Post #50 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
This has been a tough week for me. I have been on the road visiting animal shelters around the state of Maine. And I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. I knew from my reading that shelters were bursting at the seams with dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits, horses…even reptiles. But like I said, I wasn’t prepared for just how dire their plight has become in this bad economy.
Visit your local shelter, and you’ll see exactly what I’ve been seeing all week. Crates stacked upon crates of cats and kittens…especially kittens. `Tis the season, I’ve been told. Most crates have two or three inhabitants. They’re clean and cared for, but all the cats have sad eyes. And if I didn’t already have three cats of my own, I’m sure I’d have come home with a couple new friends. And while you’re seeing the cats, you’ll be hearing the dogs. They’re in back, but doing their best to make their presence known. “I’m here!” “Come see me.” “I’m cute.” “I’m cuter.” “I know how to sit.”
I walked into one place and watched as a woman surrendered a carrier full of kittens. There must have been eight kittens piled in there. All gray; all clearly from the same litter.
Another shelter I wanted to visit didn’t even post its address on the web page. The director explained that too many people were dropping off unwanted animals in the middle of the night.
I was cold calling on the shelters. I hadn’t called ahead to make an appointment with the director. But I can assure you I didn’t have any trouble getting seen. I’d go up to the front desk and say, “I’d like to speak to someone about fundraising.” That’s all it took. Faces lit up, and I was ushered in to the director’s office.
There is a book business story in here…I promise
So what does my story have to do with book business? A lot. I was there to help these shelters raise money. And I was using a book as the incentive. Some of you know that Matilda and I published Dr. Greg Martinez’s new book, Dr. Greg’s Dog Dish Diet: Sensible Nutrition for Your Dog’s Health. Some of you on our email list have even been receiving emails from us this week. If you’re not a dog owner, if we annoyed you, we apologize. We understand that a dog health book (however important) is off topic for you. But we felt the seriousness of the problem–both for your dogs and for shelter dogs–warranted taking action.
If you don’t yet know about Dr. Greg’s Dog Dish Diet, the book’s based on the nutrition therapy Dr. Greg has been using in his veterinary practice for the past 12 years. Instead of just prescribing a pill, administering a shot or rubbing on some ointment–all designed to mask the symptoms and bring temporary relief–Dr. Greg looks for root causes. More accurately, he educates owners so they can find the problem, which is usually an ingredient in the animal’s diet to which the pet is allergic.
Dr. Greg has had such success with this–as in 1000’s of pet patients–that he wanted to get the word out to pet owners everywhere. So he wrote a book that’s instructive, yet easy to understand, and he throws in some touches of memoir by sharing his own experiences. It actually was his own dogs–an orphaned three-legged Dalmatian, a cat-food-eating Wire-Haired Terrier and Golden Retriever whose frizzy hair coat, occasional seizures and floppy wrists almost got him euthanized–that led to his discoveries. I encourage you to follow this link to read more about Dr. Greg and Dog Dish Diet.
But I said this has something to do with book business. To help Dr. Greg reach dog owners, we decided to put together a series of marketing campaigns in conjunction with animal shelters. In exchange for sending a series of emails to their lists, we would give the shelter $5 for each book sold (25 percent of the cover price) to the shelter. You can see why they were interested in talking with me.
But here’s the problem, many of these organizations lack email lists. I guess in retrospect, I’m not surprised. It’s just that Matilda and I have been so focused on building our own list of women who love to write or read memoirs…or both. I guess I assumed everyone understood that an email list is the greatest asset a business or a writer can have.
It’s the way you stop being reactive in the marketplace and stop relying on people to find you and your message. Having a list means you’ve been out in the marketplace for some time, providing good information, free content and building trust. Then when you are ready to publish your book, you actually have a group of followers who like your ideas to whom you can announce your book.
For that reason, we’re going to start discussing list building and what you can do. And we’ll start with tomorrow’s post. For today, I invite you to think of anyone you know who has a dog (or cat…it works with cats too) and might benefit from receiving a copy of Dr. Greg’s Dog Dish Diet. You’ll be giving them a great book while helping with a huge problem. I’ll leave you with this fact: Shelters across the country are so overwhelmed, they are euthanizing more than 7 million dogs and cats annually. While this has been necessary, shelters would like to do more community outreach, education, spay and neutering to arrest the problem. I hope you’ll help.
book marketing
book leverage
list building
