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Conduct Informational Interviews to Land Your Next Job

One of my favorite podcasts is Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang, a podcast about writing and journalism. Jeff also writes a Substack called The Yang Slinger.

Sorry I didn’t upgrade to the paid version, Jeff.

In it, he usually dives deep into a particular question or issue he’s wrestling with, getting input from his friends and former colleagues in the sportswriting biz.

This week, he wasn’t wrestling with an issue so much as he was looking for help from those same colleagues. (Read it here.) He asked:

This week’s substack topic is a doozie: a friend of mine, just 23 (former student of mine, actually) just got laid off. He called asking me for advice … and I’m honestly running out of answers. So I’m collecting advice for this week’s substack. What would YOU tell him?

Although Jeff didn’t ask for my advice, I’m going to give it, mostly because I like to hear myself talk. It’s the same advice I have given to aspiring entrepreneurs, college students, and job seekers for the last 14 years. I’ve written about it elsewhere in the past, but I think it’s time I plant this flag on my own blog.

Here goes:

The power of Informational Interviews

If you’re looking for a job, stop looking on the job boards. Frankly, the job boards suck. They are literally bad at what they do.

That’s because roughly 85% of jobs come through networking, although 50% of all job applications come through the job boards.

That means 15% of all jobs are filled through job boards. If you batted .150 in baseball, you would have a very short career.

The rest of the jobs — the EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT — come from professional connections.

  • You meet someone at a conference.
  • A friend tells you about an opening at their company.
  • Your old boss or colleague calls you from their new company.
  • A friend of a friend of a friend introduces you to someone they know.
  • You had coffee or lunch with someone in the same profession.

It’s these last two that we’re going to focus on. You’re going to interview your way to your next job, and you’re going to do it by having coffee with someone and then with someone else, and then they’ll introduce you to someone else, and on and on.

I learned this from a friend who used this tactic in the 1980s after he moved to Indianapolis from New York. Within three months of informational interviews, he had three job offers and requests for 40 hours/week of freelance work.*

* This is notable because most freelancers usually only hope to work 20 hours a week; the other 20 hours are spent chasing up more work. So set your prices according to a 1,000 hour work year. (Your salary needs ÷ 1,000 = your hourly rate.)

And I’ve used it many times myself, as well as told other people about it. This advice has helped get people job interviews, internships, and brand-new jobs that they never heard about because they never showed up on any job boards.

That’s because 70% of all jobs are never published publicly.

Your job is not to apply for jobs.

Fourteen years ago, I spoke to a job seekers’ support group about informational interviews. Many of them had been searching for a job for many months without luck.

After my talk, one guy stood up and proudly declared, “My current job is to find my next job. I spend 8 hours a day applying on the job boards.” He even seemed a little smug about it.

I did that in 2005 and it was soul killing. After one week of spending four hours a day on the job boards, I was so damn depressed I could barely get out of bed. But the guy was undeterred. He wasn’t going to let the world get him down, he was going to apply and apply and apply.

A year later, I was asked to come back and give the same talk.

You’ll never guess who was still attending the weekly meetings.

When you lose your job, our temptation is to hit the job boards, like our parents, teachers, and guidance counselors all told us to do.

But it’s all bullshit. I mean, sure you can do the job application jitterbug, but the odds are stacked against you.

Our world has changed so much. We communicate differently, we connect differently, we consume media differently, we learn differently. So why the hell would we look jobs the way our parents and grandparents did?

If you’re going to take that path, you might as well apprentice yourself out to a blacksmith or cobbler.

Here’s how to do informational interviews

An old coffee shop in Central Florida that is no longer in existence.

(First, let me apologize for taking so long to get here. I did not mean to pull that same recipe website bullshit, writing a 4,000-word murder mystery before sharing their Memaw’s tomato sandwich recipe. I’m very sorry!)

So here’s how you do informational interviews.

Step 1: Reach out to someone in your industry, field, or company you want to work for.

Ask them to meet you for coffee or lunch because you want to learn more about their career and how they got there. A Zoom call or phone call will also work.

There is a very good chance these people will want to talk to you because they want to talk about themselves.

If you were to call them and ask about a possible job, I can almost guarantee they will not talk to you.

If you asked if you could do some freelance work for them, they probably won’t want to talk to you.

