Susan Friedmann
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books.
Today, my special guest is a high-profile international award-winning publisher. Tracy Lamourie is the founder and managing director of Lemoure Media, Inc. Accredited by the iconic Can International Film Festival. Tracy is also a Universal Women's Network 2020 Woman of Inspiration winner for the Women in Media Award. Wow, what a mouthful. She is the author of the upcoming book Get Build Your Brand with effective Public and media relations. She's been featured in Rolling Stone magazine, the Hollywood Times, NBC TV and other major media. Tracy works across borders and across industries, from major entertainment projects to small businesses.
Tracy, what an absolute pleasure it is to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
Tracy Lamourie
Oh, no, thank you so much for having me on. I'm thrilled to be here and to be talking to your audience, which I know is primarily comprised of nonfiction authors. Those are honestly with also seriously, some of my favorite people to work with. So I'm excited for this conversation.
Susan Friedmann
Well, we already have something major in common because, yes, they're my favorite people as well. Tracy, you are a pro. Obviously, this is your business in publicity, in media relations publicity. And yet help me with this because I believe that most people, having been in this industry, don't really understand what it is when they think publicity. When they think of media, they think of advertising. And yet it's far from that. Start at the very beginning, understanding what publicity really means.
Tracy Lamourie
Absolutely. And I heard recently an amazing analogy, which I've been quoting ever since to business audiences when I speak to entrepreneurs, but it's exactly the same effect for this audience. This is explained what the differences are between marketing, advertising, and public relations publicity, which obviously have some things in common and that they're all meant to get you heard and get you seen. But I believe, and I'll explain to you why in a minute that PR is the most effective. So the analogy goes like this. If a young man and a woman are out on a date, and the young man tells the young woman what a great job he has and how much money he has and how skilled he is, that's advertising. If he tells her she looks great and she's a great conversationalist and she knows what she's doing and all this, that's marketing because it's saying the right thing to the right person. If somebody else tells the date how accomplished and smart and brilliant or data is, that's PR.
So PR is essentially third-party validation. Somebody else talking about you, saying and doing things, elevating you as an expert, which is relevant to the nonfiction authors, because every one of you is an expert in something, and that's why you put the proverbial pen to paper and why you're educating us about it or why you're writing about it in your book. You know things that others don't that is of value to the media.
So advertising, anybody can buy an ad. We're sophisticated these days. That only goes so far. But the difference between what you say about yourself or what you pay an ad company to say about you versus what mainstream media, television, radio, newspapers, editorial versus advertorial. So what the editorial department says about you, that's reputation building. That's where you get that thought. Leadership, the global reputation for whatever your expertise is in your field. And that makes all the difference. It can happen very quickly, just with some quick media attention. I had one client, literally, after six weeks of working together, she told me we had changed her business and her life. And I said, Why? She said, well, you take investors take us more seriously, made investors take us more seriously. But by that same token, it makes everybody take you more seriously as the expert in whatever you're presenting. Yeah, that's the difference in what media can do. And I'll explain a little bit later, if not everybody has a publicist. Not everybody connects a publicist, though.
This is editorial versus advertorial. Editorials, when you talk about your expertise, like what I've been doing, an advertorial is where you talk about yourself and your business and give a pitch, which is like me saying, oh, you know, I work with anybody across the district, you can talk to me and we can work together, but editorial is me give you valuable information. Like, if you don't have a publicist, here are some steps that you can take and how you can access the media opportunities on your own so that you can start getting in the media mix. So I'd like to give a few hints on how people can do it on their own at some point, too.
Susan Friedmann
Wow. Listeners. That in and of itself, Tracy's just shared with us is just a synopsis of everything. I mean, just great in terms of understanding those three different components, the marketing, the promotion, and then the publicity. The idea of it being third person, somebody else acknowledging that you're brilliant rather than you saying, hey, I'm an expert, I can do this, I can do that. People believe what other people say before they believe what you say. Tracy, let's dig a bit deeper here and look at authors using the media to build a brand for themselves. How can they do it? Where do they start? I mean, this is what everybody says, well, where should I start with this?
