First Word

In promoting numerous books over the years, here are a couple things that I've learned that "are what they are," so to speak. If the tipping point never arrives ... it just doesn't arrive and dumping more money and resources will not change that situation . I compare this to survey. If you survey 100 people and come up with an answer that is perhaps between 10-12 percent it doesn't matter if you survey another 1,000 people, your answer will still roughly be 10-12 percent. So if you're marketing and your book finally finds its place in the market and starts selling, it will continue to sell if you continue to promote. If you're marketing and your book has gotten 10 reviews with no momentum it's not very likely 20 reviews will be any different. The buying mood, the topic or story isn't resonating for whatever reason in the marketplace. When I have a book that has received more reviews than we can count and yet still sales remain overall flat (even ...

Good or bad press is always good press. Attention is, after all, attention and a spotlight on anything calls attention to it. I was reading a book review of another author's book. Now I know this book very well (and I'm not going to say the book to avoid "insult to injury"). I got extremely annoyed when the book reviewer, who was slamming the book, started making specific statements about the content. What's worse, the statements and the examples were not from the actual book. I was aghast to read the reviewer say the writing was bad, and then show examples that didn't come from the book! How can you say a book is poorly written and then use examples of why that aren't even from the material? If you're going to criticize something try being accurate. You can't say something is poorly written and then write something poorly written as an example that doesn't come from the source. I wasn't sure whether to laugh, mock the reviewer with a ...

I don't know why I am still shocked when people are just so rude for no good reason. For our radio show First Word Radio , I recently had a random, rude comment posted on Facebook that cited the show as the worst show ever. I sort of knew the "friend's" name and was shocked. It was a pointless comment from a guy I hardly knew. First and foremost, it's my Facebook Wall you're pretty much defacing with "graffiti". Second, no one is forcing you to listen to the show. It's a show we do as a marketing and entertainment tool for my company 3L Publishing . We do it for fun and to promote other authors. We're up to between 1,000-2,000 listens per show. If people happen to like it and apparently some seem to enjoy it then bravo and yaye! We're not asking for anyone's approval anyway. If you don't like it, that's cool and no problem. But I do have a problem when someone blatantly goes out of their way to post some mean-spirited message ...