Sigh… my business life was so simple when I started out as a copywriter. I could reach out to thousands of contacts in my database, and I just needed a handful of people to engage my services, and POOF — I was making a living. When I had ten active clients, I was swamped with work. So a 1% or less response rate was fine with me.

But now I’m an author, and I need to sell books. Lots of books. Thousands of books. Which means that if I have 5000 people connected to me through various means, and 1% buy the book, I’m in horrible shape.

And right now, frankly, I’m kinda in horrible shape. The publishing world is black and white. If you sell enough books, you’re a good bet for other books. If you don’t, you’re not going to get other contracts. So if this book doesn’t do well, my life as an author may be over before it begins. I’m really not counting on becoming rich from the book sales — it’s the speaking gigs that will help me make a living. But being an author makes me a more desirable speaker, so I need to sell some books.

But having a good product is just a minuscule part of the selling process. I need to do SO MUCH MORE. The problem is there’s so much to do and so many avenues to take that I have no idea where to start or what to do. I follow up on media contacts, tweet out a new tool, call a bookstore, run a Facebook ad…. The list goes on and on. Sometimes I sell a couple three books from an effort, but often I hit a roadblock and change direction.

I actually thought I had a great plan to sell the book. I enlisted the help of several awesome (and big-name) contributors to share their favorite tools, including THE Seth Godin, author Dan Pink, social media superstar Chris Brogan and more. And they all agreed to receive an advanced copy of the book for a possible review. And then they all said they were too busy to write the review. Then I met Steve Strauss, the small business columnist from USA Today, who said he’d LOVE to do a column about the tools and the book and how it helps small businesses. He’s too busy, too, seems like — I’ve written him twice with no response. I don’t blame them, of course, for not being able to write a review — I’m sure they get requests all the time. But they were part of my plan to get the word out, and the dead ends are disheartening.

There are companies who will help you sell your book. But frankly I couldn’t buy a cup of Starbucks coffee with the royalties I get from the sale of one book, so paying thousands of dollars to sell my books doesn’t make much financial sense. The food and champagne for the fabulous Book Launch Party cost about three times the money I made on book sales from the event, even though the AMAZING cupcakes were donated by Jennywennycakes. Yes, I said “three times.”

So there you have it — writing a book is hard, but selling a book is much, much harder. And so far, I haven’t figured it out.

So now that I’ve shared my challenges and aired my laundry, do you have any advice on where to go from here? I’m all ears.

PS – In my many years of fundraising for Team In Training, I’ve learned that you never get anything unless you ask. So I’m going to ask you, my readers, if you can help. Here are three things that would be greatly, greatly appreciated. Really.

1. Buy the book. It’s just ten bucks on Amazon, cheaper for the Kindle. When people buy through Amazon, the ranking goes up, and the sales go up. It helps. A lot.
2. Like the Facebook page. Tell your friends to like the Facebook page. Help me get some critical mass.
3. Tell people you know a good speaker. Attendees leave my sessions with smiles on their faces and tools they can use right away. I’d appreciate an introduction to anyone you know who books speakers for events.

Strangely enough, the move comes almost four years to the day since I quit my sales job in a tearful phone call to my boss. “I can’t do this anymore!” I wailed. And when I got off the phone, I said, “Uh oh. Now what?” I was daunted by the idea of looking for a real job (even before the economy tanked), so I decided the easiest thing to do would be to start my own writing business.

It was very, very tough to make the phone calls to those clients, many of whom I’ve had almost since the beginning. It took me several months to finish all the work in progress, and when I pushed the send button on Sunday, there were a couple of tears.

So, here I am again starting completely from scratch on a new career I know very little about. That’s not exactly true because I’ve been booking speaking gigs for about three years, plus the first book is in the bag (and on the shelf — check it out!). But I have to create new marketing techniques, new online strategies, new connections — really a whole new identity.

So before I begin a new chapter, I thought I’d share a pictorial look back at the last four years of Avenue Z:

Now… on to the future as Your Nerdy Best Friend!

• Enjoy our blog posts
• Tell your friends about us
• Like our Facebook pages
• Follow us on Twitter
• And, of course, buy our products

Some of you guys have been loyal fans since I started this blog in 2007, and based on other uber-supportive comments you’ve made, I imagine you might say, “Oh, Beth — don’t be silly — just stay sincere and honest and people will follow you.”