Tracy Lamourie
The first thing, I'll tell you where to actually go on the Internet, where you can start for free in a minute. But first, before I send you there, I really want to make sure we really resonated with and understand that part about editorial versus advertorial because it is not an opportunity, when you get to these asks that I'm going to show you from television, radio, newspapers, podcasts, etc. Asking for experts about things you can speak on. It is not an opportunity for free advertising. They'll be happy to send you the ad department if you're looking for free at their businesses too. It is an opportunity to share your editorial knowledge, your expertise, and in so doing, that will get you better than advertising. It will get you mentioned in editorial, which is where you build that expertise for that reputation for leadership, where people are like, oh, I saw you on TV. I heard about you in Readers Digest. Oh, I saw. Which is literally I can tell you from my own experience, if you Google my name, I've done a lot of that. I've started overcrowding.
In addition to building my clients brand, I started answering questions and talking about my expertise, which is this in doing that for two years, literally, I've gotten tons of four or five major awards. Now completely elevates you when you get yourself out there and people are able to not only your customers see that you do well, that you know what you're doing, but that the world starts to see your expertise. So make sure you understand that when you see these asks for media, which I'm going to direct you to, it's not an opportunity to say, oh, you know, my carpet cleaning company for my book about carpet cleaning is the best book about carpet cleaning. Please put this up. It's an opportunity for you to share the knowledge and expertise that you have. Then they will in return mention you, mention your book, mention your website, give you that backlink, or if it's an article, talk about you and quote you. So here are some places you can go if you don't have a publicist.
But again, I want to reiterate that if you do have a marketing budget at all that you've been thinking about advertising, put it aside for a month and don't do that. And maybe think about putting it to a publicist for a month. Because even if you only do that for a month, when you walk away, you're going to see their pitch. You can have a better understanding of yourself as an expert. You're going to see how they present you and you're going to have some initial media that you can use to build on and get other media. So if you do have any kind of budget where you don't have to reinvent the wheel, I'm happy to talk to anybody. And that is the advertorial portion of this message. But here we go back to the editorial. This is some actual tips of what you can do and where you can go right now if you do not have a budget to get a publicist, but you want and I'm telling you, if you start doing this for a week or two. Even if you don't answer any of what you see, it's going to be a real education in a real eye-opening moment for you to understand what kind of media opportunities there are for free for somebody who presents the right kind of information in a timely manner. One of the free services is called HARO “Help a Reporter Out” and it's well-loved among publicists and smart entrepreneurs and experts of every client. So that's HARO “Help a Reporter Out”.
You go to their website, you sign up on an email list, you can get it daily as a digest form or three times a week or day or whatever it is or special to specifically what your topic is like if you were writing about real estate you would maybe just want the real estate one. If you were writing about a lifestyle thing, maybe you just want the lifestyle one. I look at all of them because you never know where you're going to see something that someone might answer and you see really high profile thing.
Almost all the major media you can think of uses these Help a Reporter Out is one free one. It's usually US centric, that one, one that is UK centric but also has some international is just a hashtag which is hashtag Journal request, J-O-U-R-N-O request on Twitter, one that's very Australian centric but again globally you can answer things. There is called source bottle. S-O-U-R-C-E. Bottle. All of those are free services. Hashtag general request on Twitter, source Bottle, the website and Aero help Reporter Out which is a website and email list. Those are all places that you can go right now and start daily, mostly Monday to Friday, seeing all kinds of requests for all kinds of media opportunities where you see things like for Fortune magazine with a deadline of 02:00 p.m.
I'm looking to speak to entrepreneurs who never for the office association with a deadline of thought. I'm looking to speak to nonfiction writers who are for the million things. So whatever the topic of your book is, there is something out there for you and if not today, there'll be something there tomorrow. Then there's also the stepping up the ladder of those kind of PR tools. There's the kind of publicist pay several hundred dollars a month for which are essentially the same kind of services, but more reporters use them and they're quicker, better response, we get things earlier on them. So there's things like quota that I pay a few hundred dollars a month for QWT ed or there's editorial out of the UK.
