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Well, it seems that Grandfathers rule all year long, not just on Grandparents day, as evidenced by the sale of our book The Grandfather Thing by Saul Turteltaub on Amazon and our own website. So, Christmas and Hanukah are great times to give gift books to grandpas about grandpas!!! Enjoy!
This week's quote is by Saul Turteltaub, and comes from our book The Grandfather Thing.
What exactly IS "the grandfather thing"?:
""The Grandfather Thing," by common definition, is believing that the newborn grandchild is the most beautiful creation in the world, although any souvenir cushion is more attractive. It's wanting to see the baby any hour of the day and wanting to hold it and kiss it and believing it likes you doing that. It's taking dozens of pictures of it and showing them to strangers in the next car at a traffic light.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Tell us in the comments below and receive 15% OFF ANY ORDER from our site that includes a copy of The Grandfather Thing. Use the following sales code upon checkout:
SAUL
Act fast to get your items shipped in time for Father's Day!
If you're trying to get into the media, you really need to subscribe to Google News Alerts.
Google News Alerts let you subscribe to an as-it-happens, daily, or weekly newsletter digests that send you links to news stories featuring certain keywords you select.
For instance, if -- like me -- you're trying to promote a book on grandparenting, enter keyword "grandparenting" and every news story on the net that mentions "grandparenting" is yours for the picking. National news, local news, internet-based news, major market newspapers and magazines... it's a catch-all for everything, and it's immediate.
Doing this lead me to a motherhood and pregnancy portal that just yesterday published an article about creative ways to break the news to your family that you're pregnant.
One of the article's suggestions was to buy books on grandparenting and give them as gifts. Recognizing an opportunity to mention The Grandfather Thing, I went onto the portal's web site and submitted a pitch for our book via the on-line form. The Editor-in-Chief responded immediately and agreed to run a photo and blurb about our book in a followup story on her html newsletter -- which went out today.
That's right -- less than 24-hour turnaround.
So this is what it feels like to be of-the-moment. It feels pretty good. I'm going to be signing up for more Google News Alerts ASAP.
If you're interested in trying this out, go here to get started.
Wow, I just checked on The Grandfather Thing, and its rank is 20,694 on Amazon.
In publishing parlance, that really rocks. Anything under 40,000 is considered awfully good. This new status could be due to the fact that we excerpted a chapter on the GrandTimes web site for seniors. I'll keep checking in to see if it stays there more than a few days.
While checking the site, I realized that I recently bought 2 of the books that are currently in the Top 25 -- Collapse, by Jared Diamond, which is a 600+ page history/sociology/anthropology book, and French Women Don't Get Fat, which is a diet book.
I first found out about Collapse in The New Yorker, and a couple weeks later, a friend of a friend mentioned hearing Diamond give an interview on NPR. So in this situation, the publicists really worked the intellectual in-crowd, focusing on the "environmental impact" and "how we can learn from history and not repeat it" angle. Diamond's book -- which I haven't started reading yet -- apparently contains moralistic undertones about how we should be giving more thought to long-range land and resource management so that we too don't vanish from the planet.
This book is everywhere you look -- on the radio, in major market magazines, in newspapers -- and I think the key to its success is its alarmist p.o.v. Even the most subtle suggestion that society may self-destruct is one that taps into common fears, fears people will spend $25 in an attempt to ameloriate.
French Women Don't Get Fat first entered my awareness around Christmas, when I was feeling especially chubby. I spotted a feature article in the lifestyle section of the Hartford Courant. I made my mother read it, and then we become obsessed with finding the book.
Diet books are always popular, especially if you can offer a refreshing approach that involves little to no effort on the part of the dieter. This book is unique because it offers promises of chocolate and champagne without exercise. Somehow by the end of the process you should end up looking like Juliette Binoche. Hell, this book doesn't even need a publicity campaign. The word of mouth should be, and probably is, ferocious.
To recap. If you want to sell a lot of books:
1) Pick a controversial topic, then figure out how to tie it into current political policy later;
2) Promise the impossible.
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