Category: Business-general

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business-general, Copywriting, Entrepreneurship, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

Some things should always be left to professionals. You don’t ever want to trust me to do any carpentry for you…or even have me paint a room. and the older I get, the more I move from a D-I-Y (do-it-yourselfer) to a have-it-done.

Writing your own press release is something most people should not tackle. Here’s a comment I just made on a self-publishing discussion list in response to an advocate of D-I-Y press releases:

When I write a press release for a client, I spend significant time with the book. Sometimes I read the whole thing. Sometimes I read sections I’ve asked the author to flag, plus the beginning, end, and some random sections. Plus a synopsis, for fiction, and a thorough look at the TOC and Index for nonfiction. And always I read the author questionnaire I send, and the supporting materials I always request (such as press coverage of the author)…I read enough to thoroughly immerse myself in the project. And my press releases for clients have been picked up by the New York Times, among many other places.

Yes, the author has far more subject knowledge than I do. But *I* have the expertise in crafting a message that the media, and the public, will find exciting. Most authors don’t, and believe me, I’ve seen their attempts.

One of the *problems* is the formulaic approach F___ recommends. Those formulas yield terrible press releases straight out of the 1970s. I don’t follow the formulas. I write press releases with the idea that the reader says “Wow! I want more of this.” Writing a standard reverse-pyramid 5Ws press release (who, what, where, when, why)–the most common formula–doesn’t accomplish that.

My favorite press release out of the probably thousands I’ve written was for a book on electronic privacy. If I followed the 5Ws formula, my release would have had a headline like “Electronic Privacy Expert Releases New Book.” How fast is the reporter going to hit delete on a big-snore headline like that? My headline was “It’s 10 O’Clock. Do You Know Where Your Credit History Is?” Following a lead about the credit history “vacationing” in databanks of big corporations, the book finally showed up in the third paragraph.

I refer to this type of press release as “the-story-behind-the-story,” and other than my own books, I don’t know a lot of books that teach how to do this… My book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, does give that context, and gives a lot of book-specific examples, including a wildly successful press release by listmate Ruth Houston that violates all the rules–proving that F___ is right that *some* authors can do their own press releases very effectively.

Some can do their own layout, too. I have discovered after laying out two books in my early publishing years, that I’m someone who should not ever lay out my own book. And most authors should not ever write their own press release.

In an earlier post in the same discussion, responding to a post that called professional publicity services a waste of money, I describe the advantages of a third alternative between do-it-yourself and pricy full-service publicists:

R___’s point is well-taken. With any expenditure, you want to be sure the results justify the expense.

And she’s right that most book publicists who are any good are frightfully expensive. Typically, you can expect to pay between $2000-$10,000 a month, with a 6-month commitment required. It takes a lot of sales to justify a $12-60K expenditure.

However, it’s not an either-or. There is a third alternative between doing it all yourself and spending $60K on a professional full-service publicist.

That alternative is hiring a la carte: use a professional writer to create a get-noticed media release that is likely to wildly outperform anything you do on your own, and then either hire one of the publicists who is willing to work a la carte and just do the distribution/follow-up, or use a wire service, or do it yourself with a list compiled by a media list specialist (such as our own Paul Krupin of Direct Contact PR).

As an example, I charge $325 to write but not distribute a news release on a book. I refer out to others for the other pieces for a few hundred more, and the total cost is under $1K. So if you did, say, six releases in a year, you’d still pay less than for one month of a high-end publicist.

Oh, and regarding the likelihood of better results: I had one client do a comparison test. He sent my release to half his media list, and one he’d written to the other half. He became a fan and a steady customer when mine got 6 times as many media responses.

One further lesson: these two posts demonstrate examples of promoting my own services on a discussion group while not making enemies—because the self-promotion is in the context of—and directly relevant to—a discussion already underway.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Business-general, Publishing Tagged with , , , , , ,

Book buyers: looks like the party’s winding down. Amazon’s once-generous discounts are slowly going away, as this article in the New York Times reports.

I’ve been expecting this for years. Now that Amazon has kicked so many competitors to the ground through ruthless discounting, the laws of the market decree rising prices. This is what happens when a company gains a market share bordering on monopoly—while establishing a tech and logistics infrastructure that would be very difficult for a new competitor to match, so the likelihood of being undercut on a mass scale as they did to others is slim. Amazon has also, for many years been utterly ruthless in its dealings with other segments of the market (particularly small independent publishers, where years ago it started extracting a 55 percent discount in an industry where the normal bookstore discount had been 40 percent).

