Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 66 – Barbara Cave Hendricks

Peter Winick

In the past, a book’s initial marketing push came from the publisher. But, in today’s globally-connected world, authors often have to create your own marketing campaigns. Do you know how?

Barbara Cave Henricks, Founder of Cave Henricks Communications and author of “Mastering the New Media Landscape,” joins us today, offering her expertise about book publishing and campaigns.

Learn about the mistakes new authors often make, and how you should prepare now for the book you want to write in the future. Amy shares how to set your expectations before you launch your book campaign, and ways to make sure yours is a success. Listen in!

If you want to scale your content to make more profit, Peter has advice for you.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you are joining us on our podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is a good friend is Barbara Cave-Henrich. She’s the president and founder of Cain Henrich’s communication. She in a prior life was a journalist at NBC radio. She’s been in publishing. She spearheaded campaigns for some of the biggest names in the business like Jack Welch, Tom Rath, Ram Charan, Maria Bartiromo, Seth Godin, Marcus Buckingham. She’s got a really interesting perspective and I would say framework and process and methodology on how to successfully launch your platform in books. We’ve worked together in the past and I think we’ll be working together in the near future again. And I appreciate you coming on today, Barbara. Welcome, welcome.

Barbara Cave Henricks Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Peter. I really always enjoy chatting with you. So this should be fun. Oh, thank you.

Peter Winick So I think, given your domain expertise, I think we just sort of dive right in. So why don’t we start with sort of the three stupidest things that you see authors and thought leaders do when it comes to launching their books. Three things not to do. So let’s give them three.

Barbara Cave Henricks Okay, so I think, you know, I would just start with first is, you know, our expertise really does sort of dovetail. It sits nicely alongside what you do working with people on their content. Our firm does books and authors all nonfiction about 75% of them are business books, some of the notable ones you mentioned, but plenty of others by people with less recognizable names. And, you know, we work once the book is complete from the galley stage through the publication, usually 30 to 60 days after. So I don’t wanna call them stupid things to do because I really do have a lot of empathy for authors in the current publishing environment.

Peter Winick Let’s call it less than optimal.

Barbara Cave Henricks It’s less than optimal from one standpoint, from my particular chair, which is getting media attention, working with people to build the momentum, to get the visibility. Publishers used to have pretty robust departments, publicity and marketing, that did this for each author. And the reality of technology catching up with this and them not over-printing books and just printing exactly as many as they need really puts the onus on the author to create their own marketing effort. You know, and once the book starts to really get. know, some wind underneath it, you know, then typically the publisher can kick in. So they do what they can, but they’re not set up anymore to really support someone.

Peter Winick But I think you made a critical point there, because in the old days of maybe five or 10 years ago, the initial push that would get the flywheel was always on the publisher, mostly on the publishers to sort of get that initial energy going, and then it would dovetail, right? Exactly. Now what’s happening is the publishers, they don’t have the resources, whatever the case may be, they’re pulling back and saying, okay, let’s see what they can do from an author’s perspective, lightening up their platforms and their networks. making things happen. And if they start to see momentum, then they’ll might make some investments and all that but not before. And I think people don’t understand that sometimes because, hey, it’s the first book I wrote, why would I? And it’s a really important issue that you bring

Barbara Cave Henricks Yeah, it definitely is. And you know, just when an author sort of begins to figure out, wow, I’m supposed to do all this myself. Typically, what we get is they they don’t know what to do. You know, they get lots of advice. Oh, get yourself on a lot of podcasts or, you know get get your book out to every thought leader you know and try to get booked on whatever they do, whether it’s a blog or a podcast or you know if there are contributive forms, get them to write about you. And all those are good things. But I’d say the number one mistake people make. is, you know, they don’t have a strategy. So it really, in order to do what is optimal for any book, is to create a strategy so that all of these things can work in concert with another. It’s really not enough just to book yourself on 10 podcasts, or really enough to think, Okay, I guess once the book comes out and once one interview runs that’ll stimulate more

Peter Winick So let me unpack that a little bit, because there’s really a lot embedded in what you just put out there. So, you know, I’m a strategy guy, that’s what we do for a living. But our strategy is the overall sort of platform strategy, long term strategy for the business, etc. You know, a book, just by its natural cadence, has a logical life cycle, pre-launch, launch, post-launching, etc. Thank you for watching! doesn’t mean it’s stale after that, but there’s usually sort of this four to five months, whatever initial burst of energy. And I think what you say is really, really important is that activity is activity, right? So going from a podcast to an AM radio to a whatever, I think those strategic questions that are the same questions that we look at from a platform perspective are, you know, things like who are you trying to reach? Where are they? How are you try to reach them? What does success look like for you in that book? And you’re really, really good at that. that most people want to jump into the, oh, what’s the author video I make? So how do you force folks to slow down a little bit and push in that level of strategy? That seems like sort of not the fun part sometimes.