So there's a whole bunch of services. And if you have a good publicist, they're already looking through all these 4 hours a day for other clients and they're spending a few minutes finding them for you and then sending them your way and boom boom boom. You only have to deal with it. The ones that are relevant to you. So if you have more time than money, do it yourself. At least start to figure it out, check out the landscape and remember again, before you reach out to anybody, really make sure that you're understanding you're answering what they're asking. You're not taking it as an opportunity to be too advertorial. You're giving them good and valuable information and then you have a little bio at the end, which is why you're an expert in this situation. So your little bio you're linked to your website or your link to your LinkedIn and that's it. From there you never know what you're going to be quoted. I've got clients literally using just those services alone, not even using press releases in everything from New York magazine to Oprah magazine, to major newspapers in the states, in Utah and in Texas and in Florida. I've got clients on morning television shows that way and just all kinds of major media so that's the first ones that I mentioned are free to go and look at and to take opportunities from. If you do only one thing today from all of this, it doesn't cost you anything to go over there and start looking at them and even just begin to get your head around the kind of opportunities that exist. That you can try to frame, trying to figure out and try to get in on or be the first step the publicist will be taking for you.
Susan Friedmann
And that's so incredible, those free resources. So thank you for those. And you actually mentioned something that I was just going to talk about and that is press releases. When I was working in publicity and PR, we did press releases all the time. Now are they still alive? Is there value in writing press releases these days? And if so, what is the best approach with them?
Tracy Lamourie
I think there is for sure. And there's a lot of debate about it. There's been people who have been saying the press release is dead for a while and so I really call it a media advisory, call it a press release, whatever. So some of the old formalities may not exist and it doesn't go out on the wire and there's different wires that you can put it on. But I usually recommend you send directly to reporters. So it's not been the same as it always was. But in terms of press release or media advisory, whatever you want to call it, reaching out with your messaging, sure you have to meet some media hates it, some people hate it.
Reporters because they'll say they hate it because they get a thousand emails a day and 99% of them are not relevant to them. And that's where you have to be the 1%, that where you've done your research and you are relevant and your presenting the right story to the right person. That's where it's not a cut and paste sent to 500 job if you do it that way. Yeah, you might as well not be doing it. If you just write a press release and do a CC to 50 reporter emails, you might as well just not doing it. You do more harm to yourself than good. But if you craft a well written press release with a good subject line and you're sending it to the right reporter, even better if you have time to send it individually.
Hey Bob, here's a story you love. You're going to get 33% numbers, say more pick up rate, so it might take a little bit more time to do that or have your publicist do that, but it can result in some major, major pick up and it only takes one. I had one client, she wasn't even an author. She didn't even have a well, I guess she had a small business. She was a coach, like a life coach, like a lot of people. She was amazing. She had a lot of really good history personally and really informed her work. But on paper she didn't really have anything to differentiate herself. And she was only 26 years old, no prior media. She hired me, she told me her backstory, which was really good, literally. So I start looking through the harrows and all these things and literally the very next day I find a reporter from Good Housekeeping Magazine, one of the major print magazines in the world at every single checkout counter who is looking for women from between 20 and 40 to share their personal stories similar to hers. I conquered them. I got them in touch. She was willing to do the interview. They loved her. Turned out her very first media right out the gate was zero. Media Ever was a major article. Her picture wasn't on the COVID but the article was one of the stories written on the COVID of Good Housekeeping magazine. And from there she literally pays me every month now because we've continued to do media, because she's able to get almost any media speaking engagement, anything she wants in the mental health realm, purely on the strength of that one article. We got my 1st 3 hours of work in Good Housekeeping magazine for her.
