Celebrating Our Own

A couple of years ago, my friend and my colleague Dennis Welch began sending me email missives, chapters of a book he was writing based on a weekly conversation he had with his mother. Funny, heartbreaking, and impossible to put down, I found myself searching my inbox for the latest installment. When one was late, I picked up the phone and insisted that he find time to write the next piece so that I would know how it all came out in the end.

I am happy to report that those chapters will be available to readers everywhere this fall. RICH PEOPLE SHOP HERE: A Tale of Love, Redemption, and Bargain Hunting is the story of Patsy Welch, whose first 80 years have been filled with sadness, struggle, alcohol, death, and divorce. But that’s not the way Patsy sees it. In the face of obstacles that would make others crumble, Patsy met adversity with a faith so strong and friendships so resilient it will forever change the way you see the world.

Oh, it's also hilariously funny, with Patsy a perfect mix of Southern Belle and Lucille Ball. Forever short on maps and directions, she could turn a car ride to church into a rolling adventure for her three sons or a trip to the grocery store a near tragedy when she picked up the necessities, went to retrieve her car and proceeded to drive home leaving the food and one of her young boys behind. As I said to Dennis, "you couldn't possibly make up this stuff."

George Gallup Jr., co-founder of the Gallup Organization where Dennis worked for over a decade, calls it "the ultimate tale of triumph." Carolyn Castleberry, a reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network, says it reminds us that "no challenge can extinguish hope."

You can pre-order a copy now. Stay tuned, I'll keep you posted on critic and reader response.

Thankful for Teamwork this Thanksgiving

It's been a tough week for publishing, along with the rest of the nation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers of literary giants such as Philip Roth and J.R. Tolkien, announced that it has put a freeze on acquiring new titles, an extreme move that has sent shock waves through an industry already battling weak sales report at the bookstore chains across the country.

But here in my little corner of the world, I've decided to focus the things that are going right. With every business title I read, whether to consider it for a pr campaign or just to educate myself on running a company, I learn more and more about the importance of the team. One of our books, STRENGTHS BASED LEADERSHIP (coming from Gallup Press in January) uses Gallup research to prove that the best leaders build teams with a wide array of complementing strengths.

This week, I saw this work first hand. Caught downtown and on a conference call from a coffee shop, I saw my cell phone ring with a call from Dennis. While staying on the client call, I sent a him a text to check in. Turns out CNBC was looking for Harry Dent, author of THE GREAT DEPRESSION AHEAD (Free Press; January) for a live TV spot that night. I had him call Lew, our office manager, who would locate Sara, who is working with me on Harry's book, handling the digital campaign. Before I could conclude my own call, Harry Dent had been reached and CNBC was coordinating his appearance from a studio in Florida. Technology and teamwork together scored air time for an author, and I am infinitely grateful for a group of people who know that response time is key as we battle for airtime and space.

Sure, it's just one interview; but watching everyone jump on board without a nudge from me was the an incredible feeling. No dysfunctions for our team this Thanksgiving. What great news.

Update: Harry's interview on CNBC can be found here, here, and here.

Connecting with our community

I've been attending BEA, the annual book convention, for more years than I care to admit -- I remember when it was the ABA, recall the year it rained through all the outdoor parties in Miami, and even recollect the year that Oprah announced her own book, a deal she famously pulled out of before turning around to be the biggest advocate for reading and books the country has ever seen.

It never gets old to me, spending time with tens of thousands of people who passionately love books -- it's like getting a snapshot of the many talented hands it takes to turn a great author's idea into an equally terrific book.

Dennis, Sara, Lew and I holed up miles from the convention center at the boutique Ambrose Hotel in Santa Monica, a place we highly recommend if you're heading west and have any concerns about your environmental impact -- a very green hotel.

Our convention highlights and a few photos:
**World Cafe in Santa Monica where we celebrated with our friends from 800-CEO-READ (their book is coming out from Portfolio in early 2009).

**We all are forced to live vicariously through Sara, who wrangled an invite to the exclusive book party at Prince's house. We were jealous, but I helped out on wardrobe and at least my dress got to go to the Purple One's backyard and party until the wee hours of the morning.

**Lew scored Rick Riordan's autograph for her son Cody and tells us it was a huge thrill to meet the man "who inspired my son not only to read, but to become an avid reader."

**Barbara waited 30 minutes to say hello to Ethan Canin who was signing his new book America, America. She worked on Blue River with him in 1991 and reports he's still the "nicest and most talented novelist I've ever had the chance to work with."


Our goodie bags -- Sara made her famous toffee and marshmallows and my son posed for our promotional photo along with stacks of our great books.


Dinner at the Wilshire Restaurant with our friends from Gallup.


Dennis and Gallup editor Piotr Juszkiewicz with their selected reading material picked up on the convention floor.



We share a moment of levity before boarding our planes back home -- to the east coast and the heart of Texas.

Good show, good memories, always a great time.

A Virtual Hug in the Cold, Digital World (or Yesterday a Blog Entry Fell into My Lap)

Yesterday was just one of those days. A storm zapped one of our routers, disabling the network and leaving us limping along. Forced to rely on an email system that was less than optimal and definitely not what I was used to, I committed what I can only guess is considered the worst of all technological and public relations sins. Unbeknownst to me, my email began adding the name ROBERT after each first name greeting I typed. Worse yet, it was in bright red font with a single line through it. Something along the lines of "Dear Andrea, ROBERT," Lovely. Just the personal, customized approach I was looking for.

Or not.

I realized what had happened when I got an almost immediate reply from someone on the West Coast, saying certainly I could "do better than this." It was followed quickly by another from a famed marketer with the single word -- "OUCH." Only on these notes could I see how my email was being delivered, with a flaming red errors and mark outs. Ouch is right, although as I went back through my sent items folder and discovered that I'd sent out nearly 300 notes with the same mistake, I wanted to declare myself dead rather than merely wounded.

I tramped off to the dinner table, a grim expression on my face. We play a game every night at dinner, one that I invented after discovering that asking my three kids how school was that day resulted in blank stares and single word replies. Instead, we now go around the table, playing high/low, with each person sharing the best thing and the worst thing that happened to them that day. I was last. When I had reached the end of my embarrassing email snafu, my fourteen year old, who rarely thinks I do anything right, looked me straight in the eye and said, "That's it?" She insisted that I was being ridiculous and only needed to send a brief explanation. "No one is perfect," she huffed before disappearing once again behind her bedroom door. No one indeed.

And that is when, lo and behold, our high tech, steely cold world dissolved. I sent my apology note, praying that I would not be blasted on someone's blog tomorrow for my mistake. Cheery note after sweet email began landing in my box. ABC was particularly kind, with several staffers there dismissing my mistake with a "no worries" reply. I felt more than loved when journalists at Time, Reuters, Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal, Ad Age, MSNBC, CNBC, and dozens of others responded with nice notes, mostly saying how they or their colleagues have made similar mistakes. These notes outnumbered the attackers by a long shot, with 10 "no worries" for every one "how stupid are you?" " My favorite was signed with the sender's first name, followed by that bright red ROBERT. Gotta love him.

I must say that I felt buoyed by the fact that when presented with humanity and honest-to-goodness mistakes, even our beloved journalists, undoubtedly deluged by a rain of email every hour, stepped firmly to the plate with reassurances at hand. We're not advocating mistakes and have certainly learned to triple check when emailing, but we couldn't help basking in the nice people out there in cyberspace.

Our author Jack Mitchell, the bestselling author of Hug Your Customers and the just-launched Hug Your People, has been telling us for months that treating everyone you deal with in business with kindness and respect is the best kind of "hug" that exists in our sometimes impersonal world.

The media, apparently, is already well onto the idea. And I, for one, am extremely grateful.

(side note: I spent yesterday looking for a good topic to blog about. My colleague Dennis Welch, who's an amazing singer/songwriter in his other life told me, "Great country songs usually come from trouble - maybe blog entries do too."