Today is the first of April.\u00a0 In the weeks since the tour began on March 7, I\u2019ve done 35 hour-long presentations and traveled by car more than 3,500 miles.\u00a0 That\u2019s a lot of talking and driving.\u00a0 Book tours sound glamorous and fun, right up until you find yourself dragging luggage in and out of hotels without a bellman in sight.\u00a0 But I\u2019m not complaining.\u00a0 Meeting people is part of the job.\u00a0 Doing book talks is part of the job.\u00a0 Being polite to impolite people\u2014most especially the ones who tell me I look tired\u2014is part of the job.<\/p>\n
So when newbie authors ask me for career advice, I often tell them the following:\u00a0 Get Thee to Toastmasters.\u00a0 Nobody cares more about your book than you do.\u00a0 You\u2019re going to need to be able to stand up in front of people and tell them about your book.\u00a0 You\u2019re going to need to be able to do so without stammering and stumbling and without peppering every sentence with ums and ahs.\u00a0 You\u2019re going to need to be an interesting and engaging speaker.\u00a0 Most of the time those newbie authors look at me as though I\u2019ve lost my marbles.\u00a0 They think being an author means they get to be hermits.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 You need to be a capable public speaker, and a year in Toastmasters will get you there.<\/p>\n
Sometime in the last month, a newly self-published author asked me for advice.\u00a0 I said, \u201cWho buys your book?\u201d\u00a0 Answer: ” I mostly give them away.\u201d\u00a0 Bad idea.\u00a0 If you want to be an author, you need to write books that are good enough for people to be willing to BUY them.\u00a0 The thing that\u2019s missing from books by many self-published authors is that critical element of book publishing\u2014editing!!!\u00a0 The books end up being poorly written and poorly edited.\u00a0 No wonder someone has to give them away.<\/p>\n
But self-published or not, one thing authors MUST do is be involved in sales and marketing.<\/p>\n
During my years in the life insurance industry, one of the things I learned is that your best customer is your most recent customer.\u00a0 And that was the real purpose of my question to the self-published author mentioned above.\u00a0 Who buys your books and do you have a database of same?\u00a0 That line of inquiry caused a certain amount of eye-rolling on his part.\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t something he wanted to hear because he didn\u2019t think actually selling his book was part of the bargain. I\u2019m here to tell you, that is not true.\u00a0 Writing a book and editing it are only part of the job.<\/p>\n
When Until Proven Guilty was published in 1985, I had just finished up ten years in the life insurance industry.\u00a0 What I had going for me was a Rolodex with 250 or so names in it\u2014people who were friends, co-workers, clients, and acquaintances.\u00a0 Some of them were in Arizona and some in Seattle.\u00a0 For the kickoff signing, I called the people in the Rolodex and invited them to the event.\u00a0 And when there was an Arizona segment for that tour\u2014a self-paid tour, by the way\u2014we called the Arizona names.\u00a0 This was 1985 after all, so there was no such thing as the Internet.\u00a0 Phone calls were it when it came to contacting potential customers.\u00a0 For subsequent books, when the grand opening events were held at the Doghouse, my daughter was tasked with calling the list which gradually became known as the Doghouse List.\u00a0 For whoever was doing the calling, answering machines were a huge blessing.\u00a0 Being able to leave a message meant not being caught up in a half hour chat.<\/p>\n
Eventually the Rolodex went bye-bye and the list, still called the Doghouse List, moved to a computer file.\u00a0 Now, rather than a phone list, it\u2019s primarily an e-mail list, and it\u2019s a vital part of my business.\u00a0 I guard that list with my life, and nobody else touches it.\u00a0 For one thing, it contains the names and e-mail addresses of more than 12,000 of my customers.\u00a0 How do I know that?\u00a0 Because I\u2019m the only one who adds names and addresses to the list.\u00a0 Every one of those 12,000 names is someone who has received at least one and probably more than one e-mail message written by me personally.\u00a0 Incidentally, my first Avon Books sales rep, Holly Turner, taught me that one personal contact is worth ten readers.\u00a0 From where I\u2019m sitting\u2014with books regularly landing on the New York Times list\u2014I think her advice holds true.<\/p>\n
Answering e-mails personally counts as a personal contact.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a secretary who scans my e-mails or responds to them.\u00a0 E-mails from readers come to me and are answered by me.\u00a0 Those little notes are important.\u00a0 The people writing them are my CUSTOMERS, and customers are ALWAYS important.<\/p>\n
It took a lot of years to grow those 250 initial names to 12,000.\u00a0 I passed that benchmark last night, and I\u2019m already ten to the good on the way to 13,000<\/p>\n
That\u2019s something else my years in life insurance taught me.\u00a0 My agency manager, Gilbert F. Lawson, always said:\u00a0 Know the score, keep the score, report the score.\u00a0 The score will improve.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll let you know when we hit 13,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is the first of April.\u00a0 In the weeks since the tour began on March 7, I\u2019ve done 35 hour-long presentations and traveled by car more than 3,500 miles.\u00a0 That\u2019s a lot of talking and driving.\u00a0 Book tours sound glamorous and fun, right up until you find yourself dragging luggage in and out of hotels […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,128,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-marketing","category-tour-2","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-eE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}