I’d like to introduce you to a few of my friends and give you some links to what you can get from them (Free or otherwise. They’ve got great stuff and they are my friends after all.). They are all good, smart, thoughtful people, offering business the best of the best (IMHO). Check them out.

Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies, has written another wonderful book that will help you with the ‘sales’ end of your job: SNAP Selling. Visit her new site. There are fabulous freebies that she’s offering. Her ideas are solid, her writing is clear, and she understands the buyer’s buying decision issues (I’ve even written a bit for the book – discussing Buying Facilitation™, naturally) and offers help to get a buyer’s attention in this insane world where everything is fighting for our buyers’ attention. Go to Amazon.com and buy the book, and then go to her site and sign up for the free resources. Jill is one of the smart ones in the field, and I respect her greatly.

Leadership Excellence, Sales and Service Excellence, and Personal Excellence Magazines have been around decades, offering articles from new thinkers that are consistently solid and interesting. They have two new products that you can use:  ABC Leadership Development Tests and Templates and Personal Excellence Plan. I’d also like you to consider subscribing (yes, and giving them real money to do so).  This magazine has been a bellweather for integrity in business: Leadership Excellence will continue to shape future business successes. Our mission (to help you find a wiser, better way to live your life and lead your organization) is one of positive growth and improvement. And as our 25-year track record shows, we’ve found the means to lasting advancement. Continue browsing LeaderExcel.com to learn more about what Leadership Excellence can do for you.

How about Trust-Building – on line! Imagine! Meri Aaron Walker will teach you how to get friends, meet clients, and have virtual relationships on the net. Here is what she says about her work: I sell a distance relationship management solution. In a nutshell, I help people encounter and overcome the barriers in remote work.For almost two decades, I have been part of an emerging social body of women who have found ourselves responding to the deepest vocational needs of human beings in the midst of the financial, ecological, and social tsunami we’ve been living through as the Internet emerges.

Go to her site and get her new little book. It’s filled with goodies that will help you be really, really professional and smart on Skype and in video-based meetings. Stop spending all of that money for flights when for $17.97 you can have that meeting on line – and be just as successful.

Stone Payton has a radio show in which he interviews leaders and rainmakers, as well as a video business in which he goes around the country, interviewing and videoing authors, making their book reviews and videos available to all. He has an interesting take on the world mixed with his iconic verve and humor. Check it out. And, I’ll be on his show June 21st. I’ll remind you later.

Martin Rutte, co-author of Seeking the Sacred: leading a spiritual life in a secular world, and I have been friends and co-conspirators for 20 years as we’ve both worked assiduously to bring spiritual values into the world of business. He’s in charge of getting out a wonderful newsletter on work and values. The newsletter is part of the Centre for Spirituality and the Workplace, Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. Take a look and/or sign up to receive the newsletter. The articles are both thoughtful and thought-provoking. If you’re a regular reader of my newsletters, these are just the sort of articles that will excite you.

The Wisdom Journal is a good place to go for anything you need inspiration for. Whether it is to find out how to have a fair fight with your husband or to motivate your employees, the Wisdom Journal finds articles that offer caring advice. The articles are smart, informative and well written. Check them out.

Alen Majer is one of the good guys. Kind, gentle, integrous, and smart. He’s got a new little book called Trigger Events. He regularly runs free webinars, and talks about finding buyers who are ready to buy. For those of you who don’t yet use Buying Facilitation™ and don’t know how to help buyers navigate through their internal buying decision issues, and are seeking those already ready to buy, Alen’s the guy.

I’ll give you further updates on friends as they write new books. It’s an honor for me to know and serve these people.

sd

Friends with Benefits is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

My jacket designer (Michael Warrell of Design Solutions) assured me (before he called his lawyer and stopped talking to me) that it was all circumstantial, but when anyone looks at the two books together, it seems they are almost identical: same color, same lettering, same typeface and size of type face, same basic layout, same envelope theme. If it was circumstantial, it was an act of God.

Indeed, it looked as if Michael had done a search, liked the design of Seaman’s jacket, and slightly adapted it. And, given that our titles are so similar, the books look so similar they could be mistaken for being part of a series.

I was in a panic. I had just spent 5 months of 17-hour days writing my new book, and 2 months of doing 1-1 marketing, writing blogs and guest blogs, doing interviews and being interviewed, to create a pretty professional launch week. I had cajoling discussions with Amazon to delay fulfillment of their pre-sale orders until THE LAUNCH DATE. I had books here, ready for fulfillment for non-U.S. orders. Indeed: I was ready for success. Ready for the next day. Was there going to be a Next Day?

