Gordon Woolf's Blog

Where is the best publicity?

Whatever you produce or sell -- books, magazines, or most other products -- you'll feel a need to get publicity for either your product or your business?

Do you aim for the top, the major newspapers or magazines and the bigname TV shows, or for something a little lower down the chain?

I'm not saying "Don't aim high", but you can do just as well from some very minor players. Publicity in specialist club, trade and craft journals can add up to a lot of sales. And those media are a lot more forgiving in the quality of what you submit.

You could try for years without getting on to Oprah, but be missing the sales of two, ten or more that come from a mention in those many publications which circulate to 200 members.

At the same time don't underestimate those readers. They know their subject. What they will want is hard edged details of why your book or product is better or has the answers to a need they can see.

I was prompted in this by seeing an ad for what is essentially a local restaurant in a national magazine. The restaurant is good, but not one that will persuade people to drive for an hour or two to get there. Even the local newspaper which circulates in several towns may be spreading the net too wide.

The book "Success in Store" which I co-authored, tells of a pizza store which "always" distributed 10,000 menus in order to get to the end of the next suburb. But the result of several thousand of those was a few price-taking delivery orders who'd go elsewhere the minute someone else made an offer. And each took half an hour to deliver.

By spending the same on fewer menus, he produced something which stood out, kept his deliveries within easy reach, so he could guarantee them being faster, and his profit went up.

Flyers you can deliver on a morning run (to keep fit) may not suit your market, but some trial promotion in those specialist publications, maybe for some businesses even on specialist web sites, could be the better answer.

Oh no! Not the 'Under New Management' Sign

In my book Success in Store both I and my co-author separately berated anyone who'd even consider a sign stating Under New Management.

If the business was good then you do not want to make a point of saying that the old owner has gone; customers, even those who are not actually dissatisfied, may take it as an opportunity to just drop off, to try that other shop they've been thinking of going to.

If the business was bad, then if a sign with those words is all you can do to make it appear that things have changed, then you may appear to be doing the same old things in the same old way.

But this sign is a play on the theme. It's big, on a busy road where it stood out even to people like me who had not noticed the business as it was. But it makes a strong point and it is in a field where many such businesses in Australia were taken over by huge groups who seemed to have money to burn but then burned out. It can therefore be a good idea to promote the benefit that the "new" owners are in fact the old owners who knew what they were doing.

We hope it helps. 

Does punctuation matter?

"Let's eat, Dad" or "Let's eat Dad". A comma can make a big difference.

Is punctuation more important than spelling?

I think it is. After all, most spelling is not so far off that you can't work out what the writer means - and this country and the UK understands what Americans write despite substantial spelling differences.

But an error in punctuation can cause mayhem. And while spelling checkers can at least offer some options, there has been little success with grammar checkers and even less success with the aspect of those which check punctuation.

Of course there will be arguments about where many commas should be put. They were a source of more disagreement with my co-author, Geoffrey Heard, on our book Success in Store than any other subject. I use more commas than he does, but we also tend to use them in different places. However, we did agree on those where they could influence the meaning, and that is important.

Lawyers tend not to use commas and one explained that they need to make it clear that when a comma is included in a contract they have considered its placement and have decided it is necessary.

Despite that, there have been problems with contracts where vast sums have depended on the interpretation of meaning based on a comma.

We can point to some sites where problems caused by this humblest of punctuation marks is discussed:

The University of Hawaii's Hohonu, a journal of academic writing has a nice piece online by Andy Gramlich: Commas, the biggest little quirks in the English language http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/academics/hohonu/writing.php?id=82

Commas have saved a life. lost a million dollars or been blasphemous according to stories at http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/A2E17AAC-4E28-4EA7-B1FC-D5064B155006/

National Punctuation Day was a not massively successful promotion in the USA but sadly it seems to have disappeared. Last year (2008) it was on September 24, but that's not far off as I write and the site is still all about last year, though some are still useful like the piece at http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/meaning.html .

My co-author (and now publisher) is probably right. I use too many commas. You can probably delete most in this article, but a few are needed, including, I hope, the very first one.

Planning for success

Any would be publisher is usually exhorted on the various discussion lists to "do a business plan".

I've sometimes joined that exhortation but when I was writing Success in Store: How to Start or Buy a Retail Business, Enjoy Running It and Make Money, I told my co-author that I've never had a business plan.

