When a Thank You Is Necessary, Send the Real Thing

Feature

Thank Yous, Greeting Cards, and Networking

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Many of you know that I spent years in the retail industry. During that time, I marketed my own stores among about a thousand other things. Thus, when I read anything about retailing, I prick up my ears. It is an especially important topic these days because retail reflects the economy (and for authors, the economy reflects how well our books will sell).

Anyway, the LA Times (Nov. 24, 2011 Business Section) ran an article cleverly titled “An Industry in Need of Sympathy.” They were talking about greeting cards, of course! And paper thank you notes. They attribute their slide in sales to electronic greetings, but note that American Greetings reported an uptick after a long period of poorer and poorer sales.

I’ve been recommending cards and thank you notes for authors (and general marketing/networking) for a long, long time. Maybe someone has been listening. Don’t get me wrong. I do a lot of gratitude messages and thank yous on the Internet, too, but there is nothing like a real paper card with a real personal message and a real handwritten signature. If you want your thoughtfulness to be remembered, send something made of paper. Use a stamp. And, yeah, a little ink.

That principle was what guided Magdalena Ball and I when we decided to publish our Celebration Series of chapbooks, too. We figured that cards could be given an upward nudge in terms of quality by including real poetry, not the sugary stuff that sometimes doesn’t suit the occasion and never appeals to literary types, in any case. We designed our chapbooks in a size that would fit into greeting-card size envelopes you can buy at Staples and priced them in the greeting card price range of $6.95. A different book celebrates different gift-giving (and card-giving!) holidays like Valentines, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, even one that celebrates women that could be given to them on their birthdays. Those who would like to know more about our concept can learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com/poetry_books.htm.

By the way, our chapbooks use artwork by Vicki Thomas, Jacquie Schmall and May Lattanzio that is just as beautiful (and quite a bit artier!) than your run-of-the-mill greeting card!

In The Frugal Book Promoter I advise authors to keep a top 50 list of their most treasured contacts. To keep in touch with them throughout the year. So what would be wrong with supporting two declining industries (greeting cards and publishing!) and sending them a real thank you note occasionally, or a real book. Maybe even a real book of poetry!

A final note to writers: Hallmark recently did a study. They learned that 20 paper cards are sent for every e-card. I often don’t open e-cards because I fear viruses or phishing scams (they have been perpetrated on us that way, you know!). So, writers, when it is important that your friend of business associate receive your thanks yous, send the real thing.

-----
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second ediction of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

Learning More About Formatting for Kindle and New Features

I’ve been busy this week updating the Kindle edition of my Frugal Book Promoter. What I learned from this effort is that their automatic Kindle formatter shouldn’t be trusted. It’s not that I don’t appreciate how easy they’ve made it to upload a Kindle book (to say nothing of the great 70% in royalties they pay!), but it just doesn’t work quite as smoothly as it should. So, advice from this corner is “Use that preview feature!”

• And don’t just skim. Turn the pages one by one. It’s a lot to go through when you have a 416 page book, but you gotta do it!
• Check to see the links are all alive (this is an e-book, not a paper book so links are important).
• Notice the cool feature that lets them include your book cover.
• Kindle doesn’t support indexes ‘cause it doesn’t use page numbers so remove your index or do what I did—make a Keyword Index of it. Why not download it at www.budurl.com/FrugalBkProKindle and see how I worked that. You know you wanted the digitally searchable iteration of this book anyway and Kindle books work on your regular computer.
• Check to be sure the links in your table of contents are live—and please call it just “Contents!” “Table of Contents” is redundant.
• Forget indented paragraphs (unless you write fiction and just have to use them!). It’s so much easier to leave lines between paragraphs.
• Be sure anything you have in the front matter that’s important to you is there. If not, you may have to remove it to the backmatter. I understand it’s all about putting actual pages up front where they can be searched by would-be readers, but it may also be a Kindle preference for launching their readers right into their books. (With that in mind, you may want to reconsider some of the niceties like a dedication page.)
• You can get frugal help with your formatting! If you have a mag, go for iBookAuthor at Apple's Mac App Store. If you have a PC, my fellow UCLA Extension Writers' Program instructor suggests www.Liberwriter.com. He says their $25 fee is reasonable compared to $100 quote he received from a freelance consultant.    

Oh, and an important reason I’m writing this. If you already have the Kindle edition of The Frugal Book Promoter, it should be updated for you automatically. But if it isn’t, nudge them a bit. You deserve your new copy.

-----
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second ediction of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

Important Tip for Writers: BEA a Must for New Releases

Just a quick tip. Consider a trip to Book Book Expo America for June of 2012. Remember that at least part of your trip is tax deductible. There are learning and promotion opportunities galore at BEA. Check the index of your copy of The Frugal Book Promoter for entries on “trade shows,” “conferences,” and “Book Expo America” to plan your BEA marketing attack, or at least to convince yourself you need to be in New York in June. (-: www.bookexpoamerica.com

-----
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second ediction of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

On Dictionaries, Word-Throwaways, and New Words

When I was very young, my grandfather brought home a huge dictionary. It was about two feet thick—the kind they put on pedestals in libraries in the old days. Everyone in the family thought he was nuts but me. I was awarded it by default, put it in the basket of my blue and white Schwinn, and pedaled it home. It was a bit unwieldy so eventually it was stowed in the rafters of a basement room. Then when I was in New York learning the ropes of publicity, my mom and dad sold the house. “Oh, no! My dictionary!” I asked them to try to retrieve it from the new owners but the story hadn’t changed much. They thought I was crazy.

So a couple years later when I went home to visit, I stopped by our old home on a whim. It took chutzpah! “Hello, I used to live here and there may be something in your basement that belongs to me—that is, if you don’t have a need for it.”