You never know what's going to develop and that's not even irregular using those things. I've gotten clients like I said in New York magazine, Oprah magazine, several newspapers, all kinds of stuff. So there's a ton of opportunity literally just going by every day that somebody is grabbing but then most people don't know are there to grab. So they're missing them, unless they're working with a public system, unless they have considerable time looking into some of these things and finding these opportunities, learning how to effectively answering them and then getting some of these media opportunities.
Susan Friedmann
Yes, as you rightly say, you never know what might come of it. That was a brilliant example. One of the techniques that I use, and I've used in the past is to write articles on a consistent basis and write them for the trade publications, the professional industry publications, where I was looking to become an expert in. Is that still something that you recommend to people writing articles on a regular basis?
Tracy Lamourie
For sure, online. That's when you hear the blogging and the guest blogging, and also for sure in publications and in newspapers and quite often have a client do like what you call this two things, like an op ed. There's two ways to approach this, too. You can do an op ed, which is like an opinion, in which case you kind of pick the one media that you think it's perfect for, you send it to them, and you have to wait three or four days for them to say yay or nay because they would not want to be printed unless you're printed in others. It's like an exclusive, right? But then the other opportunity I should mention this in terms of the press release question, too, because I often say one of the reasons press releases have become less effective in some ways than they used to be is because media rooms no longer have 20 people sitting around. The Simon editor can sign an article because the press release isn't the article. It's meant to instigate them to go do a new interview or an article of their own.
And sometimes they'll love the release and everything, but they just don't have anybody to apply to that story. And this doesn't work with all media because some media, they only have their staff writers and that's it. But then it works well with some newspapers or smaller newspapers or even some weekly dailies where you say, okay, here's our press release. We'd love for you to interview my clients, but if you can't, or if you don't have the bandwidth in the newsroom for that, here's an article that my client has written. So the clients will be any expert, say you're a nonfiction writer that wrote a book about dogs, and so I wrote the press release about this. I should interview you about this frame of dog, blah, blah. But if they can't, here's an attached royalty free article that my client, the author of the book, wrote that you can use freely.
So it's not going to be an exclusive like an op ed would be, where we can only send it to one at a time and then wait till the approval or deny, then we send to another, in which case it could be old news, right, but it's royalty free article. The way they would use what they had got an article off the wire that they subscribed to, where they can print it and put it in their paper without. So in those cases, they wouldn't pay you for the article, but you would have the opportunity to write. You know, I wouldn't recommend you put a piece of your book in there, but you write a fresh little 1000. Word article or something about dogs at Christmas in the dog analogy I'm using by the author of this brand-new dog book, then they can use that piece for free in the paper. Why do I want to let them use it for free? Well, because then our exact messaging is going out exactly the way we want it. It's not an opportunity to get paid. I'm not looking for opportunities to get my work is going to result in you selling more books and that's going to be maybe getting more speaking engagements depending on what our goal is.
But I'm not going out there looking for an opportunity to get you to get paid for media Doesn't Pay. What it does is elevate you and bring you more opportunities and bring you onto more stages and get people more excited about working with you, buying your book, interviewing you, etc, etc. Etc.
Susan Friedmann
And yes, in reality, that's exactly what you can look to expect and aim for. One of the things that you talked about earlier, Tracy, was doing your research, especially when it comes to, let's say, sending out a press release to an editor. Talk to us about the kind of research that authors should be doing before they approach the media.
Tracy Lamourie
I wouldn't even start with saying research number one, but just really understand the difference between the editorial and the advertorial. And I'm going to use an entrepreneur as example for this because I have a really good story. Wasn't an author, but any expert. The image of what I'm talking about here is really the same because for the media, whether you have a book, I always say 20% of media that wants to talk about the book is book specific. And the rest of media is just about ideas. And the fact that you have a book is the same as if you had a company or whatever. It's like your calling card to make you the expert, right? So there are two angles of promotion. There's marketing and promoting the book, getting it on Best of list, getting on the holiday list, getting it on list of the best book to give to your mother, sister, daughter. You know what I mean, like all those. And then there's the opportunities for you as an expert to speak. So I had one opportunity for a client who owned a contractor business. Like I said, I have everything from filmmakers to small entrepreneurs because anybody can have media opportunities. In this case, you own a contractor business. And we were just starting to get us immediately, but not really understanding the web and flow of how it worked yet. And we had a Reader's Digest Media opportunity where they were doing an article about how difficult it is to do the bathroom renovations and they wanted to get some quotes from the experts on more effective ways to do this or that. So when I told him that and said, please send me your quote, he sent back something literally with something like and this is supposed to be for an article in Readers Digest, right?
