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Farnoosh Brock is the author of several books. She has two put out by a traditional publisher. They are The Healthy Juicer’s Bible and The Healthy Smoothie Bible. Today she is going to talk to us about a variety of different topics, mostly about getting a book published, how that whole process works and her tips and ideas on how to market books including using a media kit.
Farnoosh spends her time writing and running the Prolific Living blog, as well as Prolific Juicing, Fast Track Promotion for career warriors and Smart Exit Blueprint for entrepreneur-wanna-be spirits. She writes books, talks about empowering your life with your own choices and re-inventing yourself with positivity, enthusiasm and the right guidance.
Zeb’s Take – Create and Use a Media Kit to Stand Out
I had a really good time today talking with Farnoosh. You can really that she’s an enthusiastic person, excited about life, and really knows the direction and purpose, where she wants to take it. She seems very happy to me as well. That’s what I want for all the listeners. I want you all to be happy and excited about the work you’re doing just like I do, just like like Farnoosh does.
One of the things that Farnoosh brought up that I want to focus on is the media kit that she talked about. She created a media kit for her book and sending them out. The reason why I want to talk about it is because, you can apply the concept of a media kit, you don’t have to just do it for books, you can literally do a media kit for anything.
Farnoosh, she reached out to me, she had talked to Jared Easley who does the Starve the Doubts podcast, he introduced her to me. She sent me, basically like a media kit email sharing here’s who I am, here’s what I’m about, Jared says you’d be a great person to talk to and a great show to be on. It really introduced her and myself and it made me feel comfortable with her, especially with the introduction through Jared, to have her on the podcast.
Creating those media kits really helps to open the door to new opportunities. Instead of sending out an email that seems like a mass email or an impersonal email, by sending out a digital media kit you can really start to introduce yourself to different people or different influencers that you want to try to get a hold of.
One of my friends wanted to become a landscape architect. Apparently, typically, to do that you sign on with a firm that does landscape architecture. At the time he graduated college with a degree and could not find a job. I understand that there aren’t really jobs out there, but you need to be proactive about it. My suggestion to him was to create some sort of media kit about himself that would demonstrate his expertise. For him I was thinking more of a physical copy, maybe not so much a digital one. I’m not sure how landscape architecture works, but I’m sure they do some designs and do work projects, maybe he could do a work project and show them a design of his own and hand that off to them. Instead of giving a resume show the actual work that you are willing to do. That’s a form of a media kit that can really open up doors. You can do it for your career. If you are looking for potential clients, you can use a kit to reach out and introduce yourself to businesses as well. There’s just so many different functions and uses that you can use a media kit for that I don’t think a lot of people think of.
One of the books I read was by John Jantsch, The Referral Engine. In the book he says there’s a lot of really cool things you could do to make yourself stand out in front of people. One of the things he did was send a rubik’s cube to a bunch of place with a little note attached to it explaining who he was and his business and there was a reason why he used a rubik’s cube, I don’t remember the example, but it was a very inexpensive way, it was something memorable, that people can look at and say oh yeah I remember that guy he sent me the rubik’s cube. It worked out really well for him and his business. There’s so many other opportunities like that out there if you think about that. I think Farnoosh did a great job with her media kit and sending them out so I wanted to share that with you today.
Thanks for listening. Check us out on Facebook, say hi. I love talking with our listeners, it makes me happy.
Now go out there and find your success!
Find out more about Farnoosh Brock and the Prolific Living Blog
Visit ProlificLiving.com. It connects to all her blogs, see her about page, and there she has a free confidence building course that you can download. Visit Fast Track Promotion. Find Farnoosh on social media usually with ‘Prolific Living’
She encourages you all to connect with her. Let her know that you found her through Zeb at The Defining Success Podcast.
Quotes
- “The more I went deeper into my corporate career, and I was making more money, I had more flexibility, more perks… the more unhappy I became. I was forced to start looking outside.”
- “I started blogging. It started out as a hobby. The more I did it the more I feel in love with writing, with social media, with doing something on my own, with the creativity process […] It was like a magnet Zeb, it kept pulling me.”
- “It’s been a really wonderful but hard journey.”
- “I am willing to bet that some of the best decisions you have ever made weren’t logical analytical numbers-driven decisions. Your heart came into play and told you, ‘you are doing this!’”