SCRAP THE LAUNCH?

Did I have to scrap my marketing? Start again with a new jacket design? It felt like it was going to be a train wreck, and I felt I couldn’t stop the train a day before the big launch date. It was an ethical dilemma: I wasn’t responsible for the jacket design, having trusted my professional designer to give me a fresh design and not even considering the possibility that the jacket might have been ‘borrowed.’

And yet, and yet, I was responsible. Was I supposed to have researched other jacket designs? In my haze of writing around the clock and choosing a jacket design in the middle of writing, I guess it never occurred to me to not trust my designer and do some research on my own. At the end of the day, the buck stopped with me. It seemed I had trusted the wrong person.

I wrote Dave Seaman a note immediately, and he had his publishing house contact me. Needless to say, there was a mess that ensued for days. Should I pull the book? Didn’t seem to be an option. Sue the jacket designer? I got a legal note from his lawyer denying any culpability but offering me a settlement to not sue (and they didn’t even pay me the settlement fee!). I couldn’t reach Seaman to discuss, and I was leaving for Australia.

Two friends/colleagues showed up to help: Eric Wolf of Gravity Free Radio, and Stone Payton of The High Velocity Radio Show, both sent Seaman a note suggesting some interesting ideas: get me and Seaman on the radio to do a program on Dirty Little Secrets in Marketing and Sales. They figured we might as well make lemonade, and help each other sell books.

In the end, it all seemed to work out: Seaman and I are supporting each other and have decided not to make it a legal hassle. But it could have turned ugly for sure.

When publishing houses do a jacket design, they have internal folks who do it. But as a self-publishing author (for this book, anyway), here is my question: how does a client know to trust a vendor? How would I have averted this problem? How would I have thought to NOT trust my book jacket designer (given the odds that just maybe he was influenced by Seaman’s jacket design while doing research for ideas for me)?

Given that in this day and age, everyone seems to be borrowing everyone else’s material (someone recently sent out electronic copies of my ebook to her team after purchasing one copy, then contacted me to help her discuss the book during a conference call. In our discussion – and she was quite lovely and excited about the book - she said she wanted to stay in integrity and thought that maybe she was in the ‘gray zone’ from sending out copies she hadn’t paid for, finally recognizing the integrity in actually purchasing copies for each person). For some reason, people seem to think that because a book is an ebook that it’s legally possible to send copies without paying for them. Would they make copies of a physical book? Of course not.  And the difference is….. what?

Here is a rule: don’t copy anyone else’s material, either as a design or a book. It took us a while to realize that musicians should get paid for their music. I hereby request 1. jacket designers come up with fresh designs, and 2. that people pay for each copy of an ebook you buy and do not share it unless it’s paid for. We authors would like to get paid for our IP also.

sd

Integrity in Book Publishing is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

As of tonight, Dirty Little Secrets is #2 in the sales category on Amazon! How exciting! I am so happy I can barely express it!

I have a lot of people to thank. The most amazing thing is that I’ve never met most of these angels – we have met over the past months (in some cases a year or more) over the phone!

First, and friend par excellence, is Jeff Blackwell of SalesPractice.com. Even though we don’t know each other well, he fell in love with Buying Facilitation™ and my decision facilitation model quite a while ago, believing that Buying Facilitation™ completes the sales model – with integrity. He has been tirelessly, and obnoxiously (smile) pitching me and the new book daily for months. He humbles me.

My friend Jill has been my sounding board, my mother, my friend, and my coach. Without her, I might have had a different book – certainly be a different person.

Clayton Shold at Salesopedia made me laugh while he did stuff to help my new book that was wwaaayyyy beyond the call of duty. Avril Shelton has been an angel, appearing softly to lend a hand at all of the right moments.  Anne Miller kept me honest and reminded me of what I was forgetting. Paul Mccord and Meri Aaron Walker kept me present. Craig Rosenberg, Gerhard Gshwandtner, David Friedland and Stone Payton reminded me of who I really am and sometimes kept me going when I wanted to go back to bed. Alan Chapman has believed in me and kept advertising about me for years and years and years.

And so many other wonderful, kind, caring folks who believe in Buying Facilitation™. Thanks everyone. You are the best!

Without these angels, not only would the book not have gotten written in the months I spent writing it, but it wouldn’t have gotten the recognition or air time that it’s now getting world wide. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.

