The Clean and Green Club

I’ve decided to stay with last month’s theme of email conversations for a couple of more issues. Long-time readers will know that I’m very big on building relationships–before you need them–with people who can help you.

Here’s an example of how I turned my negative reaction to an article in a very prominent Internet marketing newsletter (circulation 40,000 or so) into a bylined article in that newsletter. And now that editor is someone who knows who I am and how I can help her readers and who in the future may help me when I need to put a message in front of her readers.

This is a piece of the article that got me mad:

How to decrease inventory and heighten mass distribution with online self-publishing companies

If you’re an unpublished (or published) author with a book in you, or even a publisher looking to outsource inventory, you might be interested in the new rage of online self-publishing companies. These are companies that will take your novel/handbook/book series and will do the dirty work for you, on-demand.

The problem: the so-called “self-publishing companies” are in reality something else entirely, and authors using them are accepting serious limitations on their books’ success.

Now, of course, I could have fired off a “nastygram” and told the editor what an ignoramus she was–but what would that have accomplished? I’d make an enemy for life and get absolutely no benefit. As a fan and student of Bob Burg’s Winning Without Intimidation methods, I chose instead to be constructive. This is part of my original response:

Please don’t call them self-publishing companies. The publisher is the one who owns the ISBN. If you use their ISBN, they are the publisher–and that has serious implications in the book trade.

However, you can buy your own ISBNs and contract with a POD *printer*, and actually self-publish. This is something I help people do. Perhaps you’d like to run an article about it sometime.

I got a response back clarifying her position and pointing out that some of these companies do allow your own ISBN, to which I responded:

Yes, but you don’t have that option with Xlibris, iUniverse, AuthorHouse, etc., and only those who are in the know are aware you can do it at Lulu or Booksurge. Authors who believe that they “self-published” run into some very nasty surprises when they try to do anything in the book trade.

Note: I am not against these companies and have not only referred clients when I thought that was appropriate but had AuthorHouse as a client for several years. And my seventh book Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers has an Infinity edition as well as an edition with my own ISBN. But I am very much against these companies pretending to be something they’re not, and see it as a public good to make sure people know what they’re getting. I’d use the term subsidy publisher, or pay-to-publish.

You do an excellent job at (newsletter), I’ve been a fan for quite a while. Nice to connect with an actual human being.

And she wrote back,

Interesting. Thanks for the back-up knowledge, we haven’t had any direct
affiliation with those other “pay-to-publish” publishers so thanks for the
heads-up. Also, if you felt like writing an article about it, or had
something online I could reference in an article, I’d be happy to run it 🙂

Which is what I’d proposed in the first place! So after some quick discussion on how many words, etc., I condensed down a section of my book Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers that addresses this exact issue, included a nice blurb on my services, and 40,000 readers of her newsletter now know about what I do (plus I have the article to run elsewhere).

This is the blurb she ran (which I wrote):

Discuss your next book project with publishing and marketing consultant/copywriter Shel Horowitz: shel at principledprofit.com, 413-586-2388. Shel’s seven books include Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers (https://www.grassrootsmarketingforauthors.com), Apex Award winner Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First (https://www.principledprofit.com), and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (https://www.frugalmarketing.com). He’s also the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge (https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org).

Next month: rebuilding a business relationship that went bad.