Chicken Scratchings

Posts Tagged ‘Toastmasters’

A successful self-publisher must be a terrific self-promoter. There is a myth that goes; if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. If you believe that you’ll probably buy a genuine Rolex watch from a shady man in an alley for thirty bucks. No one beats a path to your door that isn’t encouraged, excited, and enthusiastic about getting the benefits of your product.

Thomas Edison

In the case of self-publishers, books are the products. Products, no matter how good they are, must be sold. Even Thomas Alva Edison with his marvelous inventions like the phonograph, and incandescent electric light bulbs knew that nothing moves without a sale. What was Edison best at selling? You are right, himself. He was a self-promoter of the highest rank. Electric light was actually invented 50 years before him, but he got credit because he learned how to make it functional, then he tied his name to it and voila Con-Edison was born.

What’s that you say? You aren’t a salesman type. You can’t sell water to a man whose house is on fire. No matter, I’m not talking about going out and knocking on doors. I’m talking about selling yourself by convincing others that the product of your mind, your book, is worth buying and reading. I know a woman in my area, Nancy Miles, who recently self-published a cookbook. This cookbook has the usual mouthwatering recipes with color photos and such, but it also has the added attraction of allowing her readers to go to her website NancyMilesInGoodTaste.com and use templates to create their own family legacy recipe pages. You can literally create a family cookbook with recipes to hand down to other generations. What a great idea!

Is In Good Taste selling well? It is, but if she had taken delivery and kept it in boxes in her garage, it wouldn’t. Nancy has been working the retail store circuit. She takes a book into buyers and shows them why it is different than the other cookbooks they sell. No high highfalutin’ sales pitch, just confidence gained by a belief in her product, and the desire to give everyone an opportunity to do wonderful things for their families.

The title of this post is Lousy Public Speakers Sell Fewer Books which came to me as I realized just how much publishing is changing. The traditional model is based on the publisher buying the rights, incurring all of the costs of  production and distribution, and rewarding the author with a royalty on the sales. The stark truth is that if traditional publishing was the only route, 95% to 98% of the available manuscripts would never get published. What a waste. Nancy didn’t wait for the luck of the draw. She’s out busily creating a market while she’s waiting to be discovered. In the meantime, she’s earning a pretty good living. I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that her earnings in the first six months are in the neighborhood of $30,000 to $45,000. Remember, she’s doing this on her own, by herself.

Confidence is the key

My point is you don’t have to be a big time traditionally published author to make a living. You don’t have to be Og Mandino who wrote The Greatest Salesman in the World. What you do have to have is a good book, and the confidence to tell people about it. How do you gain that confidence? There are many routes, many coaches, and many teachers, but for my money, there is no better place to start than with Toastmasters. I’ve been in Toastmasters for four years, and I’ve seen time after time people come to our meetings, stand behind the lectern, and shake so badly that they rattle the table. I’ve seen those same people after their fourth, fifth, or sixth speech in the first manual, literally transform themselves into a confident public speaker. It is beautiful. It truly is. And what’s even better is you don’t have to empty your bank account. My club, Precision Speakers, collects $35.00 every six months. That’s only a buck-thirty-five per meeting. To find a club meeting near you go to the Toastmasters International website.

I suggest you get your shy or reticent self to a Toastmaster meeting right away. Get some club speeches under your belt and feel that confidence rise.

Last Saturday I presented a workshop at the Toastmasters District 15 fall convention. I called it Every Speaker Needs a Book. It is the truth; every speaker does need a book. If someone is going to stand before you in the capacity of “expert,” don’t you have the right to know that they are qualified?

We are living in a new age of publishing. We are seeing the rapid rise of the self-publisher. I liken it to the changes in the music business during the 1960’s. It started with Rock and Roll. This new music hit the music industry so quickly and so hard that the entrenched establishment couldn’t wrap their minds around it. Then came the Beatles, and the British Invasion. Every album the Beatles cut redefined the genre. Music experienced an era of creativity pushing up from the grassroots (no pun intended for the band called Grassroots). Every high school in the country had at least two or three starry eyed groups practicing in their parent’s basements or garages.

60's World Shakers

I try to imagine myself in the position of a record executive. Music is flooding in from everywhere. Groups with strange names, strange sounds, and strange behaviors are climbing the charts. What do I do? I can get on-board or try to wait out the insanity. The problem is that I don’t have any point of reference. There isn’t a definition of Rock and Roll. Almost anything goes. So, what do I do? I shrug and open the studios to just about everyone, hoping to find something the boomer kids will buy.

Today the floodgates are open in publishing. Why? Big changes in book print production have created this new era. In the past traditional publishers held all the strings. The cost for an author to go it alone was prohibitive to anyone but the rich. If someone decided to self-publish, their efforts were tagged  with the derogatory title of vanity publishing.

The rise of computer’s word processors and the development of digital printing have made it so reasonably priced that almost anyone could get in the game. Furthermore, there are e-books, and audio books. Finally, the Boomer Generation has grown up and there are millions, upon millions of people that think it would be groovy to write a book. As a boomer myself, I can tell you that our generation loved the spotlight. We marched, we rallied, we protested. We got our pictures in the paper when we did something completely egregious. Boomer was probably the right name because we were loud, intrusive, and obnoxious.

