Volume 1, #4, October 2007

The Power of 3rd-Party Gifting: Guest tip from Don McCauley on how to get others to give away teasers for your book.
Nominate Your Book as “Cool Book of the Day” - a new award and you’ve got a good chance.

About Shel’s Award-Winning Book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers

Which of Shel’s Other Books is Right for You?
Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First (Apex Award Winner)
Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist)
http://frugalmarketing.com/newsletters/2007/06/18/shels-award-winning-books-which-should-you-own

Hear and Meet Shel
In person in South Hadley, MA, Hartford, CT, online, on-air, and over the phone:

Latest Additions to the Websites

Administrative Information

Subscribe, unsubscribe, back issues, etc.

Published monthly since July, 2007 by Shel Horowitz
16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, MA 01035 USA
413/586-2388

Hear/Meet Shel: November 2007 to March, 2008

“The Blogger’s Code of Ethics,” Featured Guest Blogger, International Association of Online Communicators, <a href=”http://www.IAOCblog.com”>http://www.IAOCblog.com</a>, November 13-16.
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Self-Publishing Panel, National Writers Union Write Angles Conference, Mount Holyoke College, S. Hadley, MA, Saturday, December 1.

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“Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers,” Teleseminar for Advisor Press. Thursday, December 6, 1 p.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific. PHONE NUMBER HAS BEEN CHANGED: Dial 419-400-0203  and use Conference ID: 203612#. Contact: Peter Johnson, 408-400-0400, peter AT advisorpress dot com

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“Grassroots Marketing Techniques for Authors,” AuthorSmart Teleseminars, Thursday, February 7, 2008, 2 pm Eastern/11 a.m. Pacific. Contact: Gail Richards, <a href=”http://www.authorsmart.com”>http://www.authorsmart.com</a> ,
info AT authorsmart dot com

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“How to Be a Success in Business and Still Hold Your Head Up High,” one-hour live presentation plus end-of-day panel discussion with John Ritzkowitz and Jeanette Cezanne, Managing the Customer Relationship to Maximize ROI, day-long conference, Tuesday, March 25, 2008, Hartford, CT. Contact: Christine Todd Medina, 800-678-3940, cmedina AT lorman dot com
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Listen to Shel’s own Principled Profit radio show on WXOJ-FM, 103.3 FM in the Northampton, MA area, or streaming at <a href=”http://www.valleyfreeradio.org”>http://www.valleyfreeradio.org</a>

Mondays, 11/5, Michael Gargian, E2M.org, an innovative model for boosting local economies. 11/26, guest to be announced. 12/3, Lori Martin, Citzenre, which supplis solar electricity to people who can’t or won’t pay to own their own system. 12/24, Internet marketing legend Mark Joyner on social change (a rebroadcast of the powerful call Mark did with me on October 22). All shows at 7 p.m. US Eastern Time.

ARCHIVED SHOWS: Three of my guests have been tech-savvy enough to set up podcasts of their interviews, which you can hear by clicking these links (each will take you to a different site).
We hope at some point to get a few of the archived shows on my
own sites, as well.

Charles Uchu Strader, Gaia Host, on running a
cooperative/collective business and on socially responsible web
hosting: <a href=”http://snipurl.com/1eynb”>http://snipurl.com/1eynb</a>

Charles Uchu Strader, Gaia Host, on running a
cooperative/collective business and on socially responsible web
hosting: <a href=”http://snipurl.com/1eynb”>http://snipurl.com/1eynb</a>

David Caputo on search engine optimization and avoiding Google’s
latest sand traps: <a href=”http://snipurl.com/1eyno”>http://snipurl.com/1eyno</a>

Jon Reed on leaving corporate America, outsourcing issues, the changing climate of business, and more: <a href=”http://www.freefromcorporateamerica.com/archives.php?id=45″ http://www.freefromcorporateamerica.com/archives.php?id=45</a>

Awards and recognition help books get sold!

Here’s a chance to be one of the first profiled at my friend Dan Janal’s latest site, Cool Book of the Day:

http://www.coolbookoftheday.com

It’s a blog, so chosen books will be permanently archived. No cost to enter, at the moment. Knowing Dan, that might well change in the future.