Now this was not yesterday. In those days people actually let strangers into their homes occasionally, but there was still a chance they’d consider an ax-murder possibiity. I trailed behind the new owners to the basement and there it was. It hadn’t been moved an inch but it was covered with cobwebs and dust. I was ecstatic and the new owners were either happy to let me have it or eager to get rid of me.

I still have that dictionary. It has those little thumbprint cutouts for the different letters of the alphabet and the edges of each page are gilded. It has a linen cover. It can’t really be used because it has none of the new words in it.

Ahhh, yes. But it does have four color plates of the flags of countries that existed then. There are even a few that still exist. Most of the changes have been in Africa. There are other pages that illustrate flowers and the human skeleton. Stuff like that. I mean, this is a real dictionary. So I kept it for the smell (however smudgey—that’s my own word for moldy-but-I-don’t-care-how-bad-it-stinks!), the memories, the feel of the silky thin but still substantial pages. And because I kept reading that dictionaries discarded old words to make room for the new. And, naturally, I couldn’t discard any words, right? Fiction writers can find old words valuable.

By the time computers came along, I was attached to this volume, this tome, this giant doorstop! And now the kicker!

National Geographic tells me that the words in the Oxford English Dictionary never disappear. Once a word has been very carefully vetted, it stays there. “The OED is unique,” says the new words editor of the book, “in that we never remove a word once it has been included.”

Just in case you’re interested, they add some 4,000 words of 6,000 considered each year. Including the new meaning of the word “unplugged.” It now also means the “state of living without electronic devices.”

Now wouldn’t that be awful! Almost as bad as living without my near-ancient dictionary!

PS: Can’t resist another just-added word. You know when you put your Coke bottle on a manuscript and it leaves a caramel-colored ring that can’t be erased? Rejoice. You have made a “dringle.”

 

PS: My articles, essays—even my rants—are available for reprint in your blog or Web site. Just let me know what article you like and I’ll supply you with an appropriate credit line with links. HoJoNews @   aol (dot) com.

-----
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second ediction of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

Trader Joe's: What Authors Can Learn from Their Growing Pains

The Trader Joe’s in my hometown is having growing pains. They have closed down one of their stores in a kind of nondescript strip mall and opening another with a lot of pizzazz. And they’re hoping that we won’t notice too much. Ahem.

The LA Times business page explains: “…after decades cultivating an image as the cozy neighborhood grocer, the 14,670 square-foot store …highlights the conundrum facing the Monrovia company: how to maintain the eclectic, friendly vibe that has garnered it legions of faithful shoppers, while expanding at a brisk pace.”

Mmm. This sounds like a problem facing retailers and other business people in the fast-growing 90s. But it happens now, too. In fact, I’d bet that most anyone in business (and that includes authors, whether we like the idea or not!), will face it at some time. I remember when my husband and I moved one of our retail stores from one end of the mall to another because we were out of space. Some of our customers thought we were getting too fancy.

I remember the day I decided to write a little e-book for my UCLA students that turned out to be the multi award-winningThe Frugal Book Promoter (http://budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo ), now in its second edition. That’s a far cry from being a novelist and poet.

I remember when, after the success of the HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers, I decided to do a HowToDoItFrugally series of books for retailers (www.howtodoitfrugally.com/retailers_books.htm) because I had started speaking at national retail tradeshows and, heck, I needed handouts anyway, right?

As you can tell, I believe in taking opportunity when it steps up and plops itself in my lap. Having said that, once we’ve made the momentous decision to veer from our intended path or to grow, we need to immediately think about branding.

Here are some of the things that I think can help people or business in situations like this. Mind you, these are not the result of huge marketing studies. They’re all just seat-of-the-pants lessons learned from trial and error—though some are based on tried-and-true marketing principles.

1. Drag out your mission statement and paste it to your bulletin board (or make computer wallpaper out of it). You do have a mission statement don’t you? If not, write down the goals you’ve had since you started in your career path and use it instead (until you get your mission statement written.)

2.      Look at your idea for your new project. Write down the reasons you want to do it. Then write down the pluses and minuses—and weight them. This list will help you make better decisions for the entire project as well as the marketing of it.

3.      Now make a list of how you think your present customers (yes, readers, too!) will view these changes.

4.      Using the benefits you found for your present customers in the above list, plan a marketing/promotion campaign around those benefits.

5.      Now make a list of the benefits you see for the new customers your upcoming project will attract. Draw up a marketing campaign for these folks, too. I know it looks like double work but…well, you’ll see why.

6.      Now see if you can find similarities between the two lists. That’s where you start. You can branch out to target the fringes of the two groups later.

These are general planning aids, but here is a Web site tip specifically for you. Think very hard before you open a completely new Web site for your new project. Consider instead using one site with different sections for your projects. Think how there might be crossover between customers. Keep your branding similar (maybe colors from a similar palette), but not necessarily identical. Don’t expect too much in crossover sales, but don’t discard the possibility. New efforts need support from whatever quarter we can find them. If you decide against that, at least make links from one site to the other plentiful and obvious. And make sure you’ve given your visitor reasons (benefits) they will find when they click to the new section—or the new Web site.

If you would like to see how smarty MaAnna Stephenson helped me get all my projects from consulting and editing to my books (from poetry to how-to books!) arranged on one Web site, go to www.howtodoitfrugally.com.  And find her at MaAnna@Blogaid.com.

CHJ
Reprints of all my articles are available at no charge. Please contact me at HoJoNews@aol.com for a suitable credit and add a byline and links where appropriate.

-----
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second ediction of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog: