A Couple Book Tour Benchmarks (10/13/14)
The first important benchmark for me after lining up a publisher was when Carol Aebersold sent me an email saying , “It’s a wonderful book--so open, honest and heartfelt. I certainly appreciate the nice things you wrote on my behalf, but I also appreciate the inspiration your Average Joe’s Story gave me.” This was positive feedback from someone who has not only been on the journey I’ve embarked on, but has attained the kind of success I would some day like to attain. The next important benchmark came after I met Kim at the Montville Rotary Club. She booked me as her club’s speaker for their morning meeting. Besides providing me a great audience to talk with, Kim was also an avid reader. “Have you read Outliers? This book really reminds me of it.”
Kim’s statement was important because I fashion myself to be a similar style writer as Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers. In fact I incorporated things that I learned from all of Malcolm’s books that I’ve read into my book, its promotion, and the book tour. For someone to recognize the origins of what I had created made me feel that the way I was thinking wasn’t off-base. So many other things had gone wrong up until this point I was beginning to second guess myself.
I now felt a little more comfortable with the book itself. If someone can recognize its origins then people may buy into what I was tying to do with the book. Perhaps somewhere down the road someone else will come up and say that Average Joe’s Story: Quest for Confidence was like 7 Steps to Achieving True Success. You see Average Joe’s Story was written to be inline with other books like that, but it was also written to stand apart from them. Most of the books I have read that come from that genre give you a guideline of things to do, and you do them because you want the same results as the person telling you the story.
For all of the valuable information that comes from these “self-help” books I honestly think they are more destructive than constructive. That may sound counter intuitive, but I have very logical reasons for believing this to be true. Self help is about the individual going out and making a positive change in their life. When you read a self help book you stop thinking and you start doing. Self help books are just the results another person has accomplished from various personal life experiences. What I have noticed take place in society as a whole is that we have stopped thinking for ourselves. We have moved to this ideas of just tell me the answers, and I’ll go do it. The problem with that rational is that you need to know the why before you can do it, or when you don’t see the results in a timely enough fashion you’ll just quit.
Average Joe’s Story give you some of the answers you might be looking for, but more importantly it makes you ask questions. It makes you think as well as read between the lines, and that is important because we need to return to being a society of thinkers.
