Best Way to Launch a Book
BabyCakes, the Book of Recipes: It’s Here! from BabyCakes NYC on Vimeo.
Erin McKenna the smart, savvy, passionate entrepreneur behind the successful bakery Babycakes NYC, has a book coming out, BabyCakes: Vegan, Gluten-Free, and (Mostly) Sugar-Free Recipes from New York’s Most Talked-About Bakery.
She made the above video to let people know and what I love about this video is you see her, you see the bakery, you see the glee and fun and then you see what you can make if you get the book. It’s all so slick but it feels completely authentic – like you want to be a part of it even though a company is selling you something. I love that kind of marketing.
What Every Good Marketer Knows
What Every Good Marketer Knows by Seth Godin:
- Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
- Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
- Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
- Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
- Marketing begins before the product is created.
- Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
- Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
- Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
- Products that are remarkable get talked about.
- Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
- You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
- If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
- People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
- You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
- What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
- Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
- Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
- People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
- Good marketers tell a story.
- People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
- Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
- Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
- Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
- A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
- Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
- Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
- Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
- Good marketers measure.
- Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
- One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.
- In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
- Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
- There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future. - You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
- You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
- Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.
The Boss of You
I’m asked a lot to be in books, to review books, to promote other’s books and 99% of the time I decline. Everyone and their mamma seems to have a book nowadays and from what I’ve seen, a lot seem to just be riding the creative bandwagon which I hopped off long ago.
The thing is, I’m highly creative but I’m also business and it seems that books either address one or the other. Also, a lot of self-employed/creative books geared towards women tend to lack “meat” – they go for making a person feel good with words like “juicy” “blessings” and offer ideas that aren’t appealing to me like pink markers, morning pages, breathing deeply and dancing wildly (ok – I like the last one). For someone like me who is a do-er, I want to be inspired with advice I can actually take from people who not just dish it, but have lived and are living it (I can’t take another self-help guru with a messed-up life promoting how to live and work creatively!).
Bitter much? Yes but I’m sure you’ll agree that there’s a lot of bad books out there. And when you’re starting out you might be tempted to buy them all (I almost did!).
That is why I am so, so, so thankful that Lauren Bacon and Emira Mear’s new book, The Boss of You, is finally available.
Over 5 years ago, Lauren and Emira ran an amazing site called Soap Box Girls which let women talk about what women talk about but also had tid bits on business (they really highlighted women-run business) politics and crafting. It was a great zine ahead of it’s time. I was so in-love with what these women were doing (running their own graphic business on top) that I asked them to be profiled on Another Girl at Play. Lucky for me they said yes and a great friendship started.
It was in this interview that I received the best bit of business advice I’ve ever received: Don’t undersell yourself!. Women undersell themselves on so many levels that to read this from them really, really stuck. And I’ve always asked for what I’m worth and have never settled financially or with projects. That’s thanks to them.
They now run the site “Boss Lady which has lots of great info. It was also the base for their Boss Lady Panel at SXSW last year that I, along with Jenny Hart and Vickie Howell, were able to be a part of. The five of us meshed so well and we offered great advice and stories – some of which are found in The Boss of You.
Whether you’re starting an internet based business, something crafting or a brick a mortar store, this book is something you need – and I don’t say that lightly. It doesn’t talk down to you and it’s not dry. It’s personable with real advice to get you rocking out. Isn’t that what a great book does?
Boss Lady Panel Podcast
Finally the podcast from the panel I did at SXSW in March is up. Listening to it I felt really proud (yes, even with the embarrassment of realising I talked about vomit) of all that we said in it. The advice that Emira, Lauren, Jenny and Vickie shared I think is really valuable and I hope the fun we had really came through.
“Successful, creative and self-taught entrepreneurs (from graphic designers, to producers, to crafters) will discuss and offer advice on what it’s really like to be the gal running the show. With experience running their own successful businesses on-line and off, each of these women has a wealth of information, advice and success stories to share. The panel will explore what makes business different from a female perspective, the particular challenges the panelists have faced, how to create/maintain a business with/without employees and how to achieve financial success all without boas or pink markers.”
Freelancing isn’t for everyone
Last week at SXSW I was on a panel called, “Boss Lady.” At the end of that panel a young woman approached me with the question of how to start her own company. At the moment she was working full time, had a really busy life and a family that depended on her to keep those two things going.
I offered her the idea of treating her new business as a part-time evening gig; working after all her other things had been taken care of. Her face squinted up at this. This, she said, seemed a little hard because she was already busy. I gently explained that working on your own is one if the hardest things you can do – especially at first. The effort, sacrifice and bravery required are often more than when you start a job with a company that has everything laid out for you. The cushion of a 40-hour work week with weekends off, sick benefits and coworkers to tag team with does not exist. Her face squinted more because she didn’t like the sound of all that work; that’s not what her idea of being self-employed was.
She had the “9-5 grass is greener” syndrome. The one in which you imagine that if you were on your own, everything would be easy peasy or at least easier. You’d have freedom, creativity, total control, late mornings, time off, possibility. And while you do get to have these things, there is a price to pay for it and that price is not for everyone.
