I read this book by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares because Jane Friedman recommended it in her newsletter, along with a couple other books I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. The subtitle is “A Startup Guide to Getting Customers” and that’s pretty much exactly what this book is.
I decided to read it because Jane Friedman is well known for her publishing expertise and I was assuming this was a book on publishing. It certainly applies to selling books and building a readership, but it also applies to startups of all kinds. The authors of the book are entrepreneurs themselves and they interviewed other entrepreneurs of various sorts for tips on the different methods of getting customers. None of them were writers or publishers.
The book lays out more than 20 different ways of getting customers. The only reason I read every chapter is because the first chapter emphasized keeping an open mind. Even if you don’t think a particular channel is right for you, you never really know until you try. I’m all for keeping an open mind, so I tried to do that while reading this book.
Nothing is going to work for everyone, and there are some channels (like trade shows) that just won’t work for me, but I am glad I read every chapter. As the book promised, there are some avenues I had never considered before that maybe I should start thinking about.
This goes, not only for selling books, but trying to get my copywriting business off the ground. Selling a service can be much like selling a product when it comes to finding clients and convincing people that what you sell is worth buying. In the end, I can say with confidence that reading this book opened my eyes to possibilities I hadn’t considered before. It was certainly an invigorating read in that it made me consider all the different things I could try.
My only complaint about this book is how poorly edited it was. I read the ebook, so I’m not sure if the physical copy is any better, but the ebook was pretty pathetic. It looked like the authors did nothing more than spell check, because there weren’t many typos, but there were a lot of extraneous words and sentences that didn’t make sense. I noticed it more as I got closer to the end of the book. I’m not sure if it just got on my nerves as I read more, or if whoever was editing it tried to do it all in one sitting and got tired and lost focus as they got to the end of the book.
What about you guys? Read any good nonfiction books lately? Anything that opened your mind to something new you hadn’t considered before? I want to hear all about it in the comments!
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