel Horowitz | Sound Authors Radio (edited)

October 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest is Shel Horowitz and author of a book all about book marketing.

Shel Horowitz: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Tell us about your book.

Shel Horowitz: Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers is a book designed specifically for people who write and or publish books to get themselves noticed, where just in the United States 400,000 books might be published in a year. The old ways don’t work anymore. 25 years ago, you did a book, you had a publisher, the publisher promoted the book, there were only 40,000 books being published in a year. Now there are ten times as many.

You would get noticed in the mainstream media, you would do a book tour—and those things don’t work anymore. I’ve been in marketing for a long time and I’ve been writing books for a long time. My first book was actually done back in 1980. For probably eight or ten years now, a lot of people in the book community were asking me, “when are you going to do a book on marketing just for us book people?” So I finally did and that was Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, which is my seventh book.

Dr. Kent: Talk a little bit about, now are these all self-published?

Shel Horowitz: No, it’s been a mixture. For example, my third book Marketing without Megabucks was published by Simon & Schuster. My fifth book was published by Chelsea Greene. I’m currently negotiating with John Wiley for what will be my eighth book and then in between I’ve done several self-published books. Grassroots for Authors and Publishers happened to be self-published. The original Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World that was the one I did with Chelsea Greene.

Dr. Kent: Which do you find more fulfilling? As part of the marketing process obviously when you’re published on a major publisher you expect that they’ll do something for you, but which one have you had more success, more fun with?

Shel Horowitz: I’ve had probably the most fun with the books I’ve published under my own imprint, but I don’t think its reasonable to expect any more that. Publishers do most of the marketing. A reality that was true 40, 50 years ago—but it’s not true anymore. And authors who enter into an agreement with that expectation are going to be very disappointed.

In fact, the biggest question that people get asked when they submit a proposal these days is not about the quality of the writing, the quality of your research; it’s about the quality of your audience. How many people are you already reaching? What they call a platform. How much speaking you do, how much article writing you do, whether you have a blog or a website, all that sort of stuff is what they’re looking at. As much or more than the actual content of the book. It’s kind of a scary time for people who value good writing and are not really marketers.

Dr. Kent: Because they’re looking at money, whether they can make some money?

Shel Horowitz: Yeah.

Dr. Kent: Talk about in that note, in that same reference. Talk a little bit about what authors can do these days when there are 400,000 books and they probably don’t have a following.

Shel Horowitz: Well, there’s a lot of things they can do to get a following. I’m a great believer in building reciprocal relationships with people who can help you and you can help them. So, for example, endorsements. I’m a huge believer in endorsements. For my sixth book Principle Profit, Marketing People First, I’m up to 80 endorsements right now and they’re still coming in five years after publication. And I have a few very big names. And in fact, in the Grassroots Marketing for Authors & Publishers book, I take eight of the most prominent endorsements. People have heard of these folks, like Jack Canfield who was the co-creator of the Chicken Soup empire. He gave me an endorsement and Jim Hightower, who is a well-known commentator on politics, gave me an endorsement. Robert Reich, who ran for governor here in Massachusetts and who used to be President Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. I have endorsements from these folks; Jay Conrad Levinson, who did the Guerrilla Marketing books.

So I look at eight of those endorsements and I talk about the individual stories that led me to them. In the case of Jim Hightower it was simply I went to his website, I found the contact link, I said I subscribe to your newsletter and I think this is a book you might want to blurb. Eventually they said yes.

Dr. Kent: So it’s about persistence.

Shel Horowitz: Yeah, and it’s also about using your networks. The story about how I got Jack Canfield to endorse was that Dan Pointer, who did The Self-Publishing manual (and did, by the way, a very nice blurb for me on the Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers book)—he and I’ve been on each others humor list for years and Jack Canfield was also on his humor list. I went up to Jack a few years ago at a Book Expo and I said, “Jack, I’d like to pitch you on Miso Soup for the Vegetarian Soul.” And he didn’t even answer the question, he said, “Are you the same Shel Horowitz that sends me jokes?”

