The Clean and Green Club

Ever dream of getting a big New York publisher for your future best seller? Don’t do it like this—in fact, don’t esend any kind of pitch letter that makes these mistakes:

M husband has a finished book and he is looking for a Book Agent or Book Publisher. His book is geared for young adults. He is a Highschool teacher and his students are chomping at the bit to read his book. We are sitting on a gold-mine! If you are interested, please leave your information so we can send you more information on the book! Thank you so much.

This was an actual query, submitted through a media query submission service. Let’s play a little game with this, just for fun. How many things can you find wrong with this post? Use the comment form to respond, and then scroll down to see my list (don’t cheat!)

Publishers are deluged with queries and are actively looking for reasons to say no. Any of the eight points below will probably trigger rejection. All of them together? This proposal is going nowhere, fast. Similarly, executives look for reasons to brush off sales pitches…customers of any kind want to be romanced, but this letter is more like the equivalent of a wolf-whistle on the street corner.

1. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation count. I notice two typos (dropping the y in My and running high and school together into one non-existent word), one inappropriate hyphenation, and four inappropriate capitalizations.
2. Writing style counts. This limp and wooden paragraph gives me no confidence in the author’s ability.
3. I don’t even know if this is fiction or nonfiction, let alone the subject and genre. Tell me what the book is about, tell me your working title, get me interested.
4. Young Adult, in the children’s book market, is a much younger reader than high school. She doesn’t know her terms and her audience, which means she doesn’t know the industry, which means the product is not likely to be salable.
5. Don’t give me hype (gold-mine). Give me facts.
6. What a great market analysis—NOT! His students are eager for the book. OK, let’s say he teaches five classes of 30 kids each, which would be a pretty big load but not out of the question. OK, so that’s a universe of 150 students per semester. If even 25 percent of the market actually buys (and that’s about 5 to 10x more than I’d guess), you’ve just sold a whopping six books. That won’t even pay for the cover design. I think this particular gold mine may be all played out. And no other markets are mentioned.
7. What’s his name, what are his credentials, and why isn’t he writing his own letter?
8. Finally, why submit this to a media pitch service that goes to experts across all genres, seeking publicity by answering reporters’ queries? The targeting is very poor. It would make a lot more sense to pitch a list of actual publishers, don’t you think?

And by the way, if you’re thinking of submitting a book proposal or query letter to an agent or publisher, a bit of expert help can make a huge difference. I offer critique services, rewriting, or writing from scratch. And I’ve sold to Wiley, Simon & Schuster,and Chelsea Green, as well as gotten nibbles for my clients from many other fine houses. For those authors better suited to self-publishing, I walk you through every step of the process and we come out the other end with something as good as books coming from major publishers.

Earn a commission–find me a paid speaking gig in the Bay Area for January 17 or 18. I will be speaking on the 19th at the Sustainable Food Summit. Contact me directly at 413-586-2388, shel at greenandprofitable.com

Shel’s Green And Profitable monthly column has launched. If you know a newspaper, newsletter, website, or blog that would like to run this column, please recommend us. the link is https://greenandprofitable.com/green-and-profitable-column/

In This Issue…

• Pushing the Green Bar Higher: Report from the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival
• Persuading People to Buy, by Marcia Yudkin
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Friends Who Help

Pushing the Green Bar Higher: Report from the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival

Saturday, October 23, I did my Green Marketing talk at the Green Festival: the largest and most well-run event of its kind I’ve been to, and I’ve been to quite a few.

The way the schedule worked, I ended up not being able to connect with a lot of the other great workshops—but that was ok, since it took me pretty much the whole day to go through all the exhibits.

Let me tell you, the Green world is hopping! Two years ago, much of what I saw at the show would not have even been on the drawing boards, and now it’s reality.