Barbara Cave Henricks Yeah, it isn’t. Well, it’s the less I call it the less glamorous to talk about. But I start very much where you are. What is the goal here? What’s the goal for your book? You know, and it’s always interesting to me. The answer to that question sometimes is, well, you know, I want to sell a lot of copies, of course, you know, I want it to help me promote my business, my speaking, my consulting. You know there’s usually multiple goals. So we need to sort of have those goals in our head. You know a this person wants to be more of a thought leader, both within his niche, his or her niche. and maybe overall in the general business space. Maybe they’re a branding expert. We have one author who’s, she’s a branding expert and she, you know, book one and two, we were really solidifying her thought leadership in that space. Book three, she wrote really with an intent toward getting into the more mainstream. So her goal was to get on network television to talk about brands, you now, and when brands stumble and when brands are soaring and what that new iPhone launch meant. And, you know, so that strategy was very different. You know, we focused on different.

Peter Winick same author, same expertise, but two books later, you could have a very different strategy, which is fine.

Barbara Cave Henricks Yeah, you have a very different strategy. She was very good on television. She was very good and able to comment on a lot of consumer brands. Um, that’s something we couldn’t do with book three. So when I start with someone, what I, what I first try to do is establish, you know, first of all, if I’m interested in the book, you know, what does the book tell me? Why do I care about it right now? And is this author the right one to be giving it to me? It’s a leadership book. They need to have been the leader of something. You know, those three components to me are kind of the first three, this is what I look for when something comes to me. The next one is I get on the phone and talk to the author about what they want that book to accomplish for them. And from there, we create the strategy. So usually what that means is we say, okay, and in a perfect world, we’re starting three to four months ahead of publication date, when the manuscript is done before we have a And I’m going to say to them, okay, tell me about your existing network. You know okay I’m looking at your website do you have a way to capture people and are you doing a newsletter for them what kind of mailing list you have do you media relationships i know should know about what is the list of people that you went to get blurbs from like let’s share the data here and then what we do is come in look at what they have. kind of help them walk through what the best way to use those resources are and then focus on the piece that we do the best, which is really adding in the media.

Peter Winick So let me just pause there for a moment, because I think one thing that you said, several things you said are important. Number one, you’re getting involved three to four months prepub, right? So if my book’s coming out in January, that’s going to be in the fall, whatever the case may be. If at that point in time, the network is weak, their social media followers or light, there is no newsletter, whatever. There’s only so much triage you can do. You know, I always say it’s a build it before you need it. If you may be writing a book in two to three years, whatever, and you’re not doing any of these core things today, could you give us some insight into what should you be doing now where there are books not even in your head, but maybe it would be in three, four years to make life easier down the road? It’s only something you can in 90 days.

Barbara Cave Henricks Yeah, absolutely. The first thing I would do is reserve the URL of my name, all the various spellings. I have an oddly spelled name, Henrix. I also own Barbara Hendrix so that I can point that back to my own. You kind of troubleshoot that. Get your intellectual URLs held in place. Take a look at your existing resources. Do you have you know, is your contact file full of 1,500 people that you’ve been doing business with that you should really sort through it and start putting them in piles? You know, hey, this person is a journalist or influencers who’s come to me. This person is a customer and buys my speaking or consulting service. This is a group of people who, you know my EO group or my YPO people, you know and really, you know start getting some organization around the people you do know.

Peter Winick So, we do a lot of that with our clients on a strategic account planning basis. And what’s difficult about it today is there’s usually not one place where my quote database lives. I have a newsletter list. I have my LinkedIn list. I’ve got my context and my address. You have to really look at all of those elements and it’s a little bit of brush your teeth and floss. It’s hygiene, but there’s power in your network, but it has to be organized and it in such a way that you can easily get information from it and extract value from it.

Barbara Cave Henricks Yeah, and you should try to do it. I mean, I wish I could say that I practice what I preach because I do have a really tight, nice, clean newsletter list. Last year, one of the goals was to get my LinkedIn followers migrated over to there and figure out who wants to be on the list. We did that. Usually, what I do is I have a maintenance activity or two per year. 2018 has been the year of my personal, all the email addresses that I’ve captured over the last year. 20 plus years from the media. Go through them and say, hey, is this person still at this outlet? Time to clean that up. And so I would say, yes, if you’re planning on a book, start to think strategically about how you can really clean up your contact list so that when you get to pre-publication, it’s in a usable form. And by usable, I mean we can say, OK, look, you know Dan Pink, you know Seth Godin, you know so-and-so, you these people. And let’s talk about what you want to ask them for. Because we may have an author who says, I’m going to go out to all these guys for a blurb. And we say, OK, let’s talked about that for a minute. Because usually, a good rule of thumb is one ask. Only make one ask, don’t ask someone to give you a blur, put you in their blog, and put you on their podcast. That’s an awful lot. So I always say, you know these five or six influencers, And by the way, two of them. have their own kind of outreach to a very large network of people, usually in excess of a million people. So is it more valuable to have their name on the book as a blurber, or would it be more valuable to hold that kind of one ask to see if maybe they’d feature you and go out to the million people that follow them and take their opinion seriously?

