Fortunately, Garrett Gunderson (entrepreneur, speaker, and NY Times Best Selling Author) is selfless enough to admit, he did this. Wasted time and $125,000 down the tubes! As you’ll see, he also found massive success.

After having the opportunity to interview Garrett about his book, and the roller-coaster it took him on, I just have to write about this. I hope in doing so, you avoid the pain and frustration he faced.

Here are two elements towards a truly successful book:

1) Work with the credible pros who deliver results…

As mentioned above, before Garrett learned about Michael Drew and Promote A Book, he invested $125,000 on “attempted” efforts to hit best seller lists. The results were fruitless.

Someone said, “Speak to Michael Drew,” and Garrett did. This is his account of that first conversation.

“The first call was a whirlwind. It’s rare I don’t pick up everything on a phone call. He just knew so much about the industry. I could tell Michael had a lot of experience.” – Garrett Gunderson

Michael flat out knows his stuff. His track record proves this.

2) Successful books NEED solid planning and marketing platform!

Michael recommended Platform Building to Garrett as a way to control lead flow, messaging, and monetization of all their respective efforts. Initially, Garrett turned down Michael’s advice. See though, with a proper platform, you can take the momentum of the best seller and capitalize/monetize on the success. You need the infrastructure!

Fortunately, 6 months into their work Garrett, re-considered and took on platform building. It’s such an essential element.

THE OUTCOME!

Ten months after their first meeting, Garrett’s book “Killing Sacred Cows” hit the NY Times Best Seller list. And also, because of platform building, he was truly able to capitalize on it all. International markets have now opened up for Garrett, including business and keen interest from the Middle East. Garrett told me he is really pleased with the outcomes.

I sense he’s also happy he listened to Michael Drew, who’s 67-for-67 on best seller lists (and counting).

Who are you listening to? Is their advice and guidance getting you where you want to go?

** Special Thank You to Garrett Gunderson for sharing your wins, failures, and wisdom around your book. In doing so, you are helping others avoid expensive time and money pits. You didn’t have to do this, but you did. Thank you for this!!

When Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize a few weeks ago for his novel, “Tinkers,” small publishers everywhere were thrilled, and big publishers everywhere (although there aren’t that many big publishers left) once again proved how their decision only to buy books they are sure will be blockbusters not only has left them out of the loop when it comes to quality, but also out of the loop when it comes to where publishing itself is going.

An article in The New York Times quoted Harding talking about the reams of rejection letters he got from clueless publishers. “They would lecture me about the pace of life today. It was, ‘Where are the car chases? Nobody wants to read a slow, contemplative, meditative, quiet book.’ ”

But a lot of people did, and Bellevue Literary Press, which has only been around for a couple of years is reaping the benefits of actually doing what it’s there to do: find interesting voices, publish them, market them and help them find readers.

What the big publishers seem to have missed, and keep missing, is that if they’re in the business of publishing books, they have to publish not only the blockbuster, but also the book that perhaps might be the bookstore equivalent of an art-house film. Not every movie has to have car chases, and not every book has to feature vampires or spies or whatever acquisitions editors at publishing house – who increasingly thing like Hollywood studio executives – are focusing on in their desperation to hit it big with every book, always.

You can’t hit it big always. But you can always trust your instincts, be independent and not rely on what the others are doing to see if you can release something similar to capture a share of the market.

The Times story mentions that Random House crowed about signing Harding late last year, after his book was published by Bellevue. Hey, that’s great. Where were you when his novel languished in a drawer for three years and your editors were busy signing authors to write tripe that sold like stale bread?

The world of publishing is evolving, of course, and big publishers are under enormous pressure to prop up their staffs and bottom lines. Smaller publishers are probably better equipped to withstand the tremors of the seismic changes within the industry.

But I bet there will be more and more writers like Paul Harding who use a personal platform, a small press, a network of independent booksellers and their own forward thinking to make an impact on the publishing world and grow.

With a platform like that, it’s a small wonder that a movie version of the book took 46 years to reach theaters. A peek behind the success of its chart-topping weekend opening of $32.7 million reveals the small miracle that the movie ever reached screens at all.

The author himself posed perhaps the greatest challenge. “It took this long because we wanted to get it right,” Maurice Sendak says in a USA Today interview. “Some had approaches I didn’t like, and many were intimidated by the challenge of adapting the book into a movie.” And if someone came to him with an approach he didn’t like, his response most probably mirrored that of his “go to hell” statement to parents concerned that the movie was too scary.