I happened to know that he was on Dan’s humor list and I said “yes I am,” and we began a conversation. Years later I went back to him for the endorsement. His email address had gone stale so I simply zipped a note over to Dan and said “Jack gave me his email address and it doesn’t work anymore, do you have his current one?” Of course both Jack and Mark Victor Hansen, his co-author, are extremely generous people if you can get in front of them and they like what you’re doing. It’s pretty easy to get a blurb.

Dr. Kent: So you have a sense of humor apparently. You send out jokes. Give us a sample here.

Shel Horowitz: Oh god. I don’t write the jokes I just forward them when people forward them to me.

Dr. Kent: Marketing and making connections has a lot to do with personality.

Shel Horowitz: It does and it has to do with what you mentioned, persistence. But also going after people and not how can I squeeze some help out of you but how can I help you? How can I make your day better and brighter? You never know where sending jokes to someone is going to lead. That’s a strange example but a true example and if you approach the world with the attitude. That you’re here to make the world better and the individuals within that world have a better experience, then they’re going to come to you. People will want to help you.

Dr. Kent: It’s almost the karma concept.

Shel Horowitz: Yeah, it’s in one of my books, Principled Profit. I call it The Abundance Principle.

Dr. Kent: So talk a little bit about book stores, authors, distributors, publishers, it’s a messy world that authors live in.

Shel Horowitz: It is messy indeed. I think what a lot of authors realize is that for most of us, we will never be at that table where there’s a line around the block to come and shake our hand for a minute and touch the sleeve of our shirt and say oh I love your book; its not going to happen. The bookstore system is set up to benefit very, very famous authors and it works well for them. It works much less well for the unknown author who doesn’t have a big following. The economics of it are very challenging.

You basically, your books if you get them in the stores at all you get three months to get them out again via the cash register or they’re going to come right back. Book events that you organize without any kind of community in that area, you might be lucky if you get three, five, or ten people at an event. So yes, there are ways of making it work and I devote two chapters in Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers to the bookstore system and how for most of us its probably not even where you should put your energy, but how if it is here are 50 or so ways to make it work and actually succeed with it.

I have to say that in the context that I’m not a bookstore author but I’m married to somebody who is. My wife has books with Farrar, Strauss, Giroux and Simon & Schuster and even though she’s not a famous writer, the bookstore channel worked reasonably well for her. She used them for six months after publication and then after that she was toast.

Dr. Kent: That’s I guess the most frustrating thing in the industry is that a lot of authors say well, I have to find an agent. They find the agent, the agent then finds the publisher and then they have this major publisher, which is the joy of their life. Then all of a sudden they realize they haven’t made it yet and they sit in the basement of the publisher and then never have any kind of exposure.

Shel Horowitz: Right and in fact once you’ve done that it becomes harder because they don’t want to talk to you if your first book didn’t do so well. They don’t want to hear about your next book. What makes more sense as a model I think is to buy a block of ISBNs, hire a consultant who can walk you through publishing process—and I’m one of those many people who would do that for people. And produce the best book you can and the best marketing you can of that book. Sell several thousand copies and then go to New York and say, “Look what I did without even going to bookstores. Don’t you think its time that this book had a bookstore run?” And there are a lot of examples of books that have made it this way, that started as small self-published or independently published books and then went to a big house after they had a track record. The Celestine Prophesies did that, Mutant Message Down Under, The Christmas Box; some of these books are mega best sellers. Eragon on the fiction side. A lot of people don’t know that there’s a very rare, self-published edition of Eragon. He was like, I don’t know, 16 or 17 when the book came out. I knew his parents because they were on a self publishing discussion list.

Actually his dad. So we kind of followed this thing through the process of self publishing and then finding interest among the big publishers and then becoming a mega success and selling it for more money than the family had accumulated in the previous 100 years. Now of course there’s a sequel and you can’t go anywhere without seeing those books. They’ve become super, super books and they started with self-publishing. Now it’s a hard road to do it, most books that are self-published never achieve any kind of success, but those that are well produced, well marketed and that fill a need in the market can succeed and often do.