Peter Winick Well, I think that’s wise because, you know, you could have a great relationship with someone that’s got more notoriety than you, but, you know, there’s an annoyance factor, like, I’m happy to be helpful, but I’ve got, you know, they’re busy people, they’ve got a lot of other things to do, and I like that rule of one ask, and sometimes it forces you to think of, do you want to, is that the testimonial or is that, you know, pushing some, some recommendation out when the book comes out, you know, and really evaluate.

Barbara Cave Henricks And the other part of it is, you know, if someone, even a first time author, you may have a handful of media relationships. And so my advice with those is we want to treat that list. That’s the VIP club, right? You know, those are people that when they get the galley, it should come with a personal note from you. There should be high touch. Thank you so much for you know paying it so much attention to my work basically in the past just that I clue you in no ask in that note, just I’m letting you know. that really sets the stage for us to then be able to go back and make the pushy ask of that person. So what typically happens if I have an author like Tom Rath, who’s worked with lots and lots of journalists over the years, the first thing we do is say, okay, Tom, here’s 60 journalists who’ve been covering you since 2004, so you need to write the note here. I’ll do all the follow-up. I’ll figure out what we wanna ask them for or when we wanna approach them or if this new book is appropriate. Some of it may be, eat, move, sleep, his book that dealt largely with health was not gonna hit the same people who did Strengths Finder all the way across the board. So we kind of treat that list really carefully. But from the beginning, what we’re trying to do in that strategic process is okay, two or three years ahead, start paying attention to this, get your URLs held. If you have three book titles you’re throwing around in your head, reserve all three of them. Just put placeholders in. Clean up your lists. Make sure that the people you’re in contact with you have good contact information and that you’re putting them into the appropriate buckets. And then the third thing I would do is really look at the social media space and decide where you feel you can be a reliable and regular contributor. And I say reliable and regular because too many people. hit, you know, six months before their book comes out and they get this horrible feeling, I need to do something. And they spend a weekend and they sign up for every social media, they get an Instagram account, they open a new Facebook page with the name of their book and they, you know, they, they maybe reinvigorate their Twitter feed or they open a new one and they and then they get their LinkedIn account. And you know what, only open what you can feed on a regular basis. You are so much better off having one outlet that is well-tended. and where you are a thoughtful contributor, then having five that the media will find when I’m pitching them. And that’s what happens.

Peter Winick And it’s probably, I would say, Barbara, there’s also authenticity and comfort, right? If you’re a writer, LinkedIn’s probably a better place for you than to fiddle around with images on Instagram that doesn’t really feel like it’s an extension of you or relates to your target. Exactly.

Barbara Cave Henricks Exactly. And you know, I mean, I still I know Facebook, you know enormously possible, popular, we do have some authors who use it. But typically, Facebook still is a place where people go to interact with brands that they know very well. So if you are not a brand that is known very well, I would suggest that you focus on LinkedIn or Twitter or both. And then figure out what you can do to regularly feed them. So those I think are the three things I’d do if I knew I had a book coming out.

Peter Winick those three things. Awesome. I want to touch on one thing that was sort of embedded or maybe in between the words of what you said is, you know, that you start with the goal setting and oftentimes when, you know first of all, that’s where we start as well. But when we have that conversation I feel like I have to deliver some bad news, right? So there’s what I would call a process of expectation calibration where the book comes out and I want it to be on the today show and I’m going to be a best seller and I’ve going to a $50,000 speaker and I wanna pony. Like, so how do you, how do manage? the expectations, because your clients like mine, they’re really, really smart people. And this is just, I look at it, it’s just an unknown, right? So therefore they’re entitled to any expectation they want. But how do you sort of manage that so they’re not bummed out at the back end of an engagement thinking that unrealistic things would be achieved?

Barbara Cave Henricks Yeah, so but you know, I definitely that is an enormous part of our process as well, you know We don’t want to go into this. So we want a strategy where we’re saying hey Here’s the media outlets that we think are the most important the ones that are going to really move the needle With your audience. So, we’re going to spend 80 percent of our time on the top 20 percent of this media list that we Think is crucial

Peter Winick And most important might not be what that author thought in the beginning in terms of Oprah, Dr. O, most important and realistic.

