When You Can't Locate an Individual's Phone Number...

With the proliferation of smartphones, most of us carry one of
the most powerful communication devices in our pockets—our phone. As an acquisitions
editor, I get a lot of email—and I regularly send a lot of email. While I
love the convenience of email, I also know email is easy to ignore and not answer.
You can put it off for another time and another day.



The phone is a completely different communication device. It is
immediate and if we reach the person, we can have a short conversation with
them. We can leave messages into their voicemail (something I do a great deal as
an editor). Each time I leave a message, I try to think about the person getting
that message—so I leave something upbeat and to the point with my phone number
and email so they can respond.



The Internet has given us tools where we can guard and protect
our actual phone number. For example, I've got a New York phone number through
my work at Morgan
James. When I call authors or literary agents related to my work, I use this
tool and it shows up on their phone as a New York phone number—even though I
live in Colorado and work remote. Sometimes authors will answer because
it is a New York phone number. 



What if you can't locate the phone number for someone? The other
day I wanted to have a short conversation with an author. I looked in my contact
information. I had his email and mailing address but not his phone number. I
checked the author's website to see if it contained a phone number—and it did
not. It had a contact form but no email and no phone number. See how this author
is limiting the people who have his number?  How was I supposed to find
it?



To find a phone number, one of the tools I often use is Godaddy WhoIS Database.
 You can use Google to look up “WhoIs” and see there are a number of
these databases. As the first place I turn, I use this one from
Godaddy. With the author's website, you put that into the search engine and
in a matter of seconds, you get the contact information for that
author—including their phone number.  I wrote down the number then called it.
Immediately I was speaking with the author I needed to reach—on his cell phone.
Also I saved the cell phone number I had located for if I need to use it in the
future. This system is not perfect. Sometimes authors have paid for an extra
service called Domain Privacy Protection—and their real phone number is not in
this WhoIs record—but from my experience, many times you can locate their phone
number.



Maybe you have other tools and websites that you use to gather this
information. Please let me know in the comments section. I look forward to
learning from your experiences. 

 

Tweetable:



Missing someone's phone number? How do you find it? Get some new tools here.  (ClickToTweet)