In all actuality, that’s the technique that has worked for me so far. But there are a lot of sincere and honest people out there,  creating fabulous products that people will love. The problem is no one knows about us yet, and we have to compete with all the other people with fabulous products for our potential audience’s attention. Thus we have to rely on your word of mouth and a little bit of luck to hope we catch on.

So, I’m coming up with cool freebies and incentives that will perhaps catch your collective eye. It’s a model I understand more than most, since many of the free tools that I discover are actually freebie versions of software and apps that their makers hope you will buy. I’m thinking of the following:

• If you become a fan on the new Facebook page, you get electronic version of a quick reference guide of about 75 of my favorite tools.
• If you pre-order the book on Amazon.com, you get a printed booklet of my editor’s top 10 picks OR a 15-minute one-to-one consultation to help you discover new tools that you need.

Now for your opinion… what do you think about all the techniques companies do to bribe you to pay attention to them? What works? At which techniques do you roll your eyes?

Butterflies in the stomach. My publisher is sending out what they call the Mondo Press Kits with advance review copies of my book, cupcake magnets and marketing material to about 60 people today, including THE Seth Godin, who not only has stopped by this blog a couple of times but who also contributed to the book and is generally an awesome, authentic guy.

It’s amazing that bestselling authors like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Dan Pink plus 57 more people will soon hold my work in their hands, and more amazing that they even agreed to review it.

But it’s that word that’s killing me: review. They are going to judge the book by its cover, its contents, its layout — everything. They’re going to catch typos (we spelled “charitable” wrong on Seth Godin’s page, and he caught it in the screenshot. Horrors!), examine my headshot (why is she with a piggy bank and a cupcake?), question my choice of tools…. whatever. Or they may flip through in a second, find it uninteresting and ignore it.

For whatever reason, I chose two professions with major exposure… author and speaker. An author prints thousands of copies of his heart and soul and spreads it around the world, completely open to criticism and perhaps praise. And a speaker puts herself on display in front of dozens or hundreds or thousands, has the job of entertaining people for an hour or so, then frequently gets immediate feedback in the form of evaluations about how she did. In both cases, there’s no shrinking away from how people feel about you. You’re putting yourself out there for them to tell you.

When I worked at McDonald’s in high school, the only person who really criticized your work was your manager during a quarterly review. I remember one time they said I was really good with the French fry machine but my uniform was too dingy so I wouldn’t get the full 15-cent raise I was due. I went home crying, and I started drycleaning my polyester uniform once every two weeks to keep it more spiffy. I ended up winning an award for my French fry prowess, but I still worried about the uniform.

After a presentation when I get my evaluations, I frequently read comments like, “Bring Beth back!” and “Most practical session I’ve been to in years!” But there’s always someone who writes something like, “Nice chick, but she talks about her ex-boyfriends too much” or “Session wasn’t what I expected.” And instead of focusing on the good stuff, I read and re-read the bad — obsess over them, even.

So now the books are out of my hands, and I’m inviting true scrutiny. There’s a chance that I won’t get unending praise from all 60 people. But perhaps a few people may really like the book, and a couple of people won’t. I have to remember to look at the big picture and not get hung up on a couple of bad reviews. And I also have to remember that Seth and Brian and Dan and the other 57 people are not judging me… they’re judging a book. And I am much more than this one book.

So I have all these little efficient things in place that are no longer efficient. This has produced a series of complicated little workarounds that are just downright annoying and time consuming. I’m using a wired keyboard and mouse, and I have to plug them into a USB hub that I use for a thousand things. So I’m forever unplugging one and replugging. And don’t get me started on the printer issues. Because we lost the wireless set up for one of our printers, I pretty much have to go to Kinkos to print something in color from the house.

I’d bet money that you have situations like this in your business…. little roadblocks that you’ve learned to work around instead of fixing. It would probably take half an hour to fix the Live Mesh thing, but instead I take an extra 5 minutes to wrangle files from computer to computer each time I need to sync something. If you add up the time I’m spending, it would be 30 minutes several times over.