Amazon’s history is full of stuff that looks a lot like bullying. I always expected predatory pricing—coming in willing to take a short-term loss through lower prices, in order to drive competitors out of business, and then raising the prices when consumers no longer have alternatives—was part of the strategy. What made it work for them, as the Times article points out, is that…

In its 16 years as a public company, Amazon has received unique permission from Wall Street to concentrate on expanding its infrastructure, increasing revenue at the expense of profit. Stockholders have pushed Amazon shares up to a record level, even though the company makes only pocket change. Profits were always promised tomorrow.

Small publishers wonder if tomorrow is finally here, and they are the ones who will pay for it.

 

 

Publishers accepted the higher discount because:

  • They had no choice
  • Amazon does provide some services that used to require a wholesaler (and wholesalers traditionally buy at 55 percent off)
  • AND the higher discount did translate into a reader benefit: reduced prices

Now that the third reason is being eroded, it will be interesting to see if publishers rebel. However, now it’s probably too late. Amazon is the only mass retail channel that routinely deals with tiny publishers. Barnes & Noble, the last remaining competing megachannel, prefers to buy from wholesalers (yes, I know, there are exceptions). If you say goodbye to Amazon, you’d better have some non-bookstore channels in place.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

Why do businesses (and governments or nonprofits acting like businesses) worldwide continue to squander and pollute natural resources, even when we all know better?

Because it’s in their economic interest.

And why is wrecking the planet in their economic interest?

One simple reason: they’ve externalized the true cost. In plain language, they’ve passed on the true costs of their destructive behavior to us, as taxpayers, consumers, breathers of air, and drinkers of water. Often, they even get tax advantages for doing so (ever hear the phrase “oil depletion allowance”?).

This MUST change.

If every organization had to incorporate true costs over the entire lifecycle, including environmental degradation, resource depletion, and disposal of waste at the end of the cycle, our economy would turn toward deep sustainability in a very short time—maybe even just a year or two.

Green business expert Joel Makower, of GreenBiz.com, is among those calling to change this. He’s quoted in this article about converting the business world to true-cost accounting. It’s not overly technical, and certainly educational.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , ,

Gary Hirshberg, who recently stepped down after decades as CEO of Stonyfield Farm Yogurt—the company he founded—carries a memory that would make any executive’s heart gladden:

Recently, I was standing in a Florida supermarket reading the label on a Yoplait yogurt cup because I was curious about a new ingredient the company was trying. An older customer walked over to me, touched me on the elbow, and said, “Young man, someone your age really should be eating the Stonyfield.” Her comment was akin to a religious moment for me. However, I regained my composure quickly enough to ask why she thought I should be eating the Stonyfield product. Her remarkably well-informed answer can be summarized this way: Since I apparently have a few decades left in me, I can make them more enjoyable and productive by eating organic foods. Plus, I will get the extra bonus of knowing that I am supporting a company that cares. This lovely woman certainly sold me.

Isn’t that every marketer’s dream? To have a total stranger come up to you and tell you that you MUST buy your own product, because it’s so much better? WOW!

So how can you generate that sort of love for your own products? How can you turn random strangers into fervent evangelists for you?

I give some answers in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green—but I’d love to make this a broader conversation. Please post your ideas in the comments.

(Author’s note: I heard Gary tell this story in his interview on the Spring of Sustainability series. I contacted Stonyfield’s publicity department to get the exact quote, as it appears in Gary’s book, Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World. Used with permission.)

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business-general, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People Tagged with , ,

I recently discovered that my pages have vanished from the top couple of pages for searches for résumé writing in my local area.

From 1985 to 1995, résumé writing for local clients was the biggest chunk of my business. At this point, it’s a very small percentage of what I do—my focus is far more on marketing consulting and copywriting for authors, publishers, and small businesses (especially those with green products and services).

But even though it’s a tiny fraction of my business, it’s work that I enjoy and am good at, and for local clients, it provides me with some human contact that I don’t get through a lot of my other work. And I do want to be found if people are looking.