But if you say, “Can you talk about yourself for an hour and I’ll totally listen to everything you say?” they will scramble to meet you because everyone loves to talk about themselves.

Step 2: Ask them questions.

What did they major in? How did they get their first job? What do they like about it? What do they dislike?

Let them do all the talking. You can intersperse little comments like, “Oh, I hate that, too,” or “I did that once.” But this is not your time to do a lot of talking; this is not your interview, it’s theirs.

If they ask you questions, you can answer. But make sure they do most of the talking.

There’s an old adage that the more someone else talks, the smarter you look. So you want to come away from this looking like a genius.

Step 3: Mute your phone!

And put it in your pocket.

Don’t turn it off because you may need to share something with your interviewee. But don’t keep it out where it can be a distraction. And never, ever take a call.

Step 4: Take careful notes.

Get a notebook and a good pen and take as many notes as you can. Make this your interview notebook and fill it up with people’s great advice, ideas, and stories.

Even if you never look at your notebook again, this makes you look like you’re listening and that this is so important, you don’t want to forget it.

Now, you not only look like a genius, you look like a good listener.

Step 5: When it’s all over, ask these two critical questions.

This is the really important part, so pay attention!

When you’re nearly finished, ask them two questions:

  1. Do you know anyone else I should talk to?
  2. Great, can you introduce me to them?

Because you’ve been such a good listener and you seem really smart, they’re going to be happy to introduce you to other people. They’ll say, “Yes, you should talk to my friend, Danielle.”

And then you’re going to ask them to do an email introduction between you and Danielle. (Click here to see how to do a proper email introduction between two people.)

Do NOT let them say, “Just tell Danielle I told you to contact her.”

Because Danielle is not necessarily convinced that your new friend really did tell you to contact her. You could be lying. This could be a trick. Maybe you’re just dropping the friend’s name in the hopes that you can meet with her.

You want to avoid even the slightest appearance of that, which is why you need their introduction.

Step 6: You follow-up first.

Don’t wait for Danielle (or whomever) to contact you first. Once you get that email introduction, follow up with Danielle. Ask them the same questions — “I wanted to learn more about you and your career. Can we meet for coffee?” — and go through the same process: listening, note taking, two critical questions.

Your meeting with Danielle will lead to a meeting with Rosario, which will lead to one with Curt, which will lead to one with Javier, and so on and so on.

Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of them will make two introductions, and now you’ve doubled your productivity.

Along the way, something will happen. Someone will know someone with a job opening. Or they’ll be looking for someone who does what you do. Or they’ll put your résumé on the hiring manager’s desk.

Whatever it is, you will have networked your way into a new job without filling out a single application. You’ll have avoided the job boards, skipped the HR gantlet, or put up with the months of rejections that comes with slogging it out on the job boards and classified ads like our parents and grandparents.

GIVE informational interviews, too

One day, many years from now, you’re going to be sitting at your desk and your email is going to ping (or your intra-cranial implant is going to buzz — I don’t know what the future’s going to bring), some 23-year-old kid is going to ask you to sit down with them over a cup of coffee or Soylent Green or whatever the hell we’re drinking in 2038.

Take that interview. Sit down with that kid. Answer their questions and talk about yourself because this is your moment to shine and share all the cool shit you’ve been doing. They’re going to take notes and they’re not going to talk much, which means they must be really smart.

And when they ask you, you’re going to introduce them to two or three of your colleagues, because you kick ass. And you’re going to help this kid get started on their own career path.

Because someone did it for you and that’s how you ended up having your own awesome career.

Photo credit: Jeff Pearlman’s Substack
Photo credit: Erik Deckers (Hey, that’s me!)

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Book Authors, Your Publisher Will Not Handle Your Book Publicity for You. Only You Will.

A few days ago, I spoke with two different people who were ready to publish their very first book. They wanted to know how to find a publisher that would handle their book publicity for them.

“Oh, your publisher won’t promote your book for you,” I said.

“Really? I thought the publisher handled all of that!”

“No, not at all. Unless your last name is Grisham or Patterson, your publisher won’t do shit for you.*”

* (Technically, that’s not true. Your publisher handles all editing, page layout, and cover design. You pay for that if you self-publish.)