He then took me through how I'd started a couple of businesses, and justified his own "always have a business plan" position. He claimed I'd had quite a detailed plan in each instance -- it was just that I had not written it down! So, as a writer, the one thing I've never written down, is my plan for success. However, more of those businesses have gone according to plan than those which have not.

You will need a formal plan if you are going to borrow money. However, even then a business plan can be drawn up on the back of an envelope.

A nice restaurant I used to go to had paper tablecloths and marker pens in a glass on every table because the owner said her original business plan was drawn up over a meal in another restaurant and she had to appeal to the manager of that restaurant for some paper to write it down.

It also helps to include, in advance, what you will consider to be failure. ("I will have failed if I do not publish two books in the first six months, sell 1000 copies or not be within a few hundred dollars of breaking even in the second six months").

Too many people struggle on because they attempt to justify the changed cicumstances.

There's no reason why a "business" plan can't be that within 12 months "I will have published Uncle Joe's memoir, sold 20 copies and he'd added me to his will".

You could probably carry that one in your head.

Email: the world will know

One of this country's senior politicians has just found that emails may not be what they seem. In particular a forwarded email may be changed easily before it is forwarded. That should be a warning to everyone who uses email.

To start from the basics: There's a simple Law of Email, which states "Never send anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know".

They are easy to copy, easy to change, easy to get out of even secure offices since the introduction of USB sticks, which has led some companies to disable the USB ports on their computers, a method which causes more problems than it solves.

Encryption should be used if you are sending confidential information by email, but encryption does not assure security since it has to be decrypted at some stage ("Decryption" rather than the unencryption which I've seen many times). Emails may be decrypted on the main mail server which offers little security within an office.

There are better ways, one of the simplest being to create a PDF of a document, encrypt that and sign it digitally. Warning: simply requiring a password to open a PDF is not securing it; a Google search will reveal programs that will ger around that (which I've needed to do to get an ad into a magazine that was secured by a foolish designer).

If you have this kind of material then you'll need to study the Acrobat help files. There are also some examples of commercial software programs that will make it a simpler task.

On the other hand, there are authors and others who are so scared of someone stealing a single copy of their ebook that they make access difficult for the people who have paid for the file. I would quote from my own experience when running a milk bar/convenience store. If you put a box of lollies on the counter they will sell, but a proportion will be stolen -- move them to the back or anywhere where the customer cannot easily pick them up and they stop selling. There will be a point at which theft is too great but it will always be worth losing a few.

It can also reflect on the trust between a business owner and his customers. In my book Success in Store there are two examples of the relationship between my wife and some local high school students who came regularly for fish and chips. In the first, they left wrappers and cans by the seats on the footpath until one of them saw my wife go out to clean up their mess as they left. "Do you have to do that?" one asked. No one else will do it, she said, and from that day there was no more mess; everything went in the bins.

Similarly, a sheepish youngster returned to hold out a confectionary packet, saying he'd forgotten to pay. Next day one of the other students asked if he'd returned to pay. "He told us on the way back to school and we said 'you don't do that there'."

Fair dealing will do a lot to reduce problems of theft but that does not help with the general continued availability of email and its likelihood to spread far beyond its original intended use.

A recent search for my name in Google, and going far beyond the first two or three pages where most of us stop searching, came up with an email I wrote in 1996 which is 13 years ago, long before the Internet was anything like it is today, and in the earliest days of the web when many exagerated claims were being made about "hits" on web sites. If you are interested, that email is at http://open4success.net/Olnews/mbox2/282.html

That was not the start of email for me as I'd already been using it for the best part of a decade; at that time the problem was that there were not many people you could send emails to but I did use an email-to-telex service to submit articles to some publishers.

In all that time, there have been regular warnings that normal email is the least secure communications system of all. At least with phone recordings you can be fairly sure that what is heard is what you said, and there are legal safeguards on what can be used. With email, forgery is simple, and preservation and distribution is even more simple.
 

How to make great ads

First I must declare an interest. The new ebook How to make great ads for (sm)all business grew out of my book  Success in Store, with co-author Geoffrey Heard, but this is entirely Geoff’s work. It consists mainly of short tips with examples from real life of what to do (and a few of what not to do). Most of the examples are of ads for small businesses and it is intended to be digested in small bites – taken a spoonful at a time, which suits ebooks, rather than read in a continuous session. You can download a free extract – a 30-page selection – and that should give you enough ideas to pay for the book several times over, because the full book as a download costs you only US$5.95 See details at worsleypress.com