Some random observations:

Water: Awareness of water as a global resource issue has come a long way in the past few years, and that plays out on several fronts, among them:

•   Products that reduce or eliminate use of bottled water, such as Hydros Bottle: a reusable water and highly portable bottle with a built-in filter

•   Industrial and agricultural processes designed to use much less water

•   Consumer awareness projects such as Corporate Accountability International’s very effective “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign

Community Food Self-Sufficiency: Innovative companies and community organizations are noticing that not only rural people are looking for locally-sourced, healthy food. Urban people want options too. Some of the solutions have been around for years, such as farmers markets bringing their wares to urban centers or Community Supported agriculture farms that sell memberships for a whole growing season. But others could be just as game-changing, such as the offering from Sustainable Garden Supply, Inc. This company does “vertical gardens” and claims that 30 different plants could be grown in a three-foot space. It looks somewhat like an Italian Renaissance fountain and can be used indoors or out.

Fair Trade: No longer just about coffee, cocoa, and tea, the list of fair-trade certified products (and groups certifying them) continues to grow. Sugar, bananas, clothing, and other products are now obtaining certification, and several different certifying bodies are now active. And there were at least four different fair-trade chocolatiers sapling their yummy wares (a far cry from the acute shortage of decent chocolate I encountered when I switched to fair trade several years ago).

Home, Shelter, and Energy: There must have been at least two dozen vendors selling and/or installing solar energy systems, a comparable number selling conservation and retrofit products, plus some geothermal. Attention to wind seemed to be concentrated in the nonprofit organization booths, though. Many contractors were also around to discuss building new green structures or renovating old ones, along with eco-friendly landscaping, gardening, and decorating. And Zero Waste as well as Zero Energy have become popular catchwords.

Fashion and Home Decor: Green has gotten very chic. Say goodbye to the drab monochrome patterns and I-used-to-be-a-burlap-bag look of years past. Today’s eco-fashions are colorful, dramatic, interestingly cut, heavily influenced by world-beat cultures, and look nothing like an old coffee sack. Think of the difference between recycled paper in 1990 and today. Reusability is also big, with, for instance, reusable cloth wraps with Velcro closures to replace sandwich bags—and a portion of the Mother Earth News booth set up as an heirloom seed exchange. And speaking of Zero Waste, many small vendors featured a wide assortment of craft items created from what used to be considered scrap: jewelry made of recycled paper and metal, elegant art papers made of deodorized and sanitized elephant dung (which I actually came across in 2009 and mentioned in Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), textiles from old soda bottles, furniture from recovered glass…

In short, if your exposure to green products is based on what was out there 20, 10, or even five years ago, it’s time for another look—which you can take by browsing the exhibitor catalog, posted here.

Another Recommended Book: Persauding People to Buy, by Marcia Yudkin

As a long-time subscriber to Marcia Yudkin’s Marketing Minute newsletter, I read most of these essays when they were first published in that format.

Now that she’s organized some of her columns into books, I’m pleasantly shocked by how much more I get out of them. She has clearly given much thought to the order, so that essay builds upon essay to strengthen and hammer home the central messages–such as the importance of knowing your market inside out and backwards, and matching the medium, market, and message.

The articles are short and digestible: 1-1/2 to 2 widely spaced pages apiece (remember—these were first published in a newsletter called the Marketing *Minute*). Normally, I like my content longer, because I like depth. But Marcia wastes no words and achieves that depth in surprisingly little space. Which is why I continue to read her newsletter for more than a decade, even as I’ve unsubscribed from dozens of others after a couple of years, or even a few months.

Icing on the cake: the little aphorism or bit of humor at the end of many of the articles that lets different synapses connect in your brain, and reinforces the article’s message while generating a smile.

As a long-time advocate of these principles, I strongly recommend Marcia’s book, with its easily-digested nuggets, as a complement to my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with Marcia and we were in a mastermind group together for a while.

—Shel Horowitz

Hear & Meet Shel

November

• Monday, November 8, 3:30-4:30 ET/12:30-1:30 PT, Felice Gerwitz interviews me on book marketing for WritingandPublishingRadio.com
• Tuesday, November 16, 9pm ET/6 pm PT: Mastermind class for GreenBusinessOwner.com. Details at https://www.greenbusinessowner.com/products/item6.cfm.

