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.

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I had been stressed about the last time I sat in her chair, in part because I’m worried about a whole host of other upcoming Things this month. There’s the book launch, the logo change, the potential speaking gigs I need to nail down.

Oh, and then there’s this little change I’ve made lately — I’m officially shutting down my copywriting biz and formally making the switch to being an author/speaker. Oh yeah. This is a Big Thing.*

When my stylist asked me about the Big Thing, I had two revelations:

1. Whatever I had been stressed about had come and gone, and the sun was still rising in the mornings and setting in the evenings. If you’re like me, you tend to see a Big Thing as almost insurmountable. It will come and consume you, and when it looms, it’s giant and all encompassing and it’s all you think about. But when it passes, it is over, and you forget about it.
2. My business life is a roller coaster with one Big Thing after another. This is an exhausting way to live. I get bunched up about the enormity of upcoming events and tasks without stopping to breathe, without stopping to plan. What if I planned ahead a little more to see those Big Things coming then recognized the tasks that would make those Big Things less big? I’d probably sleep better, stress less and be more pleasant to be around.

People tend to think other people think like they do and process information in the same way. So, in my opinion, all you guys are living on the same roller coasters with Big Thing obsessions and post-event forgetfulness. But I bet that’s not true. How do you handle the changes in your professional life? Do you live from peak to peak or coast along on a straight road, understanding that the Big Things you pass will come and go? What wisdom can you pass along to those of us who are getting a little dizzy from the ups and downs?

*More on the new career: I have been wanting to launch the author/speaker stuff for a while, but making a living as a copywriter was eating up my work energy. So I took the leap by taking a part-time temporary job with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, which forces me to wind down my copywriting and let it go. When the part-time job ends, the book should be in full swing, and the transition should be complete. Mixed feelings. Tough transitions. And a few tears and sleepless nights. But change is good. Here’s the new site for the new career: AskBethZ.com.

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.

Ever feel like your life will *really* get started if X happens? For me the X factor is the purchase of an area rug.

Let me explain. A couple of months ago I decided to give up my ocean-view office to move my headquarters into the house. Originally I had moved into a real office to increase my productivity. The off-site office worked wonderfully for a while until I figured out how to find as many distractions there as I did at home. So I decided to save myself a few hundred dollars a month and revamp my home office.

Our poor home office has undergone several changes in the last few years. When I moved in to D.J.’s house, he let me take it over, and I rearranged his big, wooden lawyer furniture to give it a little softer look. Then when I moved out, we moved in a twin bed for a while to accommodate extra company. Then D.J. sold his practice to a larger firm and took the office back over. But he didn’t really use it, so here I am again.

I have big dreams for this room that I sit in for 8-10 hours a day. I have a glorious blank wall to play with, and an unlimited imagination about things I can do. But so far all I’ve done is move one of the big, heavy desks to another side of the room and put up some gauzy orange curtains I’ve had for years.

In my mind, all I need to really make this room into *my* office is to find the perfect area rug. Something bright and cheery with flowers, or maybe a coffee cup, or perhaps even a cupcake! Yes! And once I find this rug, it’ll help me decorate the big, blank wall. It’ll help me determine what cute desk accessories would look best. It’ll make me feel at home.

So sometimes I get lost rug shopping. I can easily spend an hour or two searching Overstock.com or craigslist. I just get obsessed about finding THE PERFECT RUG that will ignite the completion of the office. Sometimes I find a rug that will probably do… but then I dismiss it because it has one too many flowers, or I flinch at the price (a perfect rug should cost about $25, right? Sigh). So I never buy my rug, and I sit in this office that I don’t consider fully formed.

To me this is a metaphor for other decisions in our lives. How many times have you told yourself that as soon as you lose a little weight you’ll really go out there and meet someone new? Or maybe you think all you need is to take the time to REALLY write a good resume, and then you’ll go after that great job. We sit around waiting for some little thing to happen to transform our lives (or our offices) into something more than it is. And in the meantime, life (and work) keep happening.

I know I’m not the first one to write on this subject — probably not even the one millionth one — but I think I need to look around me and accept this office as my own and get on with my life/career.

So, what’s your area rug?

This week I’m speaking at the California Society for Association Executives in beautiful Monterey. I’m trying out my new business cards, which are bright, sleek mini cards that point people to the new site, AskBethZ.com. This event is more or less my coming out party for the author/speaker path I’ve been wanting to take, a diversion from the freelance writer/marketing consultant road I’ve been on for almost three years.

Last night I ran into a speaking guru and personal brand expert, who asked me what I did. I froze. Speakers are obliged to be able to spout their conversation-provoking “brand promise” or tagline or elevator speech in a nanosecond — confidently and with conviction. It’s a thing, and I don’t have that thing.

So I stuttered and said, “Oh, I don’t have my little speech down yet, but let me give you my card.” So I got out my cute little cards that had been impressing people all day. I was hoping he’d love how adorable and colorful they were and would see how I was positioning myself. He said, “You certainly need to work on your brand promise.”

Sigh. Deflate.

And then there was a wonderful coincidence — this guy is actually a brand promise coach for speakers and authors! And he could help me hone my brand promise with one-on-one consultations! My… I am a lucky girl to have found such expertise at a time when I need it so much.

All sarcasm aside, though, he’s right. My tagline — Beth Ziesenis, The Quick Tech Trainer — was a suggestion by another speaker during a 5-minute breakfast conversation at another conference. My first draft was something like, “Hi, I’m Beth Ziesenis, and it really makes me happy to help people.” That wasn’t quite catchy enough. For a while I’ve gone with themes around me being “The Cheapskate Freelancer,” but speaker coaches and marketing gurus really, really hate the whole “cheap” theme.

Is it just me, or is it almost impossible to be your own marketing analyst to elevate your business? I spend so much time answering emails, writing for clients, sending bios to meeting coordinators and making travel reservations that I feel like I never have time to really think about my own messaging. And when I do come up with an idea, it’s tough to find people to bounce it off of because I work alone and don’t have much of a community around me.

What I need is a me — an outside consultant who can take an objective look at what I want to do and help me figure out how to say it. Any volunteers?

This week several people at the conference came up and said, “I used to keep up with you via your blog — aren’t you writing anymore?” Thanks for the encouragement to get back to the blog, and thanks to the guru for giving me an ego-bruising encounter as a writing prompt.