The Clean and Green Club

Failure as compost–I think that may be the best business metaphor I’ve ever come across! If you’re a non-gardener–compost is all the rotting bits of old food scraps, spoiled vegetables, and so forth. It’s not very appealing in its early stages, but as it ages, it turns into the most fertile soil imaginable. It also works well with her philosophy of reaching for the truth, even when it’s not pleasant.

While that’s my favorite metaphor in The Organic Entrepreneur, there’s plenty more: the entrepreneur as alchemist, the business as a habitat.

Other gardening principles Hyndman incorporates into her business philosophy–the book is organized into psychological business “seasons”–include patience, integrity, and a Green sensibility. Plus seven principles for “spirits seeking human experiences”–a nifty reversal–along with more principles for understanding business as Tao, and for finding abundance in your core principles.

This book is very much in tune with the philosophy I express in Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First–though it’s more about the overall business concept and less hands-on. A very nice complement to Principled Profit, and recommended for anyone struggling to find and express their values within business.

Click here to get your copy.

The Organic Entrepreneur: Cultivating the Conscious Capitalist

by Maxine Hyndman

Insomniac Press, 2007

In 2004 alone, 181,189 books were published just in the US. But only 10 percent of those sold even 1000 copies; many didn’t even reach 100 copies. My goal is to help you get those books out of your garage/attic/basement and into the market. For 2006, the number of titles published was around 272,000–that’s about 150% as much as just two years earlier. We are drowning in books! Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

So my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, explains…

Concepts and Strategies for Success

• Seven different types of book-promotion websites, with pluses and minus of each (and several examples)
• Three strategies to set your book apart from the pack and greatly increase the likelihood that your book will be taken seriously
• Twelve ways to promote your book on Google, above and beyond basic search
• Another twelve ways to get the most out of amazon.com
• Two entire chapters on understanding bookstores and making them work
• Four excellent tools to get coverage in the mainstream media

Tactics and Examples
But that wouldn’t be enough–you want hands-on examples. And as you may know from my other books, I’m a strong believer in specific examples that you can learn from and work into your own marketing, so you also get…

• Two complete, full-length marketing plans actually prepared for paying customers–and another one available as a downloadable no-charge bonus for anyone who purchases the book through me
• Eight actual press releases and six media pitches that got attention for books–including one that got coverage in 63 national and international newspapers and other news outlets, among them The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, UPI, Reuters, the news services of Google, Yahoo, and Netscape, and news media in eight foreign countries–and another that was only sent to 12 trade journals and got coverage in seven of them (including three major feature stories)
• Success stories from at least 41 ordinary authors and publishers and a dozen or so industry experts, highlighting the methods they used to get their books noticed–and sold
• An extensive 17-page resource appendix listing dozens of useful books, websites, publications, book coaches, organizations, etc.
• Five additional chapters in a supplementary e-book that provide extra advice for those publishing their own books–included at no extra charge with every direct-from-me order

And far more success tools than I can tell you about without making this waaay too long.

Why a Grassroots Book Just for Book People
I originally thought this would be a quick and easy book–that I could just recycle and tweak some of the stuff in my existing Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World.

But a funny thing happened: as soon as I started working with it, I realized that after eleven years promoting my clients’ books, I know far too much about book marketing and how it’s different from marketing other products and services, and that I wouldn’t begin to do it justice if I merely worked with what I already had.

Besides, things change rapidly in marketing. As just one example, Google didn’t even exist when I wrote the original Grassroots. And then there’s a whole lot of stuff in the original Grassroots book that aims at marketers in general, and isn’t specifically directed to book marketers.

So I ended up writing an entirely different book–and taking the better part of a year to do it. In fact, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World  are really companion books that work very well as a pair.

Is there some overlap? Yes. Certainly some of the overall strategies and concepts are in both books, though with a different spin for the book audience. As far as specifics–as far as I can tell, the only examples repeated in both books are one press release and one letter to the editor.