Something that was literally like, oh, well, it's really hard to do bathroom renovations. So instead of doing that called Bob's Bathroom Renovations, well, obviously they're not going to put that in Reader's Digest article about how to do renovations on your own. He would have lost if I had the coach and said, no, we have to do here, and say what they're looking for is, oh, it's hard to replace your sync.
So when you go to replace your sink, do this. This is step two. This is step three. It's not an opportunity for you to find literally, an ad trying to direct customers or readers to your company. That's not what Reader's Digest is going to put in their article about how to do your own bathroom rental. It's an opportunity for you to show your expertise, share your expertise, and then after the paragraph where they're quoting you, even if all they say is says, Bob from Bob's Bathroom Renovations in Georgia, that's huge. Now, later on, I've seen and Readers Digest, look, you grab that social. You take that picture. You put it on your social. You put it in your investors deck. You put it on your website as seen in quarterly Reid's Digest, and then you get another one. Oh, now I'm quoted in, you know, Martha Stewart Living. Oh, this is how easy it is when you start working with the publicist or if you can figure it out.
So basically, the way I think about it, too, is you're doing what you're doing. You want to be getting on stage. You want to be selling books. You want to be speaking. You want to be doing whatever your expertise is. You may have a lot of nonfiction authors are also businesses. They also have so you have all that stuff to run, and you have all that stuff to do. If you have a couple of hours to take out of every day to learn to do this effectively, and then you have maybe a writer on your team that can help you with the writing, or you're a good writer yourself. Do it. And if you have more time and money, figure this stuff out. Figure out the landscape, even if you only start with an hour a day figuring out doodle outreach here and there.
But if you have a little bit of more money than time or even a little bit of money, like I said, a marketing budget that you could apply to this, you could not spend better money, honestly, than having a publicist do some of this for you. And to really to make it all clear, whatever you think of some of these individuals are not Bill Gates who is one of the most successful, well known, blah blah, whatever people he literally has said, if I had only $100 left, I spent it on public relations. And there's a reason for that. For media. You can write the best books you want, you can have all your clients love you, and that would be limited, word of mouth. You can do all those things. But if people don't know what you're doing, then people don't know what you're doing. And you're not able to stand, you're not able to sell more books, you're not able to, et cetera.
Susan Friedmann
One of the things that you've said multiple times, Tracy, is a budget. Give us an idea of what a marketing or a publicity budget, what should we think of? Yes, if you've got $100, but in reality, what might be a monthly or an annual or a quarterly, what would you advise? Especially starting out, for sure, it's all over.
Tracy Lamourie
And it can be intimidating if you call up a general PR plus or somebody at my level, and I'll tell you why I've changed that, to make it less intimidating and make it accessible. Generally. Traditionally it was like 3000 a month, three months minimum. Like, I mean, when you go to marketing company and they put a marketing plan. So intimidating for most business people, certainly intimidating for solopreneurs because I do so much speaking and again, I'm not trying to be advertising here, but I can't help it. I answered my way because I only know my own company, right? What I do, for example, is because I do so much public speaking to audiences and solo partners and authors. Because I genuinely like those kind of projects better than working cooperate around a big 15% table trying to figure out who's going to be quoted and what they're going to say and how many days it's going to take them to decide before I can enter the media.