Broken technology and little roadblocks are annoying, time-wasting and inefficient. So why don’t we feel like we can take the time to fix this stuff? When I go to print something, I sigh and get grumpy. I do my little workaround and promise myself I’ll fix the problem “soon.” Yet “soon” doesn’t come, and I keep cussing and dealing.

What’s on your business get-around-to-it list? I propose we all set aside Thursday, May 26, as Fix-It Day. Add a comment with a list of the little things you need to fix, and we’ll all commit to setting aside time May 26 (or before) to resolving those little irritations.

Who’s with me?

We’re giving away 10 copies of the book on Goodreads, complete with a cupcake magnet and other goodies!

Enter to win the chance to be one of the first reviewers: bit.ly/U2Fgoodreadsgive

Oh boy has it been crazy here on Avenue Z. I’m finishing up a new site (www.askbethz.com), getting ready to release the book (should be out in late May, but you can preorder here ), settling into married life, coaching a running team… Today I’m flying to Houston for my first speaking gig with a book signing, and I had to call the airlines to make sure I’d have wifi so I can get a project finished on the way there.

Crazy busy, I tell you!

But as I sift through my emails from the past couple of months, it looks like “crazy busy” is a new normal in our business world:

• “Sorry it took me so long to respond… things are crazy busy!”
• “I wanted to get to this last week, but it’s been nuts!”
• “Thanks for your patience… It’s just nonstop around here these days!”

And on and on. When I was growing up, I don’t remember my parents coming home and saying, “Wow, kids. Sorry we haven’t been home for dinner much — it’s crazy busy at work.” Both parents came home at fairly normal times, ate dinner with us most nights and retired to the TV room with us to watch awesome ’80s tv (Taxi, Love Boat, One Day at a Time, anyone?).

Are these “crazy busy” times a new phenomenon? Have we created work environments with deadlines at such an impossible pace that we’re all going insane? And has technology — the tools that are supposed to make our lives easier — played a role in causing this chaos?

I would answer in the affirmative for all three of those questions. I think the easier we have made it to access work, information, entertainment and connections, the tougher we have made our workloads. As much as I love technology and the excitement of this world we live in, I’d love it if we stopped answering the “How are you?” question with “Crazy busy!”

So, how do you answer “How are you?” Is your life calm, cool and collected these days, or are you crazy busy, too?

Gotta run… My Roomba robot vacuum just got stuck under the couch, my iPhone needs charging and I have to pack my Garmin Forerunner so I can go for a run in Houston.

For the past couple of years, I’ve tried to do what they say. I’ve followed back countless self-professed SEO experts, marketing gurus, extraordinary life coaches and super-motivating speakers. I’ve followed back dogs, running events, community fundraisers and more. I drew the line at the Reverse Vasectomy Clinic that wanted to be friends, as well as anyone whose avatars showed nothing but cleavage or dollar signs.

As a result, I ended up following almost 2,000 people. Have you ever tried to keep up with the chatter of 2,000 people? Better yet, have you ever tried to carry on meaningful relationships with 2,000 people? When I first got excited about Twitter, I followed maybe 350 people. Many of them were fairly quiet, so I had a great opportunity to have real conversations with the ones who were chatty. They asked about me;  I thought about them. They made me smile when I saw their Tweets.

As my list of Twitter contacts grew, my Twitter friends’ posts slowly got lost in the ever-growing ocean of Tweets. All of a sudden, most of my Twitter updates pages were filled with comment after comment from people I didn’t know. The people who started following me were frequently people who used Twitter software to find new followers. They’d follow a few hundred new people at a time, give them a few days to follow back, then dump the ones who didn’t and find more to follow. Their following/follower relationship was usually something like 1.1/1 because they were always trying to grow their numbers.

As my Twitter friends disappeared, replaced by SEO tips, motivational quotes and retweets of other people’s motivational quotes and SEO tips, I had less and less to say. And the less I talked on Twitter, the fewer real people followed me, and the more I lost my real relationships. I could use Twitter lists and other tools to track “real people” versus Twitter machines, but I find those difficult as well, and I’d have to sort through my hundreds of followers to put everyone in their basket.