It’s inescapable: When you write a book, you need to do your own promotion, or you need to hire someone to do it for you. Your publisher won’t do it, your agent won’t do it, your friends won’t do it. (Hell, they’ll barely buy your book!)

And people will not flock to your book just because you wrote it.

Your book may be great, but no one will care.

That’s because there are close to 1 million books published in the US each year. And if you count self-published books, that number is closer to 4 million.

Also, if you do manage to find a publisher, there’s only a 1% chance that your book will reach a bookstore.

Out of the 1 million books published this year, only 10,000 will make it to a bookstore. (My last edition of Branding Yourself was not placed in Barnes & Noble, even though they carried the last two editions plus my other book, No Bullshit Social Media. My publisher said Barnes & Noble just wasn’t a viable partner for them anymore. One of the biggest biz-tech publishers in the country, and they no longer worked with Barnes & Noble.)

So, your book is not going to magically sell just because you wrote it. If it did, we’d all be rich.

Which means you need promotion and publicity.

But your publisher is publishing dozens, if not a few hundred, books per year. Do you think they have the time to devote to your book and ignore all the others?

Absolutely not. If your publisher can put any weight behind the promotional efforts, it will be a few hours of sending a generic press release to all the same media outlets, blogs, and podcasters they send all other book announcements to. And then it’s on to the next book. And the next one. And the next one. And soon, your book is forgotten along with all the others they just promoted.

In fact, when you submit your book proposal or manuscript to a publisher, they’ll want to know the size of your social media footprint and newsletter subscription list. And if it’s not “a lot,” then they won’t publish you. It doesn’t matter if your book is the second coming of Confederacy of Dunces, they will give you a hard pass.

Which means you’re on your own.

Which means — and I cannot stress this enough — you need to do your own book publicity.

Let me say that again but in a bigger font.

You need to do your own book publicity!

If you don’t do it yourself, your book will not get promoted.

Oh sure, you could pay someone to do it, but you won’t get good publicity for less than a few thousand dollars per month.

It’s a question of time versus money: If you don’t have the time, then you need to pay someone to do it. If you don’t have the money, then you need to do it yourself.

Without explaining how to do it all (because there are several good books on the subject (affiliate link)), your publicity efforts should include:

  • An email newsletter campaign.
  • A social media campaign (Twitter and/or Facebook, plus maybe TikTok).
  • A book reviewer/blogger campaign.
  • A podcast interview campaign.
  • A paid online advertising campaign.
  • An email-your-friends campaign. (Email each of them, one at a time, ask them to buy.)
  • A convention/conference campaign.

You don’t have to do all of these things, but you need at least two of them — the first two — because they’re the easiest, they can be automated and scheduled, and they’re free. (Sign up for Mailchimp or Moosend; they have free starter options.)

I don’t care if you hate social media. I don’t care if you don’t know how to do an email newsletter. I don’t care if you hate having to email 200 book bloggers one at a time.

You have to do it. You have to do it. You have to do it.

Because your book won’t sell otherwise. Period, end of sentence.

Otherwise, your book will be the greatest thing you’ve ever done that no one will ever know it. You’ll sell it to a few friends and family members, and your partner will secretly buy three copies and give them to friends. But it will be just a tiny drop in 4-Million-Books-Published-Each-Year Ocean.

So let me say it again, but in red: You need to do your own book publicity!

“But I don’t like social—”

I don’t care. Get over yourself.

“But I don’t know how—”

I don’t care. Figure it out.

“But I don’t have the ti—”

I don’t care. Make the time.

“But I—”

Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?”

I don’t care. Do you know who else doesn’t care?

Everyone!

You need to do book publicity to make them care. You need to promote your book until you’re sick of it. And then you need to promote it some more. And when you think everyone else is sick of it, promote it some more.

Bottom line: You’re going to spend 90% of your time writing your book. And you’re going to spend the other 90% promoting it.

Because if you don’t do it, no one else will. No one will care as much as you. No one is invested as much as you.

You can either pay someone to do it, and they won’t spend as much time on it as you want.

Or you can suck it up and do it yourself.

Because your publisher will not promote your book for you.

Final note

All of this is not to discourage you into giving up or not seeking publication. You absolutely should. Submit to agents and publishers and get your book out into the world. You deserve to be published! People should read your work. Just be aware that your work is not done once you write The End. It’s only beginning.