If you’d like to be considered, e-mail dan AT prleads dot com, subject line: Cool Book, with your answers to these questions:

What is the title of the book?
Who is the intended audience?
What is the book about (4-6 sentences)
Why are you the best person to write this book?
How is this book different from other books on this topic?
Is there anything else we should know about this book?

Responses should be between 500 and 1,000 words.

Winners will be asked to place the “Cool Book of the Day” icon and link on their websites.

Shel Horowitz’s Book Marketing Tip of the Month, Vol. 1 #4, October 2007

Guest Columnist:  Don McCauley

One of the techniques I teach in my book. . .

Why not give away a free gift? Or better yet, have someone ELSE give
them away. Here is how . . .

Since you have published a book, it might take just an hour or two to
create an e-book using already written excerpts FROM your book. Then
just print up some gift coupons for a FREE E-BOOK. The example I use in
my book is a book of recipes. Approach a local bakery and have the
owner give out YOUR gift coupons as THE BAKERY’s gift to THE BAKERY’s
patrons.

This accomplishes a number of things:

*Your free ebook serves as a ‘taste’ of the book, much the same as a
trailer provides a ‘taste’ of the full movie to come.

*The bakery gives a ‘gift’ to the bakery’s patrons at NO COST to the
bakery.

* The gift coupon has the effect of providing ‘third party’ influence
from the bakery, much the same as a referral FROM the bakery

* As the customer must visit your website to redeem the coupon, you now
have them in YOUR store. This gives you the opportunity to add this
person to YOUR mailing or newsletter list. They will most likely do
this, as they are certainly an INTERESTED prospect.

* The bakery is actually advertising for YOUR BOOK …. for FREE.

The end effect is that you win (getting an interested party to your
site for practically no cash layout) the bakery wins (gives a valuable
gift to the patrons) and the customer wins (gets a free gift). As
compared to using a flyer sent to potentially uninterested parties (1/2
of 1% return is the norm) there is simply no comparison.

The gift certificates will cost pennies to print compared to
potentially hundreds of dollars to print flyers.

Try this simple technique and track the results. Wow! Of course it goes
without saying that you will have to partner with a business in your
genre . . .

Don McCauley ICM, MTC, CH
Author-Top Ten Secrets To Getting Free Publicity
For Your Business Or Organization
Free Publicity Focus Group
www.freepublicitygroup.com

Positive Power Spotlight: Armstrong Capital
When you deal in other people’s money, you very quickly butt up against the perception that your company is likely to be crooked. Through his actions in his own business and his education of his peers, Jeff Armstrong of Armstrong Capital is doing what he can to change that. Starting with the very first line of his website: “Straightforward, Honest, Fair….The Way It Should Be.” … Read More

Another Recommended Book: Getting a Grip, by Frances Moore Lappé
The author of Diet for a Small Planet and many other books uses business principles including those fund in The Secret” to help readers demand true democracy.

Mark Joyner is doing a Private No-Cost Seminar–Just For *My* Readers

It helps to have friends in high places. Mark is the best-selling author of The Great Formula (which has a section by me), The Irresistible Offer, Simpleology (all published by John Wiley)…and an extremely successful Internet marketer who actually invented many of the common marketing techniques we see online today. Some people say he even invented e-books. I didn’t use that term but I was offering one in 1995, though; I may just have gotten there first. (grin)

And I became friends with him after he bought a copy of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First through my website!

To sign up: http://frugalmarketing.com/joyner.shtml

Which of Shel’s Books is Right for You?

http://frugalmarketing.com/newsletters/2007/06/18/shels-award-winning-books-which-should-you-own/

Latest Additions to the Websites

http://frugalmarketing.com/newsletters/2007/10/05/new-on-the-sites-october-2007/
Administrative Information

Subscribe, unsubscribe, back issues, etc.

Published monthly since September, 2003 by Shel Horowitz
16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, MA 01035 USA
413/586-2388

Another Recommended Book: Getting a Grip, by Frances Moore Lappé
Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

Positive Power of Principled Profit, Vol. 5 #2, October 2007

Near the end of Getting a Grip, Lapp’e–whose name may be most familiar as author of the groundbreaking Diet for a Small Planet back in the 1970s–notes that 80 percent of all Americans  “say they’re likely to switch brands to help support a cause when price and quality are equal.”

