I just published some photos from the launch party at the Ogilvy offices in Taiwan. The book so far has been a hit in Taiwan, selling over 5000 copies in its first few weeks of publication!
Last week at a publishing industry gathering of the Bookbinders Guild of NY, Personality Not Included and Art Director Anthony Landi were honored for the cover design featuring the crazy rainbow chicken. It is a great validation of some hard work from folks behind the scenes in a publishing group that don’t often get the recognition they deserve for the work that they put into making a book look good and be successful. Congratulations to Anthony and the rest of the McGraw-Hill design team for this much deserved honor! It was great to work with you and glad that the book is getting such great recognition from the industry.
An inside look at how I wrote Personality Not Included:
Tomorrow I will be in Atlanta doing the lunch keynote at the Executing Social Media conference. As part of that trip I am doing a book signing at the Borders bookstore in Buckhead. Following the signing, we’ll all be gathering at Fado’s Irish Pub in Buckhead (an old college drinking hole of mine and a bar mentioned in the book too!) If you are in Atlanta, hope you can make it to one of all of the events:
Executing Social Media Conference
Several months ago, I had the chance to go into the studios at the CNet offices in San Francisco to record a session for something called a “Business Book Brief” that runs on cNet’s companion site for business called BNet. The video has been produced, professionally edited and is now online on the BNet site. Check out the video below for a brief introduction to Personality Not Included and let me know what you think.
I recently launched a photo collection of all the places that I have managed to find Personality Not Included or promoted it. It’s a fun gallery of the book in lots of bookstores, at parties and a few other locations. Check it out and if you have any photos of the book in your local bookstore, please do share them with me so I can add them to the gallery! You can send them to me at pnibook@gmail.com or tag them on Flickr with “pnisighting.”
I love books. Not just for the power of conveying an idea through a printed form, but also for the emotional significance of actually holding a book in your hands. More and more recently I have been books become a brilliant marketing tool for everyone, from political candidates to technology companies. Along the way, there are several ideas that I have collected for how using a book could be an effective part of a marketing strategy. Here are a few:
I’m happy to announce that Personality Not Included was chosen as a book of the month by Soundview Executive Book Summaries. In case you aren’t familiar with them, they are a group that review thousands of business books a year and select two each month to summarize in both audio and downloadable PDF format for subscribers. It is a huge honor to be chosen and I’m thrilled to be among titles like Influencer, Meatball Sundae, and The New Age of Innovation. Check out their site to see how you can get a download and summary of the book - or if you already have a copy, be sure to read page 185 where I take my own shot at summarizing the whole first section of the book in just 60 words. The most profound ideas shouldn’t take long to explain. Hopefully I manage to live up to that truth.
When I was traveling in Beijing I had the thrill of finding the book in one of two big English language bookstores in the city. The Wangfujing Bookstore had three copies of PNI (pictured in the photos below). The other bookstore didn’t have it, because they were sold out! Also in the gallery below are some shots from a few media interviews I did with press in the Ogilvy Beijing office:
One of the frustrating things about writing a book is that the “metrics” you get back from the publishing industry are less than complete. As an internet marketer, I’m used to getting a certain level of detail with reporting and when you write and publish a book you need to quickly get used to the fact that you will never have those kinds of metrics. Still, over the past few months since my book came out, I’ve developed my own sense for reading between the lines to pay attention to metrics that really matter. Here are just a few that I’ve uncovered that I use to better understand how my marketing efforts for the book are doing:
- Quality and quantity of speaking invitations - Since the book came out, the fastest return (almost overnight) was the types of speaking invitations I have been getting. Instead of leading panels, I have consistent offers to do keynotes, Instead of me proactively reaching out to groups for speaking invitations, they are now emailing me. I attribute this to two things - the first is the fact that I have a book, and the second is positive word of mouth from my previous speaking gigs. Lots of these invites are coming from people who have heard me speak at another event. So if you have spread the word or recommended me for a speaking gig - thanks!