Photo credit: Dimhou (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Questions About Personal Branding for the Writing Workshop of Chicago

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Writing Workshop of Chicago about personal branding secrets for authors. We had a great question-and-answer period at the end, but we ran out of time before we ran out of questions.

So the organizer and fellow humor writer, Brian Klems, forwarded the questions to me and I decided to answer them in a blog post. This way, he can refer all the attendees to this page and there’s a permanent location for the questions. But more importantly, I’ll get a bump in web traffic.

First, Yvonne asked, “Are Facebook author pages useful?”

Yes, they are, for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of your readers are on Facebook and it’s easy to point them to that page. Second, it gives you more privacy because you don’t have to be Facebook friends with your readers. You don’t necessarily want them to see your personal stuff, so an author’s page is a great way to do that.

However, keep in mind that Facebook limits the reach of its pages in the hopes that you’ll pay to boost your different posts. Depending on what you write, you might be better off creating a group about your books or topic. Groups updates are not throttled the way a page’s updates are, plus you can encourage more discussion among your readers.

But don’t let the Facebook page/group be your main hub of activity. Try to have a writer’s blog/website as your central hub and treat Facebook and other networks as the spokes.

Maria asked, “I’d always heard you should not post the same things on your various social media channels, so you give people an incentive to follow you in different areas. Your thoughts?”

That’s mostly true. One thing to keep in mind is that people will not see all your social messages. That is, my readers don’t see what I post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at the same time. People have their preferred social networks and probably won’t go to the others just to find you.

Having said that, you can take advantage of each network’s format to post your best message. You get 280 characters on Twitter, but you get 2,200 on Instagram. You may want to cram several #hashtags into a tweet, but stick them in the first comment on Instagram.

If you want to do simple things like sharing Instagram photos to Twitter and Facebook, you can automate that with Zapier or If This Then That. You can set it up so when you post a photo to Instagram, it will automatically be shared to Twitter and Facebook. That’s a real time saver. But if you want to have separate and distinct messages, you can either do it one at a time, or you can use a service like Loomly to post from a single dashboard. You can also use HootSuite, but it costs nearly $50 per month, compared to Loomly’s $26 per month. Which makes me think doing it one network at a time is ideal for most writers.

David wanted to know, “How important in LinkedIn for authors?”

That depends. It’s critical for business/non-fiction authors, not so much for fiction writers. You can find readers on LinkedIn, even if you’re a scifi/romance/mystery writer, but it’s going to be difficult to find them since most people go there looking for work-related content.

If you only have a limited amount of time and energy to focus on one or two social networks, stick with the ones that are going to do you the most good. LinkedIn won’t be that unless you’re writing business-related books.

Howard wondered, “What do you think about #BookTok on TikTok?”

Honestly, I haven’t watched it enough to have a strong opinion about it, but I will say that anyone who’s talking about books is doing important work, and they’re finding thousands of fans.

There are several channels/creators who have gotten very popular on TikTok talking about writing and books. So if you want to join their ranks, go for it. TikTok has become an important platform for a lot of people, mostly Gen Z, so you should take advantage of that.

Clare asked, “How does your intended audience shape how you brand yourself? For example, I write middle grade fantasy.”

That’s a great question, Clare, and almost worth its own blog article, if not an entire book!

Remember, a brand is an emotional response people have to our face and our name. (Or if you’re a company, the emotional response to your name and logo.) When you think about brands like McDonald’s, Nike, BP, or the Chicago Cubs, people have an emotional response to them. They love them or hate them.

So the emotional responses our readers have become our brand. We can shape and hone that brand ourselves, but ultimately, we’re not responsible for how people perceive us. We can do all sorts of great work and people’s emotional response can be “Yay!” “Ugh!” or “Meh.”

Having said all that, you should treat your personal brand almost like a persona or a character you play. That’s not to say you should lie about who you are. Rather, your personal branding efforts should match what your readers and fans expect of you.

If you’re a middle-grade fantasy writer, the kinds of things you share on social media should be about middle-grade fantasy subjects: swords, dragons, wizards, etc. It’s not really the place to write at length about the supply chain crisis or your thoughts on the January 6 hearings. You can do that elsewhere, but not on your author profiles because it doesn’t match what your readers want.