The boomers are the right people to lead the publishing revolution. We have never been satisfied with status quo. We are self-reliant, and don’t really trust the establishment. We know how to organize. The tribe of boomers is enormous and powerful.

If you get the idea that I am in favor of this revolution, you are right. I am in awe of what is transpiring. The Internet, Computers, Alternative Publishing methods, have breached the dam and I’m sure this is just the beginning.

Creating a book is only the first half of the job. It’s like the Yin, the Yang comes with promoting and marketing. TAP (The Author Platform) is a relatively easy program to follow to learn Internet marketing, selling through Amazon, and other methods. Click here for more information.

8 Must-Do Steps To Get Your Book Out In-Time

I’m preparing a seminar to present at the District 15 Toastmasters conference mid-November. The title is Why Every Speaker Needs a Book. It’s a good subject perfectly designed for the needs of my audience. The problem? My book I am writing for public speakers is far from ready. I have been working on it regularly but it isn’t complete enough to add the final touches, get it to an editor, and print it.

Some of the points I intend to hammer home have to do with speakers using their books as a way to gain credibility, and to generate income through back of the room sales. I wanted to have my book there to demonstrate how it is done. Instead, I’m feeling somewhat hypocritical. Does this hypocrisy diminish the value of the information? I hope not. We’ll see.

Even a Professional Can Fool Himself

In fairness when I announced my intention to have a book ready for the Fall Conference, my wife said that I didn’t have enough time. “I can do it!” I said in the most convincing cartoon super-hero voice I could muster.

Most of us need deadlines or we will procrastinate forever. Setting an unrealistic deadline really doesn’t help, it hurts. Now my dream of walking in with a box of freshly printed books and smiling as the attendees lined up to have me sign their books and tell me how much they enjoyed the seminar has gone poof.

Start Backwards to Go Forward

What is my point? Book production takes time and before you set an unrealistic deadline work backwards on a time line starting with the last step which is shipping. Ha, you thought I was going to say printing, didn’t you? No, in your planning you have to figure in the time to get the books to you. For example, if you are using a local printer same day is realistic. If you are printing overseas, plan on at least three weeks by boat and another week to get through customs. Then no matter what your realistic time line is, add more buffer to each and every step. In book production things rarely go as planned. Below are some points you need to consider to build a realistic time frame:

1. Shipping. allow one day to four weeks or more.
2. Printing. Expect two to five weeks. A soft cover book takes less time than a hard cover. Discuss time frame with the printer.
3. Typesetting and Layout. Should take two to four weeks for this stage. Expect to be actively involved during this step. Authors and editors must check, and recheck to make sure everything is right before going to press. It is cheaper to fix problems during this phase than it is at press. Scrutinize everything.
4. Proof Reading. Some consider proofreading to be part of the editor’s job and it is, but in my experience, you can’t have too many eyes on it. I once read that a new edition of Webster’s Dictionary goes through 132 proofing steps and they still find errors. Find a good proofreader you won’t regret it, but if you go to press with typo’s I guarantee that they will become glaringly obvious the second you crack open the book. Then the mistakes will haunt you. The only thing you will be able think about are the errors. Cut yourself a little slack. We’ve all been there. Remember that you didn’t see the problems after reading, re-reading, and reading your manuscript time and time again, so it is likely that most of your readers won’t see them either.
5. Editing. Check with your editor to determine the amount of time they will need. The type of book and size will make a lot of difference to the time frame. A fictional book will go faster than a technical treatise. With fiction, grammar, sentence structure, and spelling corrections will pretty much do it, but with non-fiction a re-check of the facts and understanding the technical terms takes time. My best guess is that an editor could do the job in three to eight weeks.
6. Cover Design. Here’s a piece of good news. Cover design can begin at the same time your editor starts and probably won’t add more time, with one caveat; you will want the editor to check the copy. Your cover, despite the old saw that says, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is your first impression. If the cover doesn’t draw the reader, it doesn’t matter how good the text is. Time spent on cover design is worth it.
7. Marketing. It isn’t too soon to consult with book marketing professionals. You may hire them to give you general advice or have them work closely with the editor and artists. I recommend them, but you have to consider the price tag. Hourly rates, just like hiring an attorney, can quickly spin out of control. It doesn’t take long to rack up thousands of dollars.
8. Writing and Research. I’ve seen Internet ads saying that a book can be written in 14 days or less and I’m sure that some people could do it, but most can’t. Some manuscripts take six to eight months others can take years. Whatever the amount of time you need to take for writing and research is the time you need. Period. Again, add extra buffer because we all tend to underestimate what we can achieve and when.

I’m not saying that a book couldn’t be done much faster than the time frames I’ve outlined, but in preparing a good book, a book that will make you proud takes time. If you want a book to hit the marketplace in one year from now, it isn’t too early to get started. That’s what I’m saying. Get going, author, get going.

You may not believe this but after you have birthed a book, and getting a book out has much in common with birthing babies, the hard work begins. Finding readers is a difficult task indeed. Check out The Author’s Platform it’s a low cost, easy to use, step-by-step program to teach you everything you need to know about Internet marketing. I personally recommend it.

If you would like to receive notice of blog updates and other messages from me please register by entering your email address in the box on the upper left hand side.