Dr. Kent: We can visit you online at frugalmarketing.com. Tell us a little bit about what you do.

Shel Horowitz: Oh boy. I make the world insist on knowing why you’re special and I also walk people through the process of going from writer to published author. So I do copywriting, marketing, consulting, a lot of my clients, a majority of them are authors or publishers. I find the ways that their books are unique; I work with them on the best way to produce a book and the best marketing strategies. Right now I have a client who did not self-publish. She is publishing another author and the author is a phenomenally good spinner of intrigue and I told her she should go after people like John Grisham for an endorsement and heard from her it would be impossible to approach John Grisham. And I said “yes, you can make this book a bestseller, but here is what you’re going to have to do to make it,” and I laid out a rather intimidating list of things that she would need to do.

I suggested she start with the kind of strategy I just talked about. Starting small, sell a few thousand copies a year and then be able to establish the track record of a fan base and then go to a larger publisher and say, “look! This is something that’s working.” Whereas I just had another casual, this person is not a client yet, but asked for some advice and I suggested to her that her plan was to publish seven or eight books in the first year and to spend $2,000 each on the printing. I said back off and start with one book or two books, don’t do any more than two. So every situation is different. A lot of people, everybody thinks oh I’ve written a book and everybody wants it. It doesn’t work that way. Your book has to fill a need.

If you write non-fiction as I do, then you find different niches. So I have a niche of small business owners with some of my books. I have a niche of authors and publishers with this book that we’re talking about today. I had a book for people who want to have fun cheaply. A book that wasn’t as much market force I thought because the problem with people who want to have fun cheaply is that they don’t even want to spend the $17.00 it would take to find out how. That book was a very slow seller and I’ve now gone out of print with it and made it an e-book and cut the price in half. It now sells somewhat better.

Dr. Kent: This sounds fascinating on a lot of different levels. We’ll go visit you on the web at frugalmarketing.com. The book is called Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, but there’s plenty more resources on that website. Thank you so much for being on the show Shel Horowitz.

Shel Horowitz: Thank you so much.

Dr. Kent: My next guest is legendary bluegrass musician Don Rigsby. Come on back for that.

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

Ella Curry | Obama & Radio

October 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Ella Curry [19:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

About Ella Curry from her website:Ella Curry is determined to become one of the most powerful literary conglomerates in the industry. Offering the self-published and independently published author the same quality of exposure as the traditionally published author. By 2012, we hope to have our own radio show on AM radio, our cable TV literary show launched and to bring new books and the authors who create them, to millions of readers around world. Join us in this drive to Give the Gift of Knowledge!

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Art, Publishing, Politics, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Business, PODCAST

Stephanie Chandler | Sell More Books

October 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Stephanie Chandler [10:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Stephanie Chandler spent 11 years in the fast-paced Silicon Valley in a variety of roles including software sales, technical training and technical support. When she developed an ulcer before her 30th birthday, she knew it was time for a complete lifestyle change.

Following much contemplation and a year of planning, Chandler fled corporate America in 2003 and opened a bookstore in Sacramento, CA (she sold the store in 2007). In the process of starting the business, she discovered a new passion: helping aspiring entrepreneurs find the same freedom that she did. In response, she launched BusinessInfoGuide.com, a directory of resources for entrepreneurs.

Stephanie Chandler is the author of the following books:

From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur: Make Money with Books, eBooks and Information Products (John Wiley & Sons, December 2006)

The Business Startup Checklist and Planning Guide: Seize Your Entrepreneurial Dreams! (Aventine Press, September 2005)

The Author’s Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leverage the Internet to Sell More Books (Quill Driver Press, May 2008)

A noted small business expert, Chandler’s articles have been seen in dozens of print and online publications. She is also a frequent speaker at small business events and on the radio.

Chandler is also the founder ofTheBusinessGrowthConnection.com, a Sacramento-based marketing and communications company specializing in custom electronic newsletters and Web content.

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

« Previous Page — Next Page »