Read or Sleep?

Whenever I travel, I regularly notice whether people are reading or sleeping or doing something else. Last week for example, I noticed a woman one row ahead and across the aisle. She had a small DVD player and was watching the romantic comedy Hitch. On the flight to Dallas, the man in the next seat had a new thick John Irving novel, Until I Find You. Almost three minutes after opening the book, he closed this over 800–page novel, dropped his head to his chest and was asleep. When I made the return trip, the man in the seat beside me didn’t make any pretense at reading. After takeoff, he was asleep for the duration of the flight.

One of my greatest personal challenges about traveling is deciding which book to read on the airplane. It sounds trivial but there are many choices and when I’m locked in a single place, I want to have something that absorbs my attention.  

Last week I carried a book which I had partially begun to read at home. Almost immediately when I sat down, I was lost in the content of PyroMarketing by Greg Stielstra (HarperBusiness). Subtitled, “The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life,” Greg has promoted more than 750 books through his work at Zondervan Publishing House. Of those many books, twenty have been #1 bestsellers and eight have sold more than a million copies.  Starting tomorrow, Greg is the new Vice President of Marketing for Christian books at Thomas Nelson Publishers. 

Because of my enthusiasm for what I’ve learned from PyroMarketing, I’m going to take the next few days of entries and write about some of the lessons that I’ve absorbed from this book. I strongly believe if you are a writer (whether much published or unpublished), you need to think about the messages in PyroMarketing. I believe as the author builds such techniques into their proposal and work with the publishing houses, then they can drive their books to succeed at a high level in a crowded marketplace. Hurry back tomorrow for the first detailed explanation of PyroMarketing.