all flights: Shel Horowitz ? Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers

Our featured author this week is Shel Horowitz, author of Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet

Tell us a bit about you and your journey.

I?ve been in both the marketing and the environmental/social change world since the early 1970s. Since about 1999, I?ve been working on braiding these two strands together in a coherent and integrated whole.

In 1995, I got involved with the online world, and especially with the conversations independent publishers were having. I started bringing my marketing expertise to book promotion in a more serious way, and authors and publishers hired me to write things like book covers and press releases. Since that time, social media has been important in my work, and so has speaking.

What is the title of the book you?ll be speaking about today?

My two most recent books (I?ve written eight) are the self-published Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers (the book that people in the author/publisher community kept begging me to write) and the traditionally published Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson)?which started as a self-published book called Principled Profit. In fact, of my four traditionally published books, three of them can be traced directly back to earlier self-published books.

Please share with us a synopsis of your book.

Grassroots: A one-volume resource for creative and inexpensive book marketing, based not only on my own many years as a book marketing strategist and copywriter, but also on the success stories of some 40 other authors and publishers.

Guerrilla: A comprehensive demonstration that running your business with green and ethical principles is not just the right thing to do, but can be highly profitable. Demonstrates both how to be green and ethical (in some cases very deeply green) and how to tell that story to prospects who want to hear it?and then escalate them from prospect to customer to fan to loyalist to ambassador. Also explores several ?business heresies? such as the idea that market share is the wrong thing to measure, or that your competitors could become sales partners, or that you can actually get paid to do your own marketing.

What inspired you to write this book?

Grassroots: A lot of people had been asking for it! My earlier Grassroots Marketing book was very popular in the independent publishing space, and starting around 2001, people started asking me, ?so when are you going to do a marketing book just about books?? At first I felt that I didn?t know enough, but gradually?especially once I started becoming a book shepherd and publishing consultant, helping authors actually bring new titles to market?I decided that I did have something to say, and that what I had to say would be useful and helpful to others.

Guerrilla: During the business-scandal crisis of 2002 and 2003, I got the insight that the frugal methods I?d used to build and run my own business were also extremely ethical, and that I might have something to say about the possibility of building a viable business around ethics from Day One. It happened that right after that insight, I was taking a cruise in the Baltic Sea. So I took my little PDA?a Handspring Visor with a fold-out keyboard, fit in a pocket)?and I wrote the first 10,000 words or so on the deck of the ship!

In the years that followed, I began more and more to see the importance of a protect-the-environment commitment for any company that claimed to be ethical, and to look for ways to integrate these two pieces. And then I happened to get an introduction to an editor at Wiley from one of their top-selling authors, and I pitched them on dong a green version of the ethics book. Once they said yes, I asked if it was all right to bring in Jay Levinson and the Guerrilla brand, and they were thrilled.

Who is the ideal reader for your book?

Grassroots: Any author or publisher who would like to sell more books and do it without running up a big bill for marketing.

Guerrilla: Business owners and organizations who want to be green and ethical, and/or reach the green customer.

What advise can you offer to authors wanting to write their first or next book?

Figure out a method that works for you. I know some writers who work from outlines, some who dictate their notes, some who just write their way through the first draft and then figure out how to structure it. I personally work without an outline for articles, but when I write a book, I write an outline first. But then I deviate wildly from the outline because the book starts to take on a personality of its own.

What advise can you offer to authors wanting to sell more books?

Be very visible. Subscribe to HARO (helpareporter.com), ReporterConnection.com, PitchRate.com, and RadioGuestList.cm (all free). Have a true interactive presence on social media (don?t just pitch all the time). Send out press releases that tell ?the story behind the story? and actually GET coverage (I can help with that). Spend the time and money to get the right title and cover. And partner with people who can bring you new audiences.

What book has inspired you most on your success journey and what about this book inspired you?

Different aspects of dozens of books have inspired me, as a lifelong reader. From Madeleine L?Engle?s, A Wrinkle In Time, which was maybe the first book I discovered (at age 9) where a weird quirky protagonist with no social skills could change the world, to Canfield and Switzer?s The Success Principles?the one self-help book I constantly recommend, with its concrete action steps to mastering your life and accomplishing your goals?to the many utopian science fiction writers who show us how to dream a peaceful, just, and environmentally conscious world, to Alice Walker?s The Color Purple for showing that no matter how low you?ve been brought, you can climb back up to Jeffrey Lant?s Cash Copy, which is still the best thing I?ve ever read on writing marketing materials, to Stephen M.R. Covey?s The Speed of Trust, which impressed me so much I got him to write the forward for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green?and dozens of others

Are you currently writing your next book? What can you tell us about it?

Instead of a book right now, I?m trying to build a client base for my two new syndicated monthly columns, Green And Profitable and Green And Practical (and I?m paying commissions if people find me clients for these). Getting paid for content is an enormous challenge in today?s world, and I?m committed to spending two years seeing if I can make a go of it.

Do you have a program or product available to help authors in any phase of the writing, publishing, or marketing of their books? If so, please tell us about it.

Yes, I offer individual help with strategic marketing planning, copywriting (with special emphasis on book covers and press releases), and also walking unpublished or badly published writers through the process of becoming well-published authors (helping with all the steps necessary for either traditional publishing or true self-publishing).

I made an attempt two years ago to launch a get-your-book-done coaching program, but i didn?t put much energy into it. I?d certainly do that again if enough people were interested. I *am* about to start a membership program around green marketing.

Of course, my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers is chock-full of helpful advice on book marketing, and on direct orders from me, it comes with a nice bonus package. The bonuses include a number of items from other book marketing experts, as well as a five-chapter e-book I wrote, ?How to Write and Publish a Marketable Book,? and another e-book covering social media for book marketers. (I liked the bonus idea so much that for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I put together a $2000 bonus package, and made it available to anyone buying the book form any source.)

Is there anything else you?d like to share with our readers?

I feel very blessed. I love my life, I love my work, and I am still amazed that I get paid to write and speak.

What is the best way for people to find out more about you, your book and your work?

Shel Horowitz, Marketing consultant/copywriter, author, speaker, book shepherd

www.GreenAndProfitable.com or www.ShelHorowitz.com (which has connections to all my websites, and my social media connections as well).

Book Marketing: http://www.frugalmarketing.com/publishers.shtml

Get Your Book Done: http://www.frugalmarketing.com/publishing-consulting.shtml

Twitter: @shelhorowitz

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