On the other hand, if you’re a political/current events writer, you don’t necessarily want to share your cosplay photos from Dragon Con.

So, in that sense, your audience shapes your personal branding efforts because you should give them what they want.

Cindi wanted to know, “Do you use some of the new social media platforms, Locals, Rumble, Spotify, and Truth Social?”

Not really. For one thing, there are thousands of social networks these days, compared to the few dozen there were when I first started doing all this in 2007. So I can’t even keep up if I wanted to.

Having said that, I’m not against using a new social network, and I’ve joined a few but I never stick with them. However, I’m always on the lookout for new alternatives to the ones I use now. Is there a new Twitter alternative? Where should I go if Facebook collapses? Is there something better than LinkedIn?

Ultimately, if I can find a network that looks like it won’t fail, doesn’t depend on rocket-like growth just to survive, and lets me quickly and easily post updates (this is one reason I haven’t gotten into TikTok yet), I’ll use it.

And finally, Mandy put a smile on my face when she said, “@erik awesome stuff (no question) :-)”

Thank you, Mandy! I appreciate it. I always have a great time speaking to the Writing Workshop classes.

If you have any other personal branding questions, just drop them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them. Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Taken from “10 Personal Branding Secrets for Authors” by Erik Deckers”

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Stop Selling to Me on LinkedIn

Are you married? When you first met, did you walk up to your prospective spouse and just pop the question?

Or are you in a long-term relationship? How did you start it? Did you say, “How would you like to form a long-term relationship? My strengths are that I have good manners, love my mother, and am kind to dogs?” And then did you follow that up with a list of past significant others who can vouch for your good character?

Of course not! That’s clearly no way to enter into any kind of relationship.

But when people connect with me on LinkedIn, it turns me off when the very first thing they do is ask if I need their web services, followed by a 500 word explanation of everything they can do, the companies and projects they’ve worked on, and a request to hop on the phone for a 15 – 30 minute conversation about what they just sent me.

(Not to mention that every message looks nearly identical. They’re either all copy-pasting each other’s sales pitch, or it’s just one company creating thousands of profiles with the same message.)

Oh, I know, I know. Some of you are saying: “Hey, it works. We get clients this way.”

I’m sure you do. And there are stories where people agreed to get married after just one date. In fact, there’s a TV show where people agree to get married the moment they meet. That doesn’t make it a sound strategy for building a long-term relationship.

And neither does you hitting me up about your services the very instant I accept your connection request. It’s rude, presumptuous, and desperate. I ignore the people who send me those messages. Maybe I’ll tell them “no thanks,” but usually only if they insist on repeating the same request a couple weeks later — you know, in case I missed it the first time.

The practice is so pervasive that I get at least two of these a week with the same copy-pasted sales pitch all asking for my hand in business marriage.

Part of my problem is that I can’t just refuse to accept people’s connection requests. I’ve written a few social media books, and people often connect with me after reading them. So I don’t want to be a jerk and snub a reader, but it’s getting harder to accept a request because I just know I’m going to get burned.

I can usually spot most LinkedIn spammers though. They tend to have a title that says “Business Development.” They live in a city or country that I have never been to or rarely visit, and yet they’re connected to 5 – 30 of my friends. And they usually work for some sort of web, SEO, or marketing agency.

I stopped accepting connection requests from people who fit that profile because I know what will be cluttering up my inbox 24 hours later.

More importantly, I’ve begun disconnecting from people who spammed me with their first message.

LinkedIn is for serious business connections, not a way for lazy salespeople to spam other people they’ve never met. And that’s what you’re doing: spamming people.

The only difference is you’re calling it business development and you’re (hopefully) doing it by clicking on the mouse yourself, instead of using the automation software that’s infected Twitter. I don’t care if you think it’s not spamming, or you tell yourself that you’re special and you’re not doing what those other people are doing, because you totally are.

You’re sending the same unwanted, unasked-for crap we get in our email inboxes. The only difference is you’re doing it on LinkedIn as if that somehow makes it okay.

Not only do I disconnect with these people, I will also occasionally report them to LinkedIn by clicking the “I don’t know this person” link or marking them as spam. If enough people do it, their account will be suspended or even terminated. And then maybe they’ll get the hint that this isn’t acceptable.