I miss my friends. I miss real Twitter conversations. Thus, I’ve decided to take Twitter back. I’m slowly unfollowing people I don’t have much in common with. When I go to their profile and see that I’m one of 31,000 friends, I don’t think I will be missed. In a few days, they’ll use their Twitter software to unfollow me back, so my Twitter reach will shrink considerably. I bet some people may be miffed that I’m dropping them from my roster, and I guess this move may hurt my chances to promote the book. But I’d rather have a smaller reach and better conversations than a tremendous following that I can’t relate to.

What’s your social media philosophy? Do you use Twitter to grow your business? If so, how do you manage the volume?

Yeah, the day sucked. In a nutshell, Contact Us emails from this site and Cheapskate Freelancer were vanishing into cyberspace when they downloaded into Outlook (I saw it happen!). They’d be there on the iPhone, and then when I hit Send/Receive…. POOF. No more email. No more wonderful new tools sent to me from readers. I’ve lost several in the past few days — all that’s left is the small memory I have of seeing on the tiny iPhone screen as I drank coffee in the morning.

But the bigger mystery here is not the emails… it’s the dependence we have on these little black boxes. How did this become the center of my world?

And another important question… when has it NOT been the center of my world?

For most of my adult life I’ve held jobs that revolved around these little things. I really can’t imagine what I would sit at a desk and stare at if I didn’t have these monitors. What a different world it must have been where you sat at a desk and could look unencumbered across the room to other people at desks. And perhaps those people attended meetings where everyone looked at the speaker, not down at a hand cupped over a BlackBerry.

At any rate, I spent the morning cussing at the computer and the afternoon listening to the IT consultant, who blamed my fondness for free and low-cost tech tools on the slow demise of my lovely HP Pavilion. Looks like she’ll be put out to pasture soon (remember the story of how she got here?). The fact that she’s acting up during crunch time for the book is akin to being dumped during finals week in college. But I’ll be making the switch to a new machine soon, and again the black anchor will be at my feet to keep me at the desk.

Your turn… what was the last job you had that didn’t involve a computer?

On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.

After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post….

We are all shaken here at TechCrunch – this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.

I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.

TechCrunch discovers and reveals the latest technology news, products and services. I’m sure they’re offered goodies all the time, and their policy is to turn everything down (or at least I think it is — perhaps they accept products to try them out for review). But in general, there is much discussion about the ethics of accepting free products or services in exchange for a review.

In case you haven’t heard, I’m writing a book of reviews of my favorite free and low-cost online tools. Now I, too, have to deal with an onslaught of free offers. I have written to more than 100 companies to ask them for information about their products, and multitudes — scores, even! — have written back to offer me free upgrades to the full versions, etc. Oh, the temptations!

Ok, I’m lying. There have been only three. But I’ve accepted them all. (Ok, four if you count that a client of mine who has a tool offered me an upgraded account for life.) Should I turn them down? My reasoning is that I should be able to evaluate the full version and tell readers whether the upgrade is worth the money. The funny thing is that if I feel like an upgrade is worth the money (and the money is still what I would consider a bargain), I’ll upgrade myself if it’s a tool I’m likely to use a lot. I’m all for supporting cool tools and compensating those people who add such value to my life. But, of course, I can’t upgrade on everything, even if I love it. That would make it impossible for me to wear the “Cheapskate Freelancer” crown.

But between me and you, I bet everyone who offered me an upgrade will make it into the book. Although I hope this isn’t true, I may feel a certain level of obligation to them.

So, my questions are for you, dear readers… do you think less of a company that offers to upgrade or give something for free (none of them have asked me to do anything special)? Do you think I should turn them down? Would you consider my book biased if you knew I received upgrades? Should I simply disclose it in the intro (which no one ever reads, right?)? Or perhaps just mention in the write up that “the owner upgraded my account so I could take a look around the full version”?

Oh, and another issue… people are already asking me for free copies of my book. How should I handle this delicately? I get a certain number of free copies, but the rest I have to buy at a fairly modest discount. I’ll be doing giveaways with the book, but I can’t possibly gift it to all my colleagues. Yet I’ll feel a little silly asking people to pay for it. Dilemmas, dilemmas. Oh, the problems of famous authors, right?

Note to vendors who want to bribe me: For clarification, I will write anything you want if you buy me cupcakes.