An editor at Psychology Today, where I am now blogging, wrote and asked for some ideas her might use in the print edition. His question was "What's the worst advice you've ever received (Or just some really bad advice …). I wrote him that I had received — and given — so much bad advice, that I couldn't pick a "worst," but told this story.
Here
is one — with two pieces of bad advice.
When I was working on marketing my last book, The No Asshole Rule, I first had a publisher offer me a contract,
but they insisted that I had to change the title — in part — because people
wouldn't buy a book with that mild obscenity in the title. I told them that I wouldn't consider an offer
unless they went with the title and walked.
Then, as I was working on marketing the book in the months prior to
publication a fellow with more than 25 years experience in the book industry
insisted that I was nuts to send copies of the book to perhaps 100 bloggers
(most of whom I knew because I am a blogger too) and to see if they might write
something about the book months before it was published. He insisted that trying to sell a book before
it was available was waste of time and effort.
I believe that, in addition to the ideas in the book, that the main two
reasons that the book became a New York
Times bestseller are because of the title, which no one ever seems to
forget, even when they hate it. The
second reason is that the buzz on the web created a lot of Amazon pre-orders,
which helped the book become the #1 Non-fiction bestseller for much of the
first week it was out and one of the top 5 business books for several weeks (it
was ultimately the #8 business book for 2007).
When the book first came out, the major bookstores had done modest
pre-orders and I had only a couple of stories in the media. The Amazon numbers (created by
pre-publication buzz) led the major bookstores to put in big orders and led the
media to do many stories on the book.
One
of my mottos in life (which I first heard from a Stanford undergraduate years ago named Kathy) is "Don't believe everythingt hey tell you" This is especially true if
they add something like "I have been in the business for 25 years and I know what I am
talking about." As one of my former
students, Andy Hargadon used to say in response to this line, "Do you have 25 years of
experience, or have you experienced the same year 25 times?"
I wonder, dear readers, what your answer to this question might be, what is the worst advice you have ever received?