Barbara Cave Henricks realistically, you know, talking to somebody. So some people just come in and I don’t think it’s that, you know, they come in, and they just think, I know, if I’m on the Today Show, you know, I see authors on the today show. So that’s a great thing for me to be on, right? I should be on the Today Show. And I should be doing a book tour. And actually doing all these two things. And usually where I start is, you know, let’s talk about who watches the Today show. And is that audience really the audience for a book on corporate leadership? or you know corporate responsibility. No, that’s not where your audience is living. You know your audience over here on CNBC, it’s on MSNBC, it’s reading Fortune magazine, it on Fast Company, it is on Business Insider, and it’s maybe listening to these top ten, you know five of these podcasts that everybody’s listening to. So yeah, there’s definitely, here’s what you know, here is what they may think. And here’s what we may think is possible. I think the biggest thing I see when you said big mistakes that people make, I think too many people think they’re going to publish one book and move from a nice size consulting business, a fair amount of speaking into a category like Dan Pink or Seth Cotten or Gary Vandertuk. They think that the path is one book. And the truth is we know that’s not what happened.

Peter Winick Right. Well, I totally agree. And I think what people fail to see is, you know, Dan’s wonderful. Right. Oh, yeah. If you were to do it, you’re a business person. Do a comparative business analysis and say, I am a startup. Right. And basically coming out into the world of thought leadership. Dan’s been at this for 15, 18 years. He’s probably spoken 500 times, five New York Times bestsellers. That’s not a fair comparison to hold myself to in 90 or 120 days.

Barbara Cave Henricks It’s not a comparison, but you can make progress. I mean, you really can, you know, you can start with it and you can say, Hey, a great goal for you would be that we get you, you know, a contribution in HBR that we can an expert in fast company that we book you, You know, on cheddar online streaming TV, which might cue us up to get on CNBC, depending on what your background is. A lot of times people also just, they think in their head, I’m a business author. I should be on CNVC. In that case, I always say a little bit of homework. It may be possible based on your background. Are you prepared to comment on news of the day? How comfortable are you talking about the markets? Because if you watch a lot of business TV, they’re talking about the markets.

Peter Winick On a minute-to-minute basis, right, which there’s not a lot of stickiness.

Barbara Cave Henricks I mean, they do have power lunch where they’ll go into a book, but a lot of times, you know, I’ve had many an author on those programs where they sit in the chair and they say, hey, Carter Cast, we see you wrote a book. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But you were the CEO of Walmart.com and a new report came out today that Walmart is closing retail locations. What do you have to say about that? So, you, know, it’s very easy for that to get hijacked. So to me, gratitude is a campaign where we’ve really figured out this is the core group they to reach. Here are the media outlets that we think are the most important. Here are top 20% that we’re gonna focus a lot of time on. And here are the ones beneath it that really can be impactful. I’m a huge fan of podcasts. I’m not just saying that because I’m on one.

Peter Winick He he he he.

Barbara Cave Henricks We have authors who initially pushed back, and I have to say, you know what? That podcast actually has a listenership greater than the newspaper in the city you live in.

Peter Winick and a highly engaged audience, right? So people are listening to them in the car, at the gym, et cetera. The last thing on the goal piece, I’m gonna have to start to wrap up here, is I think the best way to handle sort of the expectation is not comparing yourself to, you know, the top 1% of 1%, but where am I today? And as a result of the investment in PR, the book, et, cetera, et. Where could I realistically be in six months? And is that a logical expectation?

Barbara Cave Henricks Yes and you know that’s where we go back. You know if I’m speaking to a first-time author and I’ve just in the last year or two years worked with another first- time author that I think is a pretty good comp. I will call the first author and say hey I would like you to chat with this author about your experience and if you’re okay with it I’ll share the media results that we were able to get for you so that they actually have kind of a real-life snapshot You know, it’s one thing to talk to, you know, someone who I’ve worked on four books for them or five, but you know where in a long term relationship, I think it needs to be a comparable that said, you know, we also have the client, like I mentioned, the branding author where one set of expectations was in place for book one, it got a little bigger on two, and three, we really made the switch over to a strategy that exposed her to a much more general business audience. And that was normal.

Peter Winick Yeah, no, totally. Totally. What great stuff. There’s so much. Well, there’s so much that you and I are aligned on in terms of the overall strategic thinking and expectations, all that, but you bring so much expertise into the specifics around, you know, PR and launching books and all those sort of things. So I would encourage folks that are in that stage or thinking about it or, or, you know, it’s going to be in the future. Listen to this, listen to this one and then listen to it again. And then we’ll put Barbara’s credentials up in the show notes here. and go take a look at her site. And if you need help, there’s no one better in the business. So I appreciate you so much for being on today.

Barbara Cave Henricks Absolutely, this was fun. Thanks so much for having me, Peter. My pleasure.

Peter Winick To learn more about thought leadership leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage dot com and please subscribe to leveraging thought leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.