This book is intended as a manual for social and environmental change activists, and not as a business book. Nonetheless, it’s quite applicable to the world of business, and draws on a number of business principles and ideas, including the recently popular Law of Attraction. Lapp’e doesn’t use that term, but her emphasis is clear: what you pay attention to becomes bigger and more real. Also, what I have for several years called the Abundance Principle: that there is plenty to go around, but a big maldistribution of resources. No one needs to be hungry or lack fuel once this imbalance is addressed.

Lapp’e’s central thesis is that large corporate and government entities have robbed consumers of their citizenship, by substituting what she calls “Thin Democracy”–I’d call it “Pseudo-Democracy” for the involved and active citizen participation that comprises true democracy–and that we, the people, can take back our rightful heritage as citizens–as people who participate in the decisions that affect us–and initiate true change.

The book is full of inspiring examples of individual people with simple actions that turned injustice into justice–most strongly, the story of an African minister whose pro-democracy efforts brought a visit from the goon squad on a mission to torture and kill. His compassion, humor, and lack of fear in the face of the attack won over the attackers, who, after inflicting significant harm, stopped the attack and brought him to a hospital.

A key insight that I’ve long believed but not often seen elsewhere is that there are two concurrent social trends: a concentration in corporate and government power and wealth that is threatening to ordinary citizens as well as the environment—and at the same time, an energizing, a democratization based in the actions of ordinary people. This second trend is the Living Democracy, a powerful antidote to Thin Democracy.

To bring Lapp’e’s points back to a business context: she notes that even the biggest companies respond to pressure from their customers, and that what she calls “entry points” allow those consumers (and other stakeholders, such as neighbors) to address–and effect change in–some pretty big issues. In Sweden, for instance, McDonald’s serves organic milk, because its customers wouldn’t tolerate anything less.

Photo: Jeff Armstrong (left) greets Shel Horowitz following Shel’s keynote address at the Noteworthy USA convention, Las Vegas, October 5, 2007.

Shel Horowitz’s Positive Power of Principled Profit, Vol. 5, #2, October 2007

When you deal in other people’s money, you very quickly butt up against the perception that your company is likely to be crooked. Through his actions in his own business and his education of his peers, Jeff Armstrong of Armstrong Capital is doing what he can to change that. Starting with the very first line of his website: “Straightforward, Honest, Fair….The Way It Should Be.”

Armstrong, based in the Los Angeles area, deals in real estate notes—for example, buying an owner-financed mortgage from a seller who needs an immediate large infusion of cash, and selling it at a profit to a securities company that can convert it into stock and offer it to its investors.

An early supporter of the Business Ethics Pledge, Armstrong came to my attention because he consistently generates new signers of the Pledge through the link on his website. Most of the people who have generated a larger-than-average number of signatures for me have done so through a single newsletter article–but with Armstrong, it’s ongoing, year after year. It turns out he’s been buying my books since the 1990s, starting with Marketing Without Megabucks, and he told me this is because even before I wrote a book about it, he sensed my strong commitment to ethics in marketing from those earlier works.

He also happens to edit the newsletter for NoteworthyUSA, his industry association, and consistently uses this “bully pulpit” to advance an ethics agenda. And when I heard him address the 300 attenders at Noteworthy’s conference, he stressed both the practical and the moral imperatives of being ethical. He’s not ashamed to admit that he has self-interest as well as altruism as his motives; if enough honest people crowd out the crooks, it’s less likely that government regulators will choke off his industry.

If the group I met when I was hired to keynote Noteworthy’s conference is any indication, Armstrong is having a significant impact. I got a lot of thank-yous from people who said I was reinforcing what they already knew was the right way to run their business, and giving the marketing ammunition necessary to help them prosper with it. Others told me my strategies for attracting and keeping clients through ethics are already working well in their business. And I met a few who are in the business specifically to advance a social change agenda: one woman works to provide capital to women fleeing abusive relationships and starting their lives over; a retired professor couple use their note business to fund water development projects in developing countries. All in all, an impressive group.

It does not surprise me in the least that Jeff Armstrong is quite successful in his own business.

Armstrong Capital: http://www.armstrongcapital.com
NoteworthyUSA: http://www.noteworthyusa.com