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Advertising Pitch Book Update

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baseball_2-1969pxA couple of people have asked why I’ve slowed down my blogging. Like most of you, I’ll take any chance to slay this insatiable beast.

OK, what’s up? I’ve been putting my typing into writing the world’s greatest, smartest, must have book on agency pitching. Here is where things stand.

Working title:

Perfect Pitch

What is it: A real old-fashioned paperback book printed with ink and paper and eBook detailing the best practices for designing, writing and presenting new business pitches. It leverages my 30 years of participating in and leading new business pitches… and some deep seated attitude. It will also include my story of the world’s worst agency pitch for the global Adidas account when I was at Saatchi & Saatchi London. I’ll support the book with an active website that will include agency leader insights and tools that every agency can use to better mange their pitch development.

Reason for being: According to advertising agency staff, the process of creating a new business pitch sucks. Read my post, “Half Of Advertising Agency Staff Hates Pitching.” I think that poor pitch management dramatically reduces an agency’s odds of winning. (This is a “duh” right?)

Status: I’ve written about 27,000 words. Will add another 7,000. I’ll also include interviews with experts like agency search consultants, procurement experts, a lawyer on IP and one of the best creators of 3D leave behinds. I’ve started designing the book and its website.

Stay tuned. I hope to publish this spring.

 

The World’s Best Marketing Book?

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I’ve been reading Dan Zarrella for years. His latest book, “The Science of Marketing” is a hard one to put down. It totally delivers my need for geek.

Here is his LinkedIn profile:

Dan Zarrella is the award-winning social media scientist at HubSpot and author of three books: “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness,” “The Social Media Marketing Book” and The Facebook Marketing Book.

He has a background in web development and combines his programming capabilities with a passion for social marketing to study social media behavior from a data-backed position and teach marketers scientifically grounded best practices.

Webinars in his “Science of…” series have drawn upwards of 30,000 registrants. And he holds the Guinness World Record for the largest webinar ever.

The World’s Best Marketing Book?

Is “The Science of Marketing” the best marketing book? It just could be today’s best if you’d like to run marketing programs based on analytical proof vs. assumptions.

I urge you to go out or online and buy it. The book delivers Dan’s quantitative approach to social marketing. As the subtitle says, “When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies.” Proven being the operative word here. All of this advice is backed up by years of tracking how people use social media, email, webinars and SEO.

Its a “Just the facts” book. Given the crazy world of opinionated social media advice… This book’s findings will help you dazzle your coworkers and friends.

Google Trends Web Search Interest social media how to Worldwide 2004 present

How To Get Your Book On The Shelf Of America’s Largest Bookstore In 15 Minutes

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The move from CD’s to digital music downloads; newspapers to online papers; cameras to smart phones; bricks & mortar colleges to online EDU; Best Buy to online book stores, etc. has been amazing to watch. Of course, Amazon has been a leader in this space and I am using them to publish my eBook (which is free today right here.)

This move from 3D to digital, known as disintermediation or dematerialization,  is one of the reasons that I could have my book move from concept to eBook and now paperback in three months. The paperback part has been very cool especially my use of the Espresso machine. No, not the coffee but the instant Espresso Book Machine. As Espresso says: “Books Printed In Minutes At Point Of Sale. For Immediate Pick Up Or Delivery.” By using this machine, I went from walking in the front door at Powell’s (America’s largest book store that’s right here in Portland) to having a paperback on their shelf in 20 minutes. The machine is like a big Xerox machine that took my file off of a thumb drive and printed a glossy 4-color cover, the inside pages and then bound the book at the press of a button.

15 minutes from PDF files to a printed book. Wow!

 

Will You Be One Of America’s New Authors? One of 200 Million.

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I am busy publishing my book as an eBook in Amazon’s KDP program and as a print-on-demand paperback using its CreateSpace platform. Down to the final details.

As part of the launch, I have written a 5,000 word white paper on my publishing process to help other fledgling authors give birth to their first book. I’ll get the paper up on the website in a couple of days. In the meantime, I cannot stress enough that we are experiencing an explosion in self-published books. Here are a couple of related facts:

According to the PEW Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project For Research: “As of February 2012, 21% of Americans had read an eBook, and that owners of e-readers read an average of eight books a year more than people without the devices (24 vs. 16).”

 The New York Times reported “According to a recent survey, 81 percent of people feel that they have a book in them…and should write it.” If you do the math, that represents over 200 million people in the U.S. who want to write a book in their lifetime.

Add the ease and low cost of self-publishing to the 200 million and you see why eBook revenues will soar. Here are some statistics.