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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, April 2015 |
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Lots of Book News and Your Chance to Save
I’ve just taken the rights back for two of my award-winning books, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World. In celebration, I’m putting them on sale this month. For the rest of April, you can get either or both of them for just $15 each, plus shipping. Because I’ve taken the rights back, you will not find these sold as new on Amazon or other regular channels. But I have a good inventory of them. And if you want to buy five or more, I’ll cut you an even better deal.
Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green was published originally by Wiley. It was named a Groundbreaking Indie Book by Independent Publisher Magazine, republished in Italy and Turkey, and on the Amazon category bestseller lists at least 33 different months). 236 pages of great information on marketing green businesses, plus a bonus package worth hundreds of dollars. Originally priced at $21.95.
Learn more: guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/
Order: https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/
Use the coupon code: GMGG15
Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World was published by Chelsea Green, at $22.95. This large-format paperback has 306 pages of information to help any business or organization market more effectively and spend less money doing so. It includes a bonus two-chapter ebook covering social media and other new developments.
Learn more: guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/
Order: https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/
Use the coupon code: GM15 |
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And Something Brand New: Green And Profitable is Now a Book
Green And Profitable, my 9th published book, is a compilation of the four years of my Green And Profitable monthly column, which was syndicated in the US, Australia, and Malaysia. It’s designed as an ebook, and I not only put together the whole anthology but also divided into four sections, each of which is available individually as a smaller, less expensive book:
• Book 1: Profitable Green Business Practices
• Book 2: Marketing Strategy/Messages for Green Businesses
• Book 3: Policy and Ethics Issues for Green Businesses
• Book 4: The New Realities of 21st Century Business
• Books 1-4: Compilation (your best value)
It’s available in as an e-book from Nook, iTunes, and Amazon/Kindle. If you want a paper copy, you can order one from CreateSpace.com. The electronic versions are just $2.99 for the sectional books and $9.99 for the whole thing ($5.99 and $12.99 for the paperbacks). And remember that if you’re buying the compilation, you don’t need the smaller books. This is the first time I’m playing in the sandbox of commercial ebook channels.
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| This Month’s Tip: Co-Solve It! Part 2: When One Solution Addresses Several Problems |
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How can we emulate nature in co-solving several problems at once? As promised last month, this time, we’ll look at actual examples of business offerings that confront more than one problem.
Many companies and organizations have come up with wonderful ideas, such as:
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1. d.light, which markets solar-powered LED lanterns to replace kerosene lanterns in developing countries in Africa and Asia. The lanterns: a. Eliminate fire risk (benefit: safety) b. Eliminate toxic fumes (benefit: health) c. Save money by eliminating the need to keep buying kerosene (benefit: economic) d. Provide better quality of light (benefits: eye health, comfort, ease of accomplishing tasks e. Allow children to work longer and more efficiently on school projects (benefits: education, long-term earning power through better grades) f. Allow adults to do after-hours cottage industry (benefit: economic)
2. Urban Food Projects
a. Turn abandoned or empty spaces such as rooftops, vacant lots, traffic islands, median strips into attractive, living spaces (benefits: quality of life, and eventually attracting economic development)
b. Bring fresh, local food into poor communities (benefits: health, quality of life)
c. Create pollution-absorbing buffer zones, reducing asthma, emphysema, etc. (benefits: environment, health health)
d. Train local urban youth in food production, providing marketable skills, positive experience with collaborative problem solving, and a respect for the land (benefits: economic: job skills training, job creation; quality of life: reduction in vandalism, sense of purpose and of ability to change unhealthy/undesirable situations)
e. Decrease CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions (benefit: environment)
3. Kenguru, maker of a personal transportation vehicle for wheelchair users:
a. Replace heavy, bulky, complex wheelchair vans with light, compact personal vehicles (benefits: environmental: fewer raw materials; economic: longer road durability; maintenance: eliminating hydraulic lifts)