I definitely work hard to make the pricing accessible. In my case, if somebody's interested in working with me, what would be the price point? The lowest. If you only wanted one month and that was all you're going to do. It's the cheapest, but also the most expensive if you're going to keep doing it month to month. Basically, I have three different tiers. One is literally entry-level for people just hearing about this for the first time and want to test it out and see how it works for their company because they're going to be excited, and they're going to keep on doing it. And then I have a middle tier for more established businesses or you have a little bit more of a marketing budget and you can take more of my time and more whatever. It's basically how much time I'm going to put into it.
Then I have a gold star level which is priced for individuals, but it's still basically the same services you get at the Hollywood or. Corporate level. But price for human individual people, even within those with all kinds of price ranges from one month, three months, six months, basically there's a huge range. You could start for something like $599 for a limited one month at the budget level all the way up to $8,000 a year at the high-end level or 3000 a year at the low-end budget level. So really there's a huge range depending on the goals of the project, the needs of the project, and how much time. Like if you have three businesses in the book and whatever, you want to promote them all, then you're going to be at the higher end. Yeah, basically.
Long story short I tried to price my services anyway so that people can try it out and fall in love with PR. Because as you can tell by my enthusiasm talking about it, I really believe that. I believe I know for a fact this elevates people who deserve to get recognition from just sitting there, working hard, working hard, working hard, to like being seen as the experts that they are and to get those stages. Not because they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to these people who tell them how to get on stages or anything like that, but because they're legitimately being recognized for their expertise. But they're put in between your audience's case, the pages of a book, some people their expertise and they've poured into their business or both. But either way, there are media opportunities that you do not have to pay for.
You have to pay a publicist for the I mean, unless you know how to do it yourself. You pay a publicist for their strategy, for their connections, for their writing skills, for their time, for finding the opportunities and pitching you to them. But you cannot pay to get into these articles. You cannot call up Reader's Digest. I want to be the one quoted. You can buy an ad shown in Reader's Digest, but you cannot, and will not ever get paid. You cannot pay to be an expert quoted. You just can't. And that is why it's that important third-party validation. Why people have been saying since the dawn of television as seen on TV until they started using it for commercials.
And everybody's way too sophisticated to not recognize the difference between the commercial and actual third-party validation, which is if they interview a doctor or a lawyer on television, everyone usually thinks they must be the top expert doctor or lawyer in the field or why would they be interviewing him on television more often? It's usually because they wrote a press release and gave you the idea or they had a publicist that made sure they were top of mind.
Maybe you're an expert in something and you wonder gee, why is the other guy always getting interviewed? How come they don't come to me? Because they don't just come and find you. You have to be out there and put yourself into their headspace, just like you have to apply for getting out there, for the decision-makers, for speaking engagements. And those are all things that officers can do for you. But anyway, basically the price can be intimidating if you just call up a random PR company working corporate. But I'm sure that I'm not the only one that does special pricing for small businesses, for entrepreneurs, and certainly for authors, but I know I do.
So if you like anything I've had to say, I'm more than happy to talk to any authors because, honestly, like I said, I work with a lot of people, from entertainment to entrepreneurs. But something about I always wanted to be an author and nonfiction writers who they're already experts in the field, so they're already entrepreneurs. Sometimes they just have a message to share, but they have the passion to sit down and get that message out and worked really hard to do it. A lot of times I hear from them, they're just stop. What do they do now? How do they get it out to the audience? So we're that essential component in PR that helps you reach that audience, helps your message reach that audience, and helps elevate you to where you should be as the expert that you are, basically.
Susan Friedmann
Yeah. All that we're missing now, Tracy, which is fabulous. And I do not know a PR agency that does what you do in terms of having pricing that is realistic for entrepreneurs, for, and especially nonfiction authors who, you know, they've already invested a lot of money in putting their book together, getting it published then. Now it's like the most important component, which is the marketing, the promotion, the publicity, the PR. So tell us how our listeners can find you. And I believe you also have a free gift for us.