The Experts Love It
Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers won Honorable Mention in the Indie Excellence Awards, and has gotten praises from Dan Poynter (author of the Self-Publishing Manual), John Kremer (author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books), Fern Reiss (The Publishing Game), Rick Frishman (Author 101, Guerrilla Publicity), Marilyn Ross (The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, Jump-start Your Book Sales), Joan Stewart (https://www.PublicityHound.com), Marisa D’Vari (Building Buzz), and others. It’s also been favorably reviewed in Midwest Book Review, Heartland Reviews, the Small Press Blog, and elsewhere.

Publisher Dawson Church of Elite Books (a very experienced guy in the book biz) said,

“If you retained the top three consultants in book publishing, and picked their brains at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, this book is what your notes would look like after a week. I plan to give a copy to all authors, and make reading this book a requirement for any prospective author who submits a proposal to Elite Books in the future.”

The paperback edition is just $24.95 before shipping, and the electronic edition is only $19.95. Any one of the hundreds of ideas in the book can quickly recoup this small cost.

Plus, if you order directly from me, I’m throwing in a bunch of bonuses–including a five-chapter e-book aimed specifically at publishing and marketing a successful book, as well as informative rports from some of the top names in small-press publishing.

Rather than expand this already-long post, I’ll let you read all about them at the Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers website, https://www.grassrootsmarketingforauthors.com

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
By Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler

As a professional marketer, I’ve read a ton of books on persuasion, influence, and similar topics. Until now, all or them have focused largely on moving people forward to a buying decision in the marketplace.

This is the first book I’ve come across that seeks to explore influence as a tool of widespread positive social change: How to create influence that ends a plague in Africa, builds social and job skills among ex-criminals in San Francisco, brings reading skills to thousands of illiterates in Mexico…Wow!

It’s not a fast read, but this may be one of the most important, life-changing books I’ve ever read. It’s coming out in October (I picked up a pre-release copy at BookExpoAmerica). You can order your advance copy at https://snipurl.com/1oga5

Last month, when I reviewed The Rise of the Rogue Executive, I promised a review this month of Behaving Badly: Ethical Lessons from Enron.

I don’t like to break a promise, but I decided that was a bad idea. I already gave one review of the “dark side” last month. There are so many wonderful books showing positive outcomes from positive behaviors that I should only look at negative outcomes of negative behaviors once in a while–certainly not two months in a row! The much better path to the world I want to help build is the path that takes us there, and not the dead end road with the “do not enter” sign.

This month and next, we’ll look at the dark side: two books that look not at what can be made right in corporate America, but what went wrong.

The Rise of the Rogue Executive places much blame on internal procedures that jettisoned 100 years of responsible practices, and the technologies that made fraud and profiteering possible on a scale that simply wasn’t possible in generations past.

And sometimes, flat-out lies, as in WorldCom using a totally theoretical “what-if” spreadsheet looking at the opportunity if Internet use doubled every 100 days as the basis of its income projections! The result of this total lie was devastation in the telecom industry, which was frantically laying cable in order to keep up with this demand prediction.

Another key cause was the incentive structure (eliminated by Sarbanes-Oxley in the aftermath of Enron’s collapse) that turned consultants and auditors at Big Six accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen into sales staff and pressured auditors not to jeopardize the far more lucrative consulting business (the book reproduces the full text of the Anderson indictment, in fact). Can you say “conflict of interest?”

And taking it further, CEOs face pressure to cook the books or look the other way when those to whom they delegate are unethical, both because of their own ludicrous compensation structures and pressure from investors for short-term growth. (The book cites bad behavior on the part of Dick Cheney during his Halliburton days, among others.)

But ethical, involved leaders can surmount the challenge. The book discusses this, but this part is much weaker, mostly focusing once again on the wrongdoers. I’d have liked to see that part built up.

Of course, my own award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First covers that part in detail, explaining how to set up and run successful ethical companies.

And one easy step companies can do is to sign the Business Ethics Pledge, so consumers know of their commitment.

Find this book at Amazon: The Rise of the Rogue Executive: How Good Companies Go Bad and How to Stop the Destruction by Leonard R. Sayles and Cynthia J. Smith (Wharton, 2005)