b. Replace gasoline or diesel power with electric (benefits: environmental: reduced pollution, reduced carbon footprint, potentially renewable energy sources; quality of life: reduced noise; health: potentially reduced exposure to contagious diseases from other riders)
c. Provide any-time, anywhere personal mobility (benefits: increased personal freedom, better time management by eliminating the need to wait for a paratransit driver and by shortening the time needed to load a wheelchair user in and out)
4. Israeli/Palestinian cooperative projects, e.g., Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam
a. Expose both cultures to the humanness of their “enemy” and debunk myths/stereotypes (benefit: peace)
b. Share best practices in desert agriculture and architecture (benefit: environment)
c. Increase fluency in the other’s language (benefit: economic: more employable
d. Form a constituency for long-term solution (benefit: peace)
e. Spread the benefits and knowledge through public outreach—speaking, performing, media, etc. (benefit: peace)
5. 3-D printing offers numerous benefits in both speed and cost:
a. Quickly replace a failed machine part without waiting weeks for a new one to be ordered (benefit: economic: work can resume much more rapidly)
b. Service a wide range of equipment without needing an enormous parts inventory (benefits: economic and environmental: money not tied up in inventory, real estate not needed to store the inventory)
c. Develop and test new prototypes at a fraction of the former time and cost (benefit: product development)
d. Customize devices to the user’s needs, affordably (benefit: customer loyalty)
e. Create one-off, individualized solutions to medical problems—or distribute more widely applicable technology quickly and cheaply (benefits: health, economic, more efficient hospital/clinic utilization)
f. Make generic products available in communities that could not afford them in the past (benefits: economic and environmental)
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Hear & Meet Shel
Celebrate Earth Day!
Shel will be a guest on Green Divas Radio, talking about being green and profitable AND how business can solve hunger, poverty, war, and climate catastrophe. TheGreenDivas.com, Tuesday, April 21, 3 pm ET/noon PT. |
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Then, the next day, which actually IS Earth Day, Shel will be talking about different income streams for writers with Janice Campbell of NAIWE. PLEASE NOTE SCHEDULE CHANGE. https://news.naiwe.com/2015/03/10/shel-horowitz-multiple-streams-of-income-for-writers/
This is a new program. Here’s the description:
With eight nonfiction books under his belt, including the long-running bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and award-winners Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, you’d think Shel Horowitz might be one of those people who makes a living selling books.
But actually, book sales are only small pieces of a diversified income, all of it involving the same analytical and communication skills he uses to write his books.
This call will explore several income streams writers can pursue, such as:
• Speaking
• Consulting on the publishing process
• Consulting on your field of expertise (in Shel’s case, profitability and marketing for green/socially conscious businesses as well as authors and publishers—and with companies that want to turn hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change into sufficiency, peace, and planetary balance)
• Commercial writing for business: marketing and informational copywriting, correspondence, company histories, executive biographies, speeches, social media feeds, etc.
• Commercial writing for individuals (from resumes to thank-you notes to social media profiles)
• Foreign and subsidiary rights sales
• Product sales other than books
• Ads on your website
• Teaching and training
• Event organizing and facilitation
• Article, blog, and newsletter writing
• Radio and TV work as on-air personality, pundit, analyst, etc.
So here’s the good news: you can be a writer and make a living, even if the obvious ways aren’t working for you. Shel started his writing and consulting business back in 1981 as a typing service, “to hold me over until my freelance magazine and newspaper career took off.” The business kept evolving and is now an international copywriting, consulting, and speaking enterprise with clients on five continents. (He hasn’t typed a term paper in 25 years, and hasn’t had an outside employer since 1981.)
Shel will be Katie Curtin’s guest on the Creativity Cafe, Wednesday, May 13, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. I don’t have the listen link yet, but you can probably find it at www.creativitycafeonline.com–or check my Twitter feed (@ShelHorowitz) that day. Oh, and if you follow me, please send me an @ message telling me you’re a subscriber. I’ll be sure to visit your profile.
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.
Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
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| “As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).” |
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Friends who Want to Help
As Promised Last Month—The Shift Network’s Earth Day Summit
On April 22, more than 30 indigenous wisdom-keepers, green pioneers, innovators, activists, scientists, artists and visionaries are coming together to share what we ALL can do to awaken humanity for a healthy, sustainable and thriving planet.
Join Arkan Lushwala, Chief Phil Lane, Jr., Drew Dellinger, Andrew Harvey, Esperide Ananas and others for this free online event – and learn what you can do to foster a sacred connection with the Earth.
You’ll discover:
• How the Earth is alive and how that impacts who we are and our sense of purpose
• How we can look to the natural world for guidance in these challenging times
• The wisdom that indigenous elders have for us at this critical time
• What humanity is evolving into as a planetary species
• How the natural world reveals the secrets to successful and sustainable economic models
• What gives us cause for hope, given the daunting chaos of our time
April 22 – https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/eds15GP/sah/
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| Another Recommended Book—Getting A Grip |
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Getting A Grip, by Frances Moore Lappé
This remarkable little book was autographed to me back in 2007 and sat on my shelf unnoticed until early 2015. Wow!
Part of me wishes I’d read it earlier—but part of me understands that I am much more ready to ACT on its message now than I was seven years ago—it fits in perfectly with the work I’m doing around showing the business community how to profit by developing products and services to address hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change.
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| For decades, Lappé has worked on both food democracy and grassroots citizen democracy, which she calls “Living Democracy”—something much larger and deeper than the “Thin Democracy” embodied in our electoral process. This book continues the tradition, and really looks at the powerful, empowered, vibrant, fun-to-live-in world we can create.
Yet the book starts very pessimistically, with a Spiral of Powerlessness infographic on the inside front cover. Knowing a bit about Lappé’s thought processes (I’ve been following her since I came across Diet for a Small Planet in the 1970s and have heard her speak at least twice), I immediately flipped to the inside back cover, relieved to find the counterbalancing Spiral of Empowerment infographic I’d expected.
The content of the book, overall, is a lot more empowering than the inside front cover. Democracy, she says, is not something we have, but something we create. Lappé’s focus is actually on creating a world that we can be proud to live in—a world where all of us have found our power and have used it to make important changes; action actually inspires hope. Often, these changes look small at first, but they ripple out society-wide, and the cumulative impact of these often-voluntary steps is vast—even when we can’t see it right away. Not only that, but when we get corporations to make concessions around quality of life and the environment, often their profits go up too. Win-wins are nice, aren’t they?
A lot of this is about decentralizing power. Lappé points out that the decentralized Aztecs were far better able to withstand the invasion of European soldiers (and held them at bay for 200 years), while the hierarchical Maya and Inca societies quickly crumbled before the Spaniards. Similarly, she sees top-down approaches to today’s assorted crises as far less likely to succeed than building democratic movements.
In her view, power and fear have been far too intermingled. Either we’re afraid of people who have power, or we fear taking our own power. Fear too often paralyzes us—but it can just as easily be converted to energize us. And she points out the difference between power over others and power we get working in community to improve our world. Our choice, she says, is not whether to change the world, but how we’ll change it. A movement always starts with just a few people, or even one person, and spreads outward, even if we fail to believe in our own power.
Lappé sets an ambitious agenda where we might engage our democracy, harness our power, and improve the world. A few of her goals:
• Seeing food as a human right (she notes that there is enough to go around)
• Ending the $700 billion in worldwide fossil fuel subsidies
• Ensuring that manufacturers take back their products at the end of their useful life (this concept is often called “cradle-to-cradle”)
And she sees hope all over the place: in the rise of the co-op, fair-trade, and buy-local movements…in resistance to economics that put corporate profits ahead of people’s needs…in a Clean Elections law in Maine that then enabled passage of a cradle-to-cradle law…in the 63 million Americas who now factor social and environmental criteria into their purchasing decisions…in organizers’ ability to take a large scary issue and find an entry point to ignite passions and change minds.
It’s one of the best books on citizen empowerment and deep democracy that I’ve come across (and I’ve read quite a few). Put it on your must list. |
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