Here are some podcasts from the previous weeks that I have made with my friends: Lee Glickstein (Relational Presence), Clayton Shold (Why Sales Fail), Lee Colan (Leadership), Jeff Ogden (Buying Facilitation™)

sd

For those of you still interested in purchasing Dirty Little Secrets, go here. Remember that Amazon is only selling it in the U.S. For international orders, order from us.

Thanks everyone is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

For those of you entering into the ‘book marketing’ business, let me offer a few tips. First: you need partners. Lots and lots of partners. I became a demon – writing to everyone on all of my lists…all the time. My wonderful tech guy Shawn Dibble helped me design, send, and create the materials I needed so I had everything I needed as soon as I realized I needed it.

I began my marketing as soon as I started writing. I sent out early chapters to dozens and dozens of people: some friends, some colleagues, some competitors, some clients. I got feedback, buddies who hung with me through changes and corrections, and folks who ultimately became demons at helping me promote the book they watched grow up. It gave me other brains to think with, other viewpoints from the field, areas of problems, new ways to look at book organization. And I didn’t feel so alone.

Next: I created some nifty tool kits to help people help me promote. After all, if I’m going to ask people to ‘work’ for me, the least I can do is make it easy for them. So I developed a kit with automatic tweets, different sized blog posts, an ‘interview’ with me, etc. Brainless and painless. As a result, with a flick of the wrist, people could lend a hand and help me market without having to take time from their days.  Btw, here is my kit. Cool, right?

Then, I began contacting folks on the web who I thought would be willing to partner with me. My very favorite (other than some scheduled radio interviews with Stone Payton and Erik Wolf, plus the numerous podcasts I’m doing with colleagues – see my calendar) is MaestroConference. They have this truly super-cool conference site that allows people to get into chat groups during  on-line meetings, have large group discussions and ask questions, etc. I believe this state-of-the-art product will be endemic and used by every major corporation someday. As a marketing device, they’ve gotten a bunch of truly fabulous icons (my personal favorites are Diana Whitney and Marianne Williamson and Barbara Marx Hubbard)  to give free seminars so folks could meet the greats and get free time to trial MaestroConference.com at the same time. It’s a win-win. Here is a link to an invite for my free teleseminar Wednesday, Oct 14, noon PT.

Everything else I’ve done defies what we’re taught regarding marketing. I basically spoke to folks personally. Sometimes by email, sometimes by phone, sometimes by Skype conference if they were out of the country. I asked them how I could serve them, I did blogs on them (payFORWARD), I sent them copies of the unfinished, and often typo-laden manuscript, I had lots of people vote on the cover design, I called crying when frustrated by a horrid editor, an irresponsible layout designer and a proofer who should have had his fingers chopped off. By the way, if you want the names of these folks so you can avoid them, call me.

I collected testimonials from everyone who in any way read any part of the book. I gathered freebies to hand out for the book launch …net net net, I have made this all a community effort. People who I never knew have introduced me to others. People who I never liked became my friends. People who I didn’t know well put in Herculean efforts because they believed in me – and I didn’t even know them! Some folks put together groups of us to help each other through our book writing. People who didn’t think sales needed to change are now converts. Along the way I even got work.

And I have a very special ‘Thank You’ to the folks at BookSurge.com, the POD arm of Amazon.com. I decided to self-publish this book because I didn’t want to wait 2 years for it to come out. And with the interesting personalities on my editorial/design team, I ended up interfacing with BookSurge far more than anyone expected. They came out smelling like a rose: they were supportive, creative, flexible, kind. They handed me off to higher ups when necessary and then circled back to make sure all was well. They did me favors, they stretched rules. I LOVE these folks. Every single solitary one of them. I would strongly, strongly recommend them over a conventional publishing house. Truly. So long as you’re willing to do the marketing on your own (which publishing houses rarely do for you anyway unless you’re Stephen King), call these folks. I give them a perfect 10. My rep is David Friedland. He’s amazingly gentle and supportive and professional and absolutely unflappable.

I am happy to report that I have come through the last 8 months a far more enriched person. Very Very Tired. But my book is far, far better because of the community of friends, the always-interesting feedback, the never-ending support and good will of everyone involved.

Thank you all. Together, we’ve made a great book.

sd

Listen to Sharon Drew Morgen speak on MaestroConference on Oct. 14 at 12P.M. PST

Check out my new book coming out October 15: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read two free chapters. Sign up for presales deals, and announcements.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. Click here for two free chapters. It will teach you how to understand and manage the route through the internal decision process, and is meant to be read alongside of the new book, Dirty Little Secrets.

Maestro, BookSurge, and Friends: writing and marketing “Dirty Little Secrets” is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com