Forgotten Follow-up

By Terry Whalin @terrywhalin

In some ways, my continual pitching podcast hosts is like putting together a puzzle. You have to turn the different pieces around so they fit into the right picture. If you’ve done puzzles, sometimes toward the end you discover you are missing a key piece.

I’ve had this sort of experience with PodMatch which has a database of over 90,000 podcasts. I reached out for help from support and for a couple of days, I had more matches of podcast hosts to pitch. In fact, I booked a couple more podcasts, then the matches again stopped. I asked support what else could I do and received a short list of suggestions.

The first suggestion almost leaped off the page:

1. Go through your messages and send some follow-ups. 

During the months I’ve been with PodMatch, I have not gone  back to any of the podcast hosts who did not respond and follow-up with a second pitch. I had forgotten to follow-up.

 

I’m aware there are many reasons why I didn’t get a response. Some of those podcast hosts didn’t see my pitch as a fit for their show. But there are many other reasons why they didn’t respond and a second pitch may generate interest. Here’s a few of the other reasons (speculation on my part) why they didn’t respond: 

--Maybe they never received my pitch

--Possibly the pitch went into their spam

--Or my pitch arrived at the wrong time when their schedule was stacked.

--Or maybe they were distracted and rushed when they read my first pitch and didn’t give it careful consideration.

Through PodMatch, I do not have their email address to follow-up. I do have the ability to send a follow-up message. My plan is to return to the first matches (even six months ago) and craft a second follow-up pitch. In my pitch, I’m going to highlight my own connections and how I promote each podcast. The suggestion from the PodMatch help support was brilliant and worth some of my effort.

Sometimes in these articles, I confess to being behind as an acquisitions editor processing the flurry of Morgan James Publishing submissions. In some cases, I’m many weeks behind in reaching out to an author and processing their work. Last week I got a creative follow-up email from an author. He reached out and said it had been weeks since we communicated and he believed my silence told him that we were not interested in his submission. Then he said he was leaning toward self-publishing. 

His unusual and pointed follow-up caught my attention. For the first-time I looked at his submission and scheduled a time to explore publishing this book. He used a brilliant and attention getting strategy.

As editors we have mounds of material to process and a simple gentle follow-up is a good way to catch the editor’s or literary agent’s attention. Everyone needs to follow up no matter what you are pitching--books, magazine, speaking gigs or anything else. 

Each of us have limited time to pitch our books or our writing. There are also crazy things that happen which prevent others getting our pitches. Timing is a huge element with pitches--which is another reason a gentle follow-up is important. 

What are you neglecting to follow-up? Do you have other ideas about follow-up? I look forward to your comments.

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Find The Right Puzzle Pieces

It's been years since I've put together a complicated board puzzle. As a teen, it was something we did on some rainy summer afternoons. The time disappeared as we twisted the different pieces and attempted to fit the right piece into the right place.

It's the same sort of process with our writing and communication. It is often a matter of putting together the right combination of pieces to form the completed picture. Are you looking for the right combination or stuck trying to put two pieces together which are not destined to fit?

For example, over the last few weeks, I've been pulling together another book project. For this particular book, I have a wealth of raw material yet I want to make sure I put it together in the "right" package. The big structure of the book needs to be in place as well as the details of the paragraphs and the chapter construction. In many regards, it is like a giant puzzle that I'm constructing. In some ways, I need to be careful and not mix in some pieces from a completely different puzzle so the overall picture is complete. I've enjoyed this fitting process yet one of the keys is to continually focus on the reader. Who is the target market and what does that reader need? How will the words on the page meet the needs of the reader? When it comes to nonfiction, it's the consistent focus on these questions which will keep the book on track.

When I write a nonfiction book, it starts with a solid outline for the book. If I'm writing a book proposal, then I need this outline for the proposal and the chapter by chapter summary section. If I'm writing the book, then this outline will still be critical to the creation process. The outline provides the map of where the book is headed. It keeps me focused on the overall target audience. Plus the outline helps determine the sequential flow of the contents. If I'm writing a shorter magazine article, I still need this outline to know the beginning and end of my article.