December

• Thursday, December 2, 1:00 ET: 90-minute audio conference with Association of Strategic Marketing “Reaching the Green Consumer with Effective Marketing”
  Register at https://www.associationofmarketing.org/bookstore.php?sku=387283 and use Priority Code 16899, or ph 866-226-0828 and mention code 16899 (my affiliate code).
  I’ll provide you with a bonus audio on how to respond to journalist queries with pitches that lead to coverage–just e-mail a copy of your receipt to shel at greenandprofitable.com, subject line: Audio Bonus for 12/2 Webinar.
  Please tell you friends and colleagues about this one!
• Thursday, December 9, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT: How to Create A Message that Resonates with the Green Consumer, 60-minute webinar for Strategic Sustainability Consulting, https://www.sustainabilityconsulting.com/events-list/webinar-green-and-profitable-creating-green-messages-that-ma.html Contact: tracy (at) sustainabilityconsulting.com

• Personal profile of me as a green marketer on Stephanie Chandler’s website (print)
  https://businessinfoguide.com/interview-with-author-shel-horowitz-guerrilla-marketing-goes-green/
• With I. Vitt Argent on Green Marketing: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/ivaradionetwork/2010/10/27/kiva-talk-radio-interveiws-guerilla-green-business
• With TJ Walker on social media: https://www.tjwalker.com/2010/10/13/radio-shel-horowitz-shares-some-communication-tips-on-using-social-media/
• With Carma Spence on public speaking:
  https://publicspeakingsuperpowers.com/featured-speakers/shel-horowitz/
• With Lillian Brummet on conscious marketing and green living:
  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/consciousdiscussions/2010/09/07/conscious-marketing

Friends Who Help

Some companies are just discovering that taking sustainability measures actually increases profits, and therefore they may as well join the gang. Other companies have sustainability as a core value; it’s built into their DNA. And some, like this moth’s Spotlight business, are designed from the ground up to move us toward sustainability; it’s the reason they’re in business in the first place..

We Beat the Mountain is a company formed specifically to create markets for recycled products and thus reduce the “mountain” of trash piling up at landfills. Thus, the rather odd-sounding name actually does make sense.

Visiting the site, you don’t even feel like you’re looking at a catalog; you’re joining a movement! Consider the copy on We Beat the Mountain’s home page:

We Beat The Mountain – Join The Movement Now!

Think about the items you have bought over the last few days… Go on, take a minute… How many of those items are made of recycled materials? And how many of those items could be made of recycled materials?

We Beat The Mountain is an organization that aims to reduce the trash mountains all over the world. Products that are no longer in use, such as Read the rest of this entry »

Big news: I am reintroducing a no-cost newsletter. I had up to four per month from May 1997 until the end of last year, and I realized a few things in these months of not doing it:

1. I missed it.
2. Not enough of you wanted to pay, and the amount of work I was doing to support the members and subscribers was just as much as it had been before I went to a paid model, but the revenue that would have compensated me wasn’t there.
3. Doing a newsletter offers benefits not only to you, but also to me–and I was not receiving those benefits.
4. There is no way I’m going back to four newsletters a month. If I am going to make a newsletter work, it has to be simple to do and not nearly as time-consuming.

So…instead of having three marketing and business newsletters every month plus one for the consumer market, I’m simplifying and consolidating. I will do a single marketing newsletter every month, called Clean and Green Marketing. If you subscribed to Frugal Marketing Tips, Positive Power of Principled Profit, or Book Marketing Tip of the Month, your subscription is automatically transferred over (that’s why you’re receiving this). Frugal Fun Tips, my consumer publication, will not be brought back–but you can find a lifetime’s worth of frugal fun ideas in my $8.50 e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.

The articles will be shorter, and there will be fewer of them. Each regular issue (published between the 5th and 10th of every month) will have at least one of the following:

A practical, hands-on marketing tip
Profile of a Green/ethical company
“Think piece” on trends in business and marketing
Review of a book or other resource worth knowing about

My guess is that most issues will have one, maybe two main articles. I’m starting this incarnation with two.

You’ll also get the usual side features: my upcoming speeches (both live and virtual), new content on the website, and offers from friends and colleagues who want to help you. Once in a while, I’ll probably update you on what media have covered me or on new special projects I’m working on.

Going down to one regular issue a month does mean that you may get additional mailings from me when there’s a time-sensitive opportunity I don’t want you to miss. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of extra times a month, and many months there won’t be any at all. But if there’s something that could help you but would be stale by the next issue, I want you to know about it.