Welcome to all of you BzzAgents who are making it to this site as a result of Frogpond campaign that I recently launched this week. I’ve been reading furiously trying to keep up with the nearly 2500 reviews and comments that you have left about this site and the book and contrary to what you might think, I don’t have a team of people to help read all of them so I’ve been going through all of them myself! From what I have learned so far, there are basically three categories of comments:
- Not interesting - for BzzAgents who are just not into business and don’t know anyone who runs a business or works in business … the book didn’t have much to offer.
- Like the book, but the website was confusing - many people read and enjoyed the excerpt (though many people wished for more content from the book to consume). Others thought it could be interesting, but were confused or turned off by the website.
- Loved it and bought it - this was my favourite category (obviously!) of people who loved what they read on this site or through the excerpts and said they would go ahead and buy the book.
I haven’t done a full analysis, but these categories seemed about equal in their spread (33% each). As I spent some time this weekend thinking about what to do to incorporate this feedback, I decided to focus on two things. The first was to correct some BzzAgents who thought the campaign was run by a big organization (it wasn’t … it’s just me). The second was to offer the second group from the list above more information to hopefully address their concerns and help them figure out if the book may actually be useful for them or someone else they know.
To that end, I redesigned the main section of the homepage to use a better description of what the book is all about. In addition, I’m releasing another book excerpt of material, available at www.personalitynotincluded.com/pnibonusexcerpt.pdf. This excerpt is the first several pages of Chapter 6 and should give even more of an idea of what the book is about. Happy reading and if you’re a BzzAgent and made it here, let me know if any of this helps!
Paul Dunay, a fellow marketing blogger and creator of the Buzz Marketing For Technology Podcast just published an interview we did together a few weeks ago. His show is one of the best for BtoB technology marketers looking for a great professional interview series - I highly recommend subscribing to get all of Paul’s updates.
Below is the transcript and notes from our show:
I had the chance to make it out to the iconic Strand bookstore in NY last week and launched a search for PNI. I found two review copies in the Reviewer section of the store … a place where they sell the review copies that the store gets for 50% off of retail. So PNI was selling there at Strand for about $12 - definitely the cheapest I have seen it for sale so far. There were only two copies left when I was there a few days ago, so if you want to save a few bucks and live in NY you better get there fast!
Since I launched my new book PNI, I have been getting emails, Facebook messages, Twitter updates and live feedback at events about what people liked and didn’t like about the book. These comments are a wealth of insight, but no one aside from me is getting the benefit of seeing them. Amazon reviews are the most visible way right now of sharing this type of feedback, but most people will not bother to go to the effort to write a review on Amazon - unless they have the right incentive. That’s what this post is about.
If you have read Personality Not Included and have some thoughts about it, I’m asking you to post your review on Amazon.com (or on an international version of Amazon if you happen to be outside the US). To offer an incentive, I also agreed with my publisher that we will be taking one quote from an Amazon review and featuring it on the outside back cover of the next edition printing of Personality Not Included (McGraw-Hill makes the final call). That means anyone who picks up the book in a bookstore or searches it online will see your name and organization name or URL. So before I start, I want to clarify a few things.
First of all, I am NOT in any way asking you to lie or share opinions about PNI that you don’t personally feel. If you read the book and hated it, go ahead and post your review to that effect on Amazon or anywhere else. I probably won’t use it for the back cover (obviously), but I’m not trying to stop you from doing that. Instead, my goal is to reach the many people who have read the book, but have not posted a review on Amazon because there is no tangible reason or benefit. Hopefully, this idea gives you a reason … visibility. You don’t need to be a blogger or a CMO to participate. My goal is to take a piece of REAL feedback from one of you and feature it on the back cover of the second edition, and encourage some useful book reviews on Amazon.
If you have already posted a review, don’t worry - you’ll be included in this competition. If you haven’t, but had some thoughts after reading the book, please share them on Amazon. And if you think this idea is just a cheap stunt to get more Amazon reviews, post a comment here and let’s talk about it. As an author, asking for reviews is a minefield because you don’t want to manipulate people, but you do want them to review the book so more people hear about it. Successful or not, I’m considering this an experiment in doing that.
Admission: For the more astute, you probably noted an assumption in this post - which is that PNI will actually get a second edition printed. All expectations from the publisher are that we will do one … but it does depend on sales of the first edition, so I don’t want to mislead anyone to thinking its a done deal. The chances are pretty good, though.