- “It didn’t matter how much money I was making. I had to know this unknown or else regret it.”
- “If you have something to say. If you want to write a book. Start writing today. You have so many options now. It’s so wonderful, we live in this age, so many options to get it out there.”
- “You don’t know what obstacles will come your way. Life has a unique story for all of us. Not all of it is fair or just, but a successful person will turn those circumstances around.”
- “I was finally gutsy enough to go past my fears and really take a risk and do something that I wanted to do for a long time. I feel that it has made all the difference in my life.”
More from the Interview
Farnoosh used to be in engineering. She did a lot of highly technical, highly stressful work. She worked for a start-up then a big fortune 100 technology company, she was doing technical support for huge companies fixing their broken networks. She then moved on to technical writing, project management, process improvement, sales operations, executive communications. She got a lot of wonderful experience working in many different areas in a corporate job.
Today she does something entirely different.
“It wasn’t gradual or over-night. It was a sort of hunger that was growing, or an itch that I just couldn’t scratch.” I had great experience. I worked with great people. There were things in the corporate world that I wasn’t crazy about, but I didn’t understand myself and my own strengths and, more than anything, the possibilities for a career for someone like me, so that I could better fulfill that hunger or scratch that itch. The more I went deeper into my corporate career, and I was making more money, I had more flexibility, more perks… the more unhappy I became. So, I was forced to start looking outside.”
“I started blogging. It started out as a hobby. The more I did it the more I feel in love with writing, with social media, with doing something on my own, with the creativity process […] It was like a magnet Zeb, it kept pulling me in this direction.”
She attended a conference, Blog World. She met amazing people who were doing meaningful work with their lives. She felt inspired. Meanwhile at her job, she was being asked to do a project that she had a moral conflict with. Those two forces made Farnoosh reconsider her path, really look at the future, really think about what she was doing, really take some action. Within 6 months she resigned and started her own company.
“It’s been a really wonderful but hard journey.”
“I am willing to bet that, some of the best decisions you have ever made weren’t logical analytical numbers-driven decisions. Your heart came into play and told you, ‘you are doing this!’”
She’s hired her husband and they have a profitable business. They figured it out.
“It didn’t matter how much money I was making. I had to know this unknown or else regret it later in life.”
The Healthy Juicer’s Bible, Farnoosh’s first traditionally published book, came about because of her self-published book on The Comprehensive Green Juicing Guide. It’s about taking people step-by-step through why and how they can do their own juicing, and several recipes. It was a quick process from putting the content together to being put on shelves. It did well.
Most aspiring authors expect the publisher to do all the publication, marketing, work and they just do the writing. Farnoosh saw her relationship with the publisher as more of a partnership. She collaborated with them and they worked heavily to market the book. The repeated the process for her second book, The Healthy Smoothie Bible.
Her advice: “If you have something to say. If you want to write a book. Start writing today. You have so many options now. It’s so wonderful, we live in this age, so many options to get it out there.”
Build a media kit. It makes it easy for your reviewers to give shout outs for your book. In Farnoosh’s media kit she included phrases and text they could share on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, as well as email templates that they can send to their lists, and pictures that they use where ever they like.
Pick some early reviewers. Farnoosh tapped into her network and found some new people that would be interested in the book. They got a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review, a shout-out to their audience, or maybe even just for them to get use out of it to start a relationship.
A media kit shows you as a professional author who has a good sense of your book and how to communicate your book. It shares a description of the book. The launch date. Include blurbs and email templates, really encourage people to share about the book.
Tools that Farnoosh uses includes Google Docs (you can share a document and set it so that to just view, they can still copy and paste text from it without changing it), Click to Tweet (a website that creates a unique link, people don’t even have to copy and paste), pictures (people love to share pictures) for the viewers to easily share. She even created a book trailer, a video about the book people could share. A media kit is a collection of all of this plus contact information.
“I can get up, come to work, and feel good about the work I am doing, feel like I am making a tangible difference. I am helping someone. I know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t know what obstacles will come your way. Life has a unique story for all of us. Not all of it is fair or just. But a successful person will turn those circumstances around.”
“Using your innate confidence and abilities to make changes and actually using those tools that you have to guide the direction of your life and your career”
“I was finally gutsy enough to go past my fears and really take a risk and do something that I wanted to do for a long time. I feel that it has made all the difference in my life.”
