HOW TO SELL MORE BOOKS WITH RADIO
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The story was, is that I started doing these interviews and I thought I was doing pretty good. I stumbled and fumbled through the first few of them because I was pretty nervous, but I got the hang of it and I’m like hoping I’m going to sell some books. Every morning I’d get up and I’d do radio interviews by telephone because that what most of the time they do is, these radio stations call you and they interview you on the telephone. The majority of them were early in the morning because I’m on the West Coast and a lot of these were morning drive shows back in Central and Eastern time zones so sometimes I’d get up at 4:30, 5:00, 5:30 in the morning to do these shows. At 7:30 I’d usually do the show and I’d go back to sleep and I’d get up and I’d hit the little button on my teleprinter to see how many orders I’d gotten. This went on for quite a number of shows and I would sell one, maybe two, occasionally I’d get really lucky and sell three books. Lots of times I wouldn’t sell any. I was getting kind of discouraged. I had done 34 radio interviews and not sold more than three books on any one show when WMJI in Cleveland called me. [Adrian Redmond] called me, and I’ll never…I actually remember when she called me and she said, “Alex, we saw your ad in RTIR and we want to book you on the show.” And I’m like “Great. When do you want me on?” She’s like, “How’s 7:30?” I’m like oh boy, another 4:30am radio interview. I got up, did the interview, it was 15 minutes, I rolled over and went back to sleep and I woke up at about 7:30 and got up and hit my teleprinter and jumped in the shower, which is kind of my little routine. For those of you who know me, I take pretty long showers, and when I got out of the shower, the thing was still cranking. When it was all said and done, I sold over 200 books on that one show. You should have seen me, I was like….well, anyway, you could probably imagine what it was like. That was a day that completely and totally changed my life forever because I realized that this actually had potential and I actually had a shot at making this work. Over the next whatever month or so it was I did another 15 interviews and couple more of them were big stations, and when it was all said and done, I did a total of 50 interviews and three of them were on big stations and I sold over a couple hundred books each on each one of those shows. All of the rest of the shows had sold like three books or less.
Basically when that all kind of came to a close, I realized, me being the rocket scientist that I am that, gee, I want to be on the big shows because those are the ones that have lots of listeners and I’ll sell lots of books, and all those other stations, I don’t really want to waste my time with. For those of you who don’t know, there’s over 10,000 radio stations in this country, and it’s the old 80/20 rule, except its more like the 95/10 rule—5% of the stations reach 95% of the people and the other 95% of the stations done reach much of anybody. What I decided to do was go after and try to find out where I could just get the big shows. The first thing I did was I called the guys back at Radio and Television Interview Report and I said, “Hey, you guys must have a database. Is there a way I can sort through the database and pick out the big shows?” They said, “Well, yeah, we’ve got this publicity books database and it lists the stations’ market rankings and wattage, and so, yeah, that should help you.” And I said, “Okay, great. How much is that?” “$350.” “Okay, here’s my last credit card, mortgage away.” I got that and I played around with that for a couple of weeks and I learned a couple of very important things and I want to share those with you. Basically, I learned about station wattage and I learned about market rankings. I learned that neither one of them tell you how many people listen to those stations. This is really important. I’m going to explain these to you, so pay attention.