Lucky for them, the film that director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers eventually created turned out to fit Sendak’s vision perfectly. If you’ve seen it, you know that most of the expanded dialog necessary to turn a 338 word book into an hour and a half feature film isn’t devoted to expanded scenes of rumpus-making, jungle adventure, or ocean sailing. It’s an emotional exploration filled with plenty of philosophizing about loneliness, anger, and relationships.

Wow, a kids movie filled with truly frightening monsters that philosophize about their inner feelings and the nature of life. How do you market that? I’m pretty sure that Sendak didn’t package it that way when he first pitched the book to Harper & Row. But that’s the problem that Warner Bros. faced with a finished project that arrived late and over its $80 million budget (it actually cost between $90-$100 million).

Initial screenings were poor, to say the least. “The younger children, the ones under 8, were not as engaged — in fact, they were a little bored,” said Warner Bros. marketing chief, Sue Kroll, in an L.A. Times article recently. “The people who had the best experience with the movie were adults, even adults without children, and teenagers.” To make matters worse, word-of-mouth started circulating the Internet that “children had fled an early test screening in tears.” People knew the movie was out there, but few would come see it if it sounded like a dark children’s movie train wreck waiting to suck $9 out of their pocket.

Warner Bros. must have felt a lot like Max, landing on the monster’s island before he tamed his fear. But it wasn’t them deciding to point their marketing gun at an older audience that won them first prize in the box office ratings this past weekend. It wasn’t even the ecstatic reviews they received from those critics who deeply connected with the movies’ emotional tone. What saved them from financial ruin was the same thing that 19 million people loved most about the book in the first place – “the wild rumpus.”

With all the bad buzz circulating last March, Warner Bros. released a trailer that took the Internet by storm. Avoiding all the dialogue, they attached the movie’s striking visuals to the backdrop of Arcade Fire‘s “Wake up.” Back came the adventure, the monsters, and the sense of imagination. Back came the excitement, especially among young adults, who had connected most with the movie’s test screenings. Even children came to the theater, albeit not like they usually do for family movies, since families with children made up only 43% of the ticketed audience.

Imagine the box office results if the movie had avoided so much melancholy drama the way the trailer aligned itself with the book’s sense of adventure. Profits would have gone through the roof. Having seen the movie myself, I can’t see it producing as much long term success as the original book, despite Warner Bros.’ marketing heroics.

Now put yourself in the place of Warner Bros.’ marketing team. Do you know what causes people to connect the most with your writing? Can you package that in a way that lets publishers know how people will flock to buy your book? If you’re a publisher, can you align your marketing so that the core of your book forms a tight bond with the heartstrings of its intended audience?

The closer you can bring them to palpable fear, spine shivering joy, and a land where their desires reign supreme, the greater your financial return will be. So forget the emotional analysis and explanatory dialogue. Leave it to the critics and intellectuals who are much smarter but make far less money. If you really want to see your book soar, “Let the wild rumpus start!”

You may have heard of a new novel, The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, published in English a few weeks ago. The book was first published in France in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes, and it became a sensation there, selling about 700,000 copies, and winning France’s highest literary honor, the Prix Goncourt.

The book is the fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who has survived the war and reinvented himself in northern France as an entrepreneur and family man. In his tale, Dr. Aue is a witty monster, alluding to philosophy, literature, and music while narrating a story of deep personal depravity and public horror, including gruesome details of the Nazi genocide of the Jews and other World War II atrocities.

The reviews in this country have been decidedly mixed. In The New York Times, the critic Michiko Kakutani called the book “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent,” while in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelssohn, praised The Kindly Ones for “weaving together the dreadful and the mundane in an unsettlingly persuasive way.”

The publisher HarperCollins had a lot riding on this book: it paid close to $1 million for it, and it needs to sell about 75,000 copies to break even, no small thing when the book is close to 1,000 pages.

Yet about a week after its publication, The Kindly Ones appeared on The New York Times extended bestseller list. That’s saying something, when bestseller lists today are dominated by brand-name authors from Grisham to Patterson. Last year, only one newcomer, David Wroblewski, managed the feat of breaking through, with his debut novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which was a bestseller even before Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club (the novel went on to sell close to 1.5 million copies in hardcover).

While The Kindly Ones is unlikely to reach those stratospheric sales heights in this country, its making the bestseller list at all demonstrates that American readers are willing to take a chance on controversy. And controversy itself might have helped stir interest in the novel.

