HOW TO SELL MORE BOOKS WITH RADIO
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When my four years of courier driving were all said and done, I had actually beat eight out of ten speeding tickets. I noticed a couple of things through this process. Number one, I noticed that there were a lot of people in traffic court along with me, and I also noticed that I was the only one winning and everyone else was losing. Once my whole kind of courier driver career in college thing came to a close, I thought to myself, “You know, there might be a market for a book of all these little tricks and tips on beating speeding tickets that I’ve learned along the way.” So I decided to do a little research and I found out that they write 100,000 traffic tickets in this country every single day. So I thought to myself, “Well, I think there’s a bit of a market here.” You do the math, but I started writing my little book. I did so under the tutelage of a gentleman that many of you may be familiar with. His name is Dan Pointer. He’s the author of a book called, The Self Publishing Manual, and he guided me through the whole process of self-publishing my book. I chose to self publish for a number of reasons—first and foremost because I want to keep all the money and didn’t want to give it all to a New York publisher. The average person who is published with a major publisher gets like $1.00 or $1.50 a book. When I sell books direct, I make about $11 a book so there’s this significant benefit there. The other reason I chose to self publish is because I wanted to be able to say whatever the heck I wanted to and I know that the editors at major New York publishers kind of sensor whatever you write. One of the things that was more important to me was that I wanted to have a very inflammatory catching title.
The title to my book was Beat the Cops, and the subtitle was, The Guide to Fighting Your Traffic Ticket and Winning. My book actually came out not too long after the Rodney King thing happened and so I wanted to really capitalize on that whole, I don’t know, I’d say, feeling that was going on at the time. My title was definitely memorable and has definitely done extremely well. But anyway, when I kind of finished the whole process of self publishing my book, and I had 3,000 copies sitting in my garage, and most of my credit cards mortgaged, I called Dan Pointer up and I said, “Okay, Dan, this is great. I’ve got a book. How do I sell it?” He said, “Alex, well, I think you probably would do well being a guest on radio shows. They don’t cost any money; it’s basically free advertising, and since you don’t have much of an advertising budget, that’s probably a good way for you to start.” I said, “All right. Sounds good. How do I get on radio shows?” He said, “Well, why don’t you put an ad in the magazine called Radio and Television Interview Report?” Some of you may be familiar with it; some of you may not. It’s called RTIR for short by many people. Basically what it is, the magazine gets mailed out about every three weeks to about 4,000-5,000 radio and television producers across the country.
Basically, you put an ad in it and these producers read through this magazine and if they like your show idea, they’ll call you and book you on their show. I put my ad in there and over the next couple of months I got a total of 50 radio interviews. Fifty radio stations called me and booked me on their show. I was all excited and in the beginning I thought, “Wow! This is fantastic! I’m doing all these radio shows. I’m going to sell hundreds and thousands of books.” Back then we didn’t have the Internet when I first got started, I just had my toll-free number and that’s how people would order my books. At the end of these interviews, I would give out my toll-free number when the host would ask me how people got my book. I had an answering service that I’d set up that would answer my toll-free number and take the orders because I was expecting a huge flood of them and I needed to have an answering service to handle that. Then I had this little thing hooked up to my answering service at my house that was called a teleprinter. I don’t think they don’t make them anymore, but basically what it did is it dialed into my answering service and it retrieved the orders off of a bulletin board and printed them out on a little piece of ticker tape.