Your writing situation and life will be different from mine. I have a mixture of work in the print realm and in the Internet space. It's again like a giant puzzle where you have the big picture in mind (or the end result) and you need to constantly fit the various pieces together into the right mixture. What is the right mixture for your writing life? For some people, they will be strict children's writers or young adult writers while others will be able to write stirring copy for a brochure one hour and a chapter of their current book project the next hour.

My encouragement today is to keep looking for that perfect mixture for your writing life. And don't be surprised if it changes from year to year. It's part of our ever evolving world of publishing.

The Missing Puzzle Piece

The July 30th issue of Publishers Weekly is the most recent printed issue that I've received. Living in the West, it normally doesn't arrive until late in the week. This particular issue had a fascinating short article which ranked the top 20 bestsellers from January to June 2007 called "It’s 'The Secret' By a Long Shot" Normally the bestseller lists and rankings are separated according to the type of product such as fiction, nonfiction, hardcover, trade paperback, or mass market (I didn't list all of the categories but gave you an idea of them). This list combines all of the various products and ranks the top 20 bestselling products from any category. The title for the article comes from the fact The Secret book and audio are both on this list of bestsellers.

One of the things to spot is something which is not there. It's true when you proofread your manuscript and it's true when you read publications -- whether articles in the newspaper or magazines or books. It's part of your challenge as a reader to pick up on what is missing as well as what is actually there. I see it as actually processing the information instead of simply absorbing everything like a sponge.

One of the elements which bothered me about this list is the lack of any Christian product. First you have to understand these numbers come from Nielsen BookScan which measures the actual sales from the general marketplace. A number of Christian authors have some substantial sales--yet not all of their sales are reported in Nielsen BookScan. Why?

I returned to an article which Mike Hyatt wrote in late December about the inaccuracy of bestseller lists. I'm encouraging you to read the entire article along with the sequel article from Mike. For the purposes of this post, I want to quote a couple of paragraphs from his excellent information for you:

"The best solution of all would be for Nielsen’s BookScan to collect data from Christian bookstores. It already collects data from 6,500 general market bookstores and other retail outlets, including Target, K-Mart, and Costco. (It apparently does not collect data from Wal-Mart or Sam’s.) It is also based on point-of-sale data, so the data is thus more reliable. It reflects what customers are actually buying. The sad fact is that Nielsen can't get Christian bookstores to participate. They don't want to share their data. They are afraid that general market booksellers and mass market outlets will use this data to gain a competitive advantage. In my humble opinion, this is nonsense."

"For starters, competitors to Christian bookstores already have access to Christian bestsellers lists. This data is published monthly by the two major trade magazines and is readily available on the Web (see previous links). In addition, all the major Christian publishers call on the general bookstores and the mass market outlets. In the ordinary course of business, they tell these accounts which of their particular books are selling best. So, these competitors have access to all the data they need. Because Christian bookstores refuse to cooperate with Nielsen they either intentionally or unintentionally reduce the visibility of Christian products on the major bestsellers lists. Because sales through Christian bookstores can't be counted, many books never hit the list that are, in fact, probably outselling those on the list! (Just to give you an example, in the last 12 months, we have had over 100 of our books at Thomas Nelson sell more than 100,000 copies. You can make it onto the list, depending on the velocity and the season, with as few as 20,000 books sold.) As a result, people who might be interested in Christian books, never get the opportunity to discover those books, because--to be blunt--Christian booksellers are "hiding their light under a bushel."

"In addition, the larger Christian publishers, in an effort to drive the bestseller lists, tend to send their authors to general market bookstores, because they know that they report to the various bestsellers lists. If Christian bookstores reported to these lists, particularly Nielsen, then it wouldn't matter to most of us if the author signs books at a Christian bookstore or a general market bookstore. Both would get reported. But Christian booksellers aren’t giving us that choice. As a result, everyone loses, especially the would-be Christian book consumer who doesn't get the opportunity to discover books that are, essentially, invisible."

OK, these three paragraphs from Mike Hyatt explain the missing puzzle piece in the bestsellers. My encouragement is to read deeply but also think deeply about the material that crosses your screen or your desk or your mailbox.