An author friend of mine once noted that it doesn’t matter whether or not your book gets a good review – the fact that it gets reviewed at all is enough for it to gain notice. She told me that after one of her novels was given a so-so review in a major newspaper, it threw her into a brief depression. But she changed her mind after she got an enthusiastic note from a friend who praised her for having gotten the review in the first place.

“She didn’t even remember that it wasn’t a positive review,” my friend told me. “She saw that it was reviewed, and that was positive in itself.”

People don’t really remember whether a review was good or bad. They see that it has gotten some notice, and that’s enough for them to think it might be worth their while.

For a book such as The Kindly Ones to succeed, it has to sell well for a while to earn back its advance. In an age when most books have, at best, a three-month shelf-life, it’s heartening to read that Jonathan Burnham, Harper’s publisher, doesn’t compare this novel to commercial fiction, in terms of sales expectations, and that he expects it to have a long life.

Only time will tell whether this controversial novel will become a literary classic, like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—another book that was both panned and praised upon publication.

But at least more than a few readers are willing to take a chance on something challenging today. They might have been drawn to the novel by the controversy surrounding it, but at least they decided to read the book for themselves.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Robert J. Hughes, a longtime reporter for The Wall Street Journal, writes on the arts, based in New York.

A few months ago on my website, Rebecca Lieb wrote:

“Technology is no longer at the service of marketing; it defines marketing. This places marketers on an unprecedented learning curve… Programmers don’t want creative briefs, value propositions, or mission statements. They need minutely detailed specs.”

True. The problem is several orders of magnitude larger than that.

A potential client (over $20 million in sales) whose site was developed by an outside firm didn’t even know if it owned the code. We suspect it didn’t, since the developer services many of this company’s competitors. What would happen if the relationship went awry? It doesn’t even have easy access to older order records.

Another company wants to increase search engine visibility and track and analyze visitor behavior using WebTrends. It also wants to make code changes to the shopping process but can’t because the cart produces dynamically generated URLs from .exe software. This makes it more difficult for some search engines to spider the site and to use their version of WebTrends. The company’s goal is to measure, test, and optimize pages to increase conversions and improve ROI. But it can’t meet these goals without a tech overhaul.

What do we advise?

First, marketers must understand development is not rocket science. They need to understand the developer’s methods and drive development through its phases to meet their needs. Second, your next development project, whether done in-house or outsourced, must utilize an open methodology.

Are you up to the challenge of developing a new Web site? Bet you feel like you’re about to navigate a minefield and somebody forgot to give you the map. If you follow the development process of wireframing, storyboarding, and prototyping, you can draw that map. These techniques coupled with open methodology will make development easier, faster, and cheaper.

So what is an open methodology?

Open methodology is an approach based on a known standard set of processes. The benefits to developers and clients are significant. A developer can accurately estimate the cost of your project. A client isn’t tied to one development team for subsequent versions. Any team employing the open methodology can bid competitively and understand work done to date. Some will argue they’re in a rush or under budgetary constraints. They’ll say, “We don’t have the time or resources to do all that planning and talking.” We always counter, “If you don’t have the time to get it right the first time, where will you find more time later to fix it?” This works. Both client and developer save precious time and resources!

One of the most exciting open methodologies is called Fusebox. It’s popular with development houses because its techniques can be applied to any development language. (I’m biased. Our CTO is one of the developers of Fusebox 3.0 standards.)

Fusebox employs three critical principles:

• Modularity. A project is divided into small component pieces, each tightly defined. Because it’s modular, different pieces can be coded by different developers. All the pieces just “pop” into place.
• Severability. Each module is self-contained and can exist on its own. Any references to other modules are set as variables so changes are easy to make. If references change, the module in question doesn’t have to be modified.

Because modules are severable, developers can construct each simultaneously without worrying their work will conflict with something somewhere else in the code.

• Clarity. “Fusedocs” are structured comments that document the interface between modules (“fuses” and “circuits”). They are so popular and clear, I see people using Fusedocs even when they aren’t using Fusebox! With this defining clarity at hand, each team working on a modular piece knows exactly how that piece will interact with others.

These principles give Fusebox and other open methodologies the power and flexibility to permit fast development. Modules of code can be dropped into place and work seamlessly. No module must be built in conjunction with any other one.

Result: a tremendous savings in time, money, and sanity.