So I suggested that perhaps she wasn’t made to be an entrepreneur and I could tell she didn’t like that answer because she was not happy where she was. And the opposite of unhappy is happy so the opposite of corporate must be freelance, right? Wrong.
I know a lot of people who work for corporations, company’s and star ups that are extraordinarily happy because they have found the right fit and the right company. These people know how they work, what they want to do and then target companies and other people that match their values, ideas and work ethic. And these people who go to offices each day are happy office people – they’re sometimes happier than a lot of self-employed people who struggle every day.
I asked the woman if she liked the company she worked for. No, she said. I asked if she even liked the role within the company. No, she said. I asked her if she had thought of defining who she was, what she could do and then taking that to a company that matched and she said no. She hadn’t thought of going to a different company with a different job. She had believed (as I once had), that every job would be the same. Every office would be the same. And the only solution to cubicle hell would be to leave.
It was the answer for me at the time, but it’s not the answer for everyone. Especially someone like her who really needed financial security to meet so many responsibilities and who also did not want to really work all that hard on something else. But when the idea of finding a different company in a different area and taking on a different career came to her, she smiled and shook her head “yes” for the first time in our conversation.
Sometimes when a person isn’t satisfied with something they tend to daydream about the total opposite – if you’re single you think being married would make you happy. If you have children that are driving you crazy you think about being childless. If you’re in a job you hate you think about going on your own. But I don’t think swinging to extremes is ever a really good idea because it’s usually just you reacting and not really thinking. You’ll end up with the same issues (perhaps more) if you just go to the opposite instead of figuring out what would really work best.
There are great things about working for someone else just as there are great things to working on your own. If you’re deciding weather or not to become an entrepreneur, writer or artist, you need to be honest about the amount of work that you’ll have to put into it without outside help – especially until you can afford to hire an assistant, a manager, an accountant or land an agent. You’ll have to ask if you’re prepared to work more than 40hours a week (and it’s true, you’ll be working in an area you love so perhaps it won’t feel like work, but then you run the risk of blurring the line between work and play. Burn out can be a problem). You’ll need to ask yourself if you require financial stability which can be hard to come by, especially when you’re first starting out. And you’ll have to understand how you work – because no one will be handing you work and giving you yearly reviews. You’re your own boss.
If you need freedom, creativity, the need to be of service, be independent, run your own ship but can’t quite make the leap to freelancer, see how you can rearrange your current life. Can you switch to another job within your company, can you go to a different company, can you work 4 10-hr days and have Friday off, can you go part-time, can you work in an entirely different area, can you work for an entrepreneur or a start-up to gain experience?
Going out on my own was the right thing for me to do at the time and it’s worked out extraordinarily well. All the challenges have been so completely worth it because the rewards were more than I expected. But it’s not for everyone. I think we all want to do work that we love and feel good about it at the end of the day. And for some working on their own is the way to do it whilst for others it’ll be nothing but a miserable time. Vice versa for working for someone else. The trick is just to be truthful about what you need, how you work, and what you are willing to do. Maybe that’s starting your own company or maybe it’s working for someone else.
Neither is better than the other – it’s just a question of what works for you.
(For another perspective, read Summer Pierre’s Artist in the Office series.)
Blogs with Ads
When I began blogging in 1996 (before there was the term “blogging), everything I wrote and created online was hand-coded. There was no “publish” button to make things easy, no archiving system. There wasn’t any other blogs out there so linking and building community wasn’t really easy. But I believed in writing and putting things out there so I kept going.
In 2001 when I left my 9-5 gig to freelance, there wasn’t other artists blogging about freelancing, creating, dealing with the day-to-day struggles so I decided I would. I wanted to share information to help someone who might be in the same position as I but, like myself, could not find the info.
Now, in 2007, blogs are everywhere. Everyone and their mama has one (my 63 year old mother just signed up for one!). It’s now become acceptable to blog and, in some areas, weird not to. There’s some blogs we’ve come to depend on for information or entertainment; we check these blogs daily, wanting more updates – quicker, faster, more! Because blogging has become a way to reach a large audience, advertisers are wanting to get in on the action. Having a “sponsor” never used to be an option but I’m actually glad it’s become one. For someone who wrote for years and years without receiving a direct financial benefit (I reference direct as in being paid for each visitor to the site. I’ve made a living indirectly from this site by landing jobs), it’s nice to be financially recognised for the work that I have and continue to put in.
And for some bloggers, blogging has turned into a full-time job because there’s an audience that craves their words. And for those bloggers, advertising is how they are paid for those jobs. After all, don’t most of us work to be paid? How many people go to work, come home and then say “man, so nice that I put in all that effort and received nothing!”
You might think for the people/sites that update a lot, ads might be OK but you might still hold prejudice against smaller blogs or sites that advertise. You might think it interferes with content that the author “sold out,” that the ads are ugly, that it removes the legitimacy of the blog. I believe these are ridiculous reasons and usually have less to do with the actual advertisement and more to do with personal beliefs and judgments.
Elsewhere