For years, Google has brought me an occasional résumé client. I hadn’t noticed any drop off, but the résumé portion is such a small part of the operation these days, that it’s hard to measure real drops.

So, in December, I made a special page, just for resume writing in Western Massachusetts, and crammed it full of place names for cities, towns, and counties around here. And added Like buttons for Google+ and Facebook.

Google is known to “sandbox” new pages: to let them sit outside the index for a while until they determine the page to be legitimate. And a page with this many keywords may be particularly at risk.

You can participate in this experiment at https://www.accuratewriting.com/wmass_resumes.shtml. Please click the two buttons; let’s see how long it takes for Google to notice. I will report back the results, whatever happens.

So far, in the three months since the page went up, Google has sent me one résumé client. I think the page is still in the sandbox. However, if you beleive in the Law of Attraction, here’s some validation: I’ve had a noticeable uptick in résumé work generally, but from other sources.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, People Helping People, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

“Imagine Walmart doing distribution for food banks…in which The Gap runs thrift shops…in which The Home Depot is involved in rebuilding.”

This challenge comes from Ron Shaich, CEO of Panera, as he closes a wonderful talk at Sustainable Brands about Panera Cares, a series of pay-what-you-want stores aimed at alleviating hunger. So far, his first charity store, in St.Louis, is more than self-supporting, and they’ve opened a second location in Dearborn (metro Detroit)—both in economically diverse neighborhoods. The idea is that some who can afford it will pay more than the suggested amount, subsidizing those who pay less. And so far, it seems to be working.

Great to see this sort of abundance-based thinking from the CEO of a major restaurant chain.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Publishing Tagged with , , ,

Amazon has a new program of interest to bloggers; you can have your feed available on the Kindle store, and Amazon will share revenues.

Sounds great—until you read the fine print. I read the entire contract, all seven pages of 10-point type, and I thought it was one of the most author-unfriendly documents I’ve seen in quite some time. I don’t think I really want Amazon to be able to just swoop in and repurpose my content into books or whatever, without not only consulting me but giving me the right to say no if I object to a particular use. And of course, all the liabilities rest with the blogger.

Yes, there’s a revenue share. If I understand this particularly confusing section correctly, it’s 15 cents per downloaded kilobyte. So if a typical text-only blog post of mine weighs in at 10K, I’d get $1.50 when someone downloads it—or is that what the total revenue would me, and my portion a share of that? The contract is quite ambiguous on this. If the former, the pay rate is not bad, in the great scheme of things—it compares with a typical book royalty—but not really enough to get me to give them the rights they want. How many would I realistically sell in the course of a year? A dozen? A hundred? Ten thousand? My guess is one of the lower numbers. And meanwhile Amazon gets the right to anthologize and package me, whether I like it or not.

I think I’ll wait for a more author-friendly contract, thank you very much.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , ,

Friday, I got a press release from the American Booksellers Association, crowing that a lawsuit against New York State’s “sales tax fairness” law–which states that any company using affiliates based in New York has a “nexus” in the state, and thus is subject to sales tax–had been dismissed on most counts.

The question of sales tax fairness has been a bone of contention between mail-order/online and physical stores for more than a decade (I wrote a piece about this ten years ago, in fact). Brick-and-mortar retailers claim that mail-order and (more recently) online merchants have an unfair price advantage because they don’t have to charge and remit sales tax. The remote merchants claim they aren’t actually doing business in the state, and that shipping charges shift the inequality back out. However, sales tax is usually a lot more than shipping, especially for small items like books and CDs.

As a very tiny online merchant who sells info products online and through the mail, my issue is a bit different. I do see it as unfair that we onliners don’t have to collect sales tax. However, it would be a crushing burden to have to collect and remit taxes in the hundreds of jurisdictions where our customers live—California alone has a different tax structure for almost every community, involving state, county, and local taxes in varying amounts. And what happens with international sales? Such a requirement would force hundreds, perhaps thousands of merchants to close or drastically reconfigure their businesses.

So what would be fair? Here are a couple of ideas.

1. Tax all purchases in the merchant’s home jurisdiction. On the plus side, merchants are already set up to collect and pay these taxes; all we’d have to do is change our order forms to collect tax on all product purchases. On the minus side, this would skew revenues. Amazon’s hometown of Seattle or eBay’s of San Jose would benefit enormously, while small municipalities (or those who don’t happen to have a mail-sales megagiant in their borders) are left out in the cold. Probably not the best solution.