If you’re one of those people who uses LinkedIn instead of the phone to place your unwanted cold calls, why don’t you try some relationship building first? Start a conversation with people. Find out about them first. Don’t try to close the deal on the first date, don’t try to propose entering into a business relationship the moment you meet someone.

And I’ll make you another deal. If you buy a copy of my book and email me a photo of you holding it, I’ll agree to a 15-minute phone call with you about your company. Because if you’re going to make demands of my time without actually investing anything into the relationship, then I’m going to make a demand of my own.

Put your money where your mouth is. Invest in the relationship first, and then we’ll talk about what your company does.

(And then read the book. Maybe you’ll learn a better alternative to the “Married At First Sight” strategy.)

Photo credit: Qwertyxp2000 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 4.0)

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Writing Books for Personal Branding

I have a confession to make.

I’m a snob when it comes to being a book author. To me, a book has gravitas. It’s more than 200 pages, it’s been properly edited and revised numerous times, and it takes several weeks and even months to create. And, if I’m being honest, it exists in a printed form, having been printed by a traditional publisher.

This puts me at odds with a lot of people, because the modern definition and process of creating a book has changed, thanks to new technology.

  • Word processors let us write and revise manuscripts instead of rewriting them. Forty years ago, you typed a manuscript, made edits, and then retyped it.
  • Ebooks has changed book lengths. Now, we can churn out short stories and novellas, and publish them online and sell them for as little as $1.
  • Short-run self-publishing lets us print a few books. Rather than buying 2,000 copies from a vanity publisher, and having 1,990 copies sit in our garage for years, we can print out a few books at a time.

All of this has democratized the book industry.

The last time we had technology this disruptive was when the printing press was invented. Instead of waiting for a monk to copy a book by hand, you could gather a small group of investors, buy a printing press, and go into publishing yourself, and print whatever the hell you wanted.

That world grew and grew to the point where publishing was huge and unwieldy, and only very special writers could get books published. And then, like most everything else, the Internet broke that system.

Now, not only do the very special writers get books published, so can everyone else.

On most days, I embrace democratization of any elitist system. I’m all for tearing down walls and letting everyone be awesome and cool.

Want to write your own book? Awesome! Cool! There are ways you can get that published and you don’t have to be a part of that stuffy old elitist system! Power to the people!

Except I finally got to be special this time. I co-authored three books that were published by Real Publishers, and I won’t lie. That feels pretty good. (I co-authored a fourth book that was self-published, but I feel a little self-conscious about it.)

So I roll my eyes whenever someone holds up a 50 page stack of papers and says “I wrote a book!”

Because that’s not a book, that’s a pamphlet.

“I wrote it over a weekend,” they boast.

I want to shout. “That should be a warning, not a brag!”

“And you can too!”

“Like bloody hell you can,” I want to say, but I never do.

And so my protective instincts kick in and I want to stop people watering down what it means to be an author, or promoting this crazy notion that you can just spit out a book over a weekend.

Except I’m rethinking my whole attitude.

I have seen the light!

I was at a networking lunch recently where someone was talking about how “easy” it is to write your own book. It happened a day after I heard a podcast interview about the very same thing.

“Just take a talk you like to give, and record yourself talking about it. Or come up with 10 – 12 questions and record yourself answering them. Get that audio transcribed, edit it into something readable and coherent, and upload it to CreateSpace. Bada-bing, bada-boom, you’ve got a book!”

Look, a good book is not that easy. And something that easy will not be good.

All of my books have taken two people four or five months to write. The last edition of Branding Yourself took four months, and I worked on it for 10 – 15 hours a week. I was supposed to cut it down to 300 pages, and instead, it weighs in at 380 pages. But it’s good, and I’m very proud of it.

Because writing a book is hard work, it takes time, and you have to know your subject and you have to be able to write about it well.

And it has to be thick, right? Right?

Maybe not.

“These short books are a good personal branding tool, aren’t they?” asked my friend, Jim. We were sitting together at the networking lunch. “They show that you have some expertise about that topic and they give you some credibility.”

I stared at Jim, stopped in my tracks, mouth open a little. “Well. . . maybe,” I said begrudgingly

“They don’t all have to be big thick tomes, right? I mean, this is the kind of information you’d share with someone in an hour-long conversation over coffee.”