Tracy Lamourie
I do. If anybody wants to tell me that they've heard me on Susan's show, then absolutely, I'm happy to do a free consult. An hour, an hour or whatever. And I mean, it's not a sales call where I'm just trying to pitch you. We're literally going to talk about what you do, and I can tell you what you could expect and give you a little bit of direction about what you should do. How do you convince yourself that you can't move forward with a publicist and also what we would do if you decided to move forward with a publicist? I do put a lot of effort, if you want to read my backstory, I didn't come into PR to get the cool job with all the VIP parties and travel, though. That's what's developed. I'm blessed.
But I came into PR literally to do messaging. It came from an activist perspective. Originally, it was an 18-year campaign to help somebody, and that's how I learned how to do all of this. I'm not only money, of course, I'm older now, and I've got a family, and I've got a business to run. My business consultant always tells me it's not a charity, and I understand that, but still, I want the young activists, me, to still be proud of this corporate need. I do all this speaking to get people excited about it and educated about it. I don't want the door to be closed because of the $10,000 price point to get in. So my price point to get in is 599. If you can only do one month right now. But I always recommend the three months where there's specials, you get a month free, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, we're way too aggregational, but you get the point. I try to really, truly make it accessible so that when you hear me and think, oh, gee, I need that, you're not like, oh, but I can't afford it.
Susan Friedmann
That's fabulous. And I'll put your website, Lamouriemedia, in the show notes so that anyone or all the people who want to speak with you, which I really highly, highly recommend, listeners that not only listen to this several times because Tracy talks really fast. I can barely keep up with the speed. And that's okay, because you have managed to fill this time with so much wisdom and gems. We always end up, Tracy, as you know, with asking our guests to share a golden nugget. So nice, quick golden nugget for our listeners.
Tracy Lamourie
I have a favorite, and I will quote my friend Jimmy Dennis, who was the reason I wrote my first pressure release a long time ago when he went to Google RnB artist Jimmy Dennis, who spent 20 years sexually innocent on death row. We became involved with that case, and that's how we learned to write a press release. He always said Never, never give up before he was released in 2017th, actually innocent. But we always say, even when you have a bad moment after the never give up because everybody, you can feel down or depressed. I always say to him and to everyone, we didn't get this far to only get this far. And I mean that really because that works for whether you're accomplishing your goals when you're hitting those goals, whether you're doing it, whether you and you still have further to go. It's great for you, and I feel like that sometimes. But it's also for that person who is having trouble getting up in the morning, who doesn't feel they're hitting their goals, who has ambition, but maybe they feel like they haven't made it, they're just depressed or whatever else. You didn't get the star to only get this far. You made this stuff as all the naysayers, your own nays saying, all the depression, all the whatever it is, and you're still here, so keep on going. You don't know what's right around the corner. Honestly, keep going. You make your own this isn't false positivity, but you form your own viewpoint, and that's how things generally progress. And if you let those roadblocks come up in front of you, whether they're mountains or molehills get you down, they're going to get you down. But if like Jimmy Dennis, when you're on death row and everybody thought you were done, you keep on saying, never, never give up. And then after that, when you get through another day, you say, well, you know what? I didn't get this far to only get this far, you keep on going. And that's for business, that's for personal, that's for whatever. But I think that's a real thing to hold on to. When you need some motivation and things are going good, you want to keep going a little further, but even more importantly, when things don't feel so good.
Susan Friedmann
Oh, that's wonderful. Great wisdom. And thank you so much for sharing that. This has been pretty amazing. And as I said, listen, you've got to go back and listen to this several times so that you can really capture all the incredible nuggets that Tracy has shared with us. And by the way, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected to, let you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways in which you can really ramp up those sales. You've invested a whole lot of time, energy and money, and we've talked about that with Tracy, and it's time that you really got a return and the return you were hoping for. Go to brainstorm with Susan.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. So until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
Connect with Tracy at https://LamourieMedia.com
Schedule your complimentary 20-minute brainstorming session with Susan, go to BrainstormwithSusan.com
