Waiting for your Cat to Bark?

Several weeks ago I received a pre-publication copy of Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg's fantastic new book Waiting for your Cat to Bark? The book is due to be released on June 13 and is available on a pre-order basis on Amazon.

Waiting for your Cat to Bark? is a riff on persuading customers when they ignore marketing. The Eisenbergs, authors of the best selling "Call to Action," argue that customers ignore traditional marketing techniques such as big-budget advertising. Yes! I've been saying that for years!

I really like how the book explores buyer personas and shows marketers how to understand buyers first and only then develop an effective persuasion architecture to lead buyers to action. These are topics I've written about frequently, so it was great to read about them with some new angles. "Cat" lays out the ideas and themes in an easy-to-understand way and I highly recommend the book.

I also love that "Cat" authors and their publisher (Nelson Business) have targeted bloggers to receive pre-publication copies. The Eisenbergs obviously practice what they write about in Cat. Rather than the traditional book model of targeting the big publications (such as The New York Times Book Review), the authors are reaching out to independent bloggers who write about the space that the book is about. This is a technique I used to promote my book Cashing in with Content and also my e-book The New Rules of PR to great effect. If I had used traditional marketing (old-school PR and advertising) for my e-book, I would have been, ahem, waiting for a cat to bark. By targeting bloggers, I ended up with hundreds of mini-reviews and links.

Sure, a hit in the New York Times or BusinessWeek would be awesome, but mentions by influential bloggers are increasingly seen as vital for marketers of all things, not just books. In many ways, the readership of a well-read blog has more clout than a major publication anyway: it’s called micro-targeting.

After blogging for several years with no publisher or author offering me advance reading copies of books, I've gotten three in the past few weeks. Is this the beginning of a trend? I received an early copy of Brian Carroll’s terrific Lead Generation for the Complex Sale which is due out June 5, 2006 and I loved it (I'll post a longer review in a few days). And I'm due to get a review copy of The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil (to be released August 3).

How cool that bloggers are now seen by smart authors (and publishers) as influential in book promotion. Congratulations to the Eisenbergs, Brian Carroll, and Debbie Weil for not only writing great books at the right time that must be read by marketers, but also for embracing new media in their promotional efforts.

Comments

[Jordan]

Smart guys, them.

I have a copy of 'Call to Action' on my shelf.

[Jordan]

and I've read it, of course.

[Joe Wikert]

There's no doubt we publishers have to figure out how to leverage those "new rules of PR" I've heard you talk about. We can't simply rely on the old list of reviewers who got every single copy of a pre-pub book, only to read a small percentage of them. It's so easy to find bloggers with the right focus, send them a free copy and (if the book is good!), let the blogosphere light the PR fire. I applaud the efforts of the folks at Amacom publishing -- they added me to their free and review list last year. Here I am, a publisher who works for a competitor to Amacom, and they're smart enough to know the type of books I read and that I'll post about the good ones. Another great example is Joel Comm's recent book on AdSense. Thanks to his novel PR efforts this past week the book climbed all the way to #3 on Amazon...*all* of Amazon, not just the computer book section!

[Giovanna]

I'm very interested in this book. Do you think this book could be interesting also for a European reader (Italian for example) or it has a USA-based approach?

[Brian]

I ordered it earlier this week from Amazon, so I should have it early next week. I loved Call to Action, and saw them speak at a SES Conference before.