How to Get a Publisher’s Attention

Once upon a time I wrote a book. It’s terrible, but it helped me land a job at my first tech startup.

Eighteen months later, I’m considering blowing my last effort out of the proverbial water — a new book.

Inspired by the likes of Gladwell, Fisher, Graham, and Christensen, I intend to bite off more than I can chew with an ambitious research project about markets.

I have a theory that markets implode and explode. A friend calls it “moving towards and away” from each other. But more on that later.

What’s more interesting is how I began my quest 3 months ago after seeing this blog post by Brad Feld, announcing his new publishing company FG Press.

March 2, 2014

I reach out to FG Press on their contact form.

March 3

I get a warm response, am asked for available chat times.

March 21

First call is scheduled but principal is a no show.

April 4

Second call is schedule and principal is again a no show.

May 1

After no correspondence for weeks, I post this on Quora:

quora-post

Hours Later I get this:
fg-press-appointment

(Their calendars don’t work, but their Google Alerts do.)

So we reschedule. Here’s how that turned out:

May 14

Third scheduled call is postponed.

May 16

Fourth scheduled call, principal is a no show. Later that day I’m told I was being “pinged the whole time, and no response.”

Which can’t be true because I was waiting patiently with 3 book outlines, ready to rock.

May 30

Today I updated my Quora answer:

quora-post-update

Then I used credits to promote the answer to 200 unsuspecting folks:

quora-credits

Within seconds I was getting traction:

quora-post-promoted

Then even better traction:

quora-notification

“This is pretty cool” I thought.

So I did it again:

quora-promote-again

Suffice to say, I think I made a dent.

quora-post-stats