I stared a little more. “I guess,” I pouted.

I hate Jim.

It was in that moment, mouth open and staring, that Jim’s question was my epiphany. Books aren’t just meant to be read. They don’t exist independently of the author. They reinforce the author’s expertise and make them look like geniuses about their particular field. They support the writer’s personal brand better than a business card or even their social media accounts.

That’s when I realized books don’t have to be 380 page bludgeoning weapons. They really can be smaller, shorter, and less in-depth than my “proper” book that I toiled over for nearly half a year.

I really hate Jim.

One guy who spoke at the networking event had just published his own book. In fact, it was his third attempt, because his very first attempt was over 200 pages. Then he revised it and cut it down to 100. And then he dumped that version and wrote it in 75 pages.

Because — and this is important — his subject matter didn’t need 200 pages.

Pat used to own a high-end AV company that helped event, conference, and meeting planners put on big stage shows. And he knew how to grow other AV companies to become successful.

That kind of knowledge is really only useful to other AV company owners, and most of them already have a lot of the knowledge that Pat has. Which means he doesn’t have to explain the basics, and he can get right to the point without any fluff and extraneous bullshit.

And that only takes 75 pages.

It didn’t need to be any longer. Anything more would have just been wasted space and wasted effort and it wouldn’t have added anything of value.

Which means I have to rethink my attitudes about books and what a “real book” can and should be.

Stupid Jim!

But that doesn’t mean you can slack off! There are still certain rules and expectations we all have.

I mean, we’re not graphic designers, for God’s sake!

I actually came up with 8 Rules for Writing a (Short) Book. But this post ran on too long, so I decided to cut it here, and I’ll run those 8 rules in a day or two.

By

FL Entrepreneur Can Fulfill 12 Days of Christmas for 76% Less Than Leading Experts (PRESS RELEASE)

For Immediate Release
November 17, 2017

(ORLANDO)—Entrepreneurs know how to get things done with less money, fewer resources, and in a shorter amount of time. Humor writer and Florida entrepreneur Erik Deckers recently demonstrated that by hypothetically fulfilling all the items mentioned in the 12 Days Of Christmas. Deckers was able to find everything for $8,407, nearly 76 percent less than PNC Bank’s proposed cost of $34,558.65.

For the last 33 years, the PNC Financial Service Group has calculated the cost of every item of the classic Christmas carol. Deckers, a newspaper humor columnist and small business owner, decided he could do better. He did some basic Internet research and contacted a couple of friends, and came up with a figure much lower than PNC, and wrote about it for his latest humor column.

“The swans and the dancers were the budget killers,” said Deckers. “PNC was spending nearly $13,000 for seven swans a-swimming, and another $13,000 on nine ladies dancing and 10 lords a-leaping.”

Deckers said he checked a bird-selling website and sourced seven swans for $3,050. He also contacted a friend who works in entertainment at Disney World.

“Based on her recommendations, I think I could get 19 male and female dancers for $50 each for a two-hour gig, plus a couple passes through the craft table,” said Deckers. “That’s $4,000 to PNC’s $26,000.”

Deckers also researched other poultry hatcheries for the geese, partridges, and French hens.

“PNC was spending $180 on French hens,” said Deckers. “I found five of them for $7.75 apiece. That’s $38.75 total, with two hens left over for Easter eggs next year.”

Deckers admits this is all tongue-in-cheek, and he appreciates PNC’s annual efforts. But he also wanted to show that small businesses can achieve nearly the same results as large corporations, especially since they don’t have the same resources.

“There are plenty of entrepreneurs in this country who are doing great things on shoestring budgets,” said Deckers. “We don’t all get millions of dollars from venture capitalists, and we don’t have the huge budgets of the corporations. So we get things done by being resourceful and calling on our professional networks for help. I thought this was a great way to remind people of that fact.”

About Erik Deckers

Erik Deckers has been a newspaper humor columnist since 1995, and has owned his own small business, Pro Blog Service, since 2009. He recently published the 3rd edition of his book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (Que Biz-Tech), with co-author Kyle Lacy. The book is available on Amazon.com, and at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million.

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Photo credit: Xavier Romero-Frias (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 3.0)