2. Collect sales tax in a national pool at the same fixed rate for all localities, use software to automatically allocate it by purchase amount and purchaser’s zip code, and distribute it, less a small administrative fee (perhaps 1 percent of all the tax collected).

3. Provide free software to every merchant that would determine and automatically debit the proper tax without adding administrative burdens.

Both 2 and 3 potentially could be cheated by a skilled hacker, which makes me nervous.

4. Eliminate the sales tax entirely for both physical and virtual businesses, and replace the revenues with income tax or some other mechanism. In today’s political climate? I think this would be a non-starter.

In short, I don’t think we have the answer yet. But I agree with the ABA that the current system of a free ride for the virtuals and a big squeeze on the physicals is not equitable (and has probably contributed to the sad demise of so many downtown storefronts)

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Energy & Sustainability, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Carmen, Costa Rica: A banana tree is a graceful thing, especially when it gets old and tall. Thousands of acres of bananas may look beautiful, but to me, the vast plantation was the most depressing place I saw in Costa Rica.

Carmen is a company town. Both Del Monte and Chiquita have facilities there, and the banana fields stretch for miles, broken only by thin strips of border plantings separating the fields from the roads and from each other, or by the drab company houses and the packaging facilities.

Most of our trip around Costa Rica has involved protected wilderness areas, and we’ve seen what bananas look like in nature; they grow a few here and there amidst the astounding biodiversity of the rainforest. Thousands of trees in orderly rows would not be found in nature.

A nearby organic farmer told us that this kind of monoculture requires enormous amounts of pesticides and herbicides. Not so good for the planet in this country that prides itself on its eco-consciousness.

That claim is somewhat at odds with what we observed and heard. Yes, the country has done a great job on land preservation, putting aside 25 percent of the country as protected areas. But we saw a lot of people applying pesticides (usually not wearing protective gear) on the fields along the roadsides. We saw almost no organic products in the stores. And a coffee merchant told us that hardly anyone rows organically because the yields are too small (something that’s even more true on a biodiverse farm, where farmers have to harvest different crops in small amounts and develop markets willing to take those small amounts). My guess is that in such a humid climate, it’s really hard to keep the pests down. Even the much smaller banana farms we saw protected the fruit from animals and insects with blue plastic bags (which then make it much easier to harvest the fruit, too.

And then there’s the matter of conditions for the workers. We met someone who had interviewed some of them, and she told us the spraying is done aerially and the workers are unprotected. They work 11-hour shifts with no break and get paid strictly on piecework.

I understand now why I once heard an interview with Barbara Kingsolver, promoting her wonderful locavore book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about eating locally. She said, “some of my friends gave up meat to make the world better. I gave up bananas.”

I’ve been buying only organic bananas for a few years; I think I need to find a source for bananas that are not only organic, but fair trade. The way they are grown commercially is not sustainable, and doesn’t make me feel very good.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, General Commentary, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Ever hear of the first-mover advantage? That’s a concept that Gravity Switch, a local web services firm here in Western Massachusetts, clearly understands. In three weeks, these guys came up with an idea (for a kiosk to frame an iPad, for touchscreen applications like museum displays), got the thing—called “iBracket”—prototyped and built, and started selling it.

In a situation where speed to market is critical, they were right there. Not surprisingly, they started coming up #1 on Google for “iPad mounting bracket”—21 days after coming up with the idea, seven days after finishing the prototype, and three days after taking the first order (which happened one hour after it was first mentioned on a blog).

By comparison, I have a publishing client who should have had his book out a year ago. This client is a walking testimonial to the need to understand that perfection is the enemy of good, and that good is good enough to move forward. The latest delay: I have been waiting for approval on a cover design since February. It would take ten minutes or less to look at the cover and tell us (me and the designer) if it’s good, or what changes need to be made. But no amount of prodding seems to get this person unstuck. Meanwhile, it’s already too late to have books ready for Book Expo America at the end of the month. Total missed opportunity because a false quest for perfection and lack of communication got in the way of good and moving forward and seizing the moment.

I think Gravity Switch’s approach makes a whole lot more sense.

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