A century and a half ago, a Swedish saddle maker fell in love and moved to the town of Köping where his beloved resided, and re-established his saddlery there. Back then, your customers were your neighbors, so you had to deliver the highest level of mastery and quality if your business was to thrive. Around the turn of the century, that saddler’s son recognized that horses were going out and cars were coming in. So, he took the skills that went into saddlery and started to make extraordinarily high-quality beds. A century later, the Hästen brand stands for the same thing that the founder stood for a century and a half ago—mastery, quality, and a sense that they are making products not for strangers but for friends around the world. Hästens is famous for its Grand Vivitus bed, which retails for more than $750,000 and is a favorite of celebrities…

As globalization marches on, more and more companies want to appeal to broader markets, domestic and foreign. It sounds easy enough, right? You’ve got a successful brand or ad campaign here in the United States, why can’t you just translate it to other countries and other cultures and watch your profits soar? Not so fast, Valerie Romley counsels her clients, as well as her readers, in Beyond Translation, which I had the privilege to edit. She points out that you can’t just sell to people whose ethnicity or nation of origin is different from your own. You have got to understand who they really are, and how they differ culturally from the markets you have traditionally favored. She brings a few hilarious examples of American companies that got it dead wrong when they tried to take their brands or ad campaigns to Mexico. Remember the Chevy Nova? Nova might sound…

Gary came to me almost 20 years ago with a plan for a consultancy that would serve dentists, a group Gary had identified as being in deep need of better professional guidance. Many dentists were floundering, and their businesses were failing. While they might have been great chair side, they had little idea of how to run a dental practice as a thriving business. He came to me and said, “I want to get five dentists to pay me $120,000 each to consult with their practices for a year. I’m going to promise them dollar-for-dollar returns, so they are not risking a penny. This way, I will make $600,000 a year, and only five people will have my cell phone number.” So, we set about writing Million Dollar Dentistry, which has now sold more than 60,000 copies. After the book came out, one of the three leading providers of dental…

David Oliphant wasn’t happy. An inveterate salesman who was responsible for moving more than a billion dollars’ worth of rare coins, supplements, books, and other items on QVC, David found two things deeply troubling. First, the profession of sales commanded little respect in American society. People tended to associate sales professionals primarily with used car salesmen, people who would say or do anything to close a deal that was bad for the customer. On top of that, David was deeply troubled by the fact that countless veterans were returning from service overseas, particularly from the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, unable to translate their military experience into the ability to make a living. He wanted to do a book that would raise the profile of selling as a career and make it particularly applicable and interesting to returning veterans. When he laid out the problem the book was meant to solve,…

Michael Levin Speaks at 12 Hay Hill at an event in London planned by Michael Levin and Jane Bayler to network and provide information on how to get a book written.

Follow me on this one. Matt Reiner is a consultant who works solely with financial advisors, helping them understand their issues about money so that they can help their clients identify and understand their issues about money. So how do you turn a practice like that into a book that his market will want to read? As you know, I’m a big believer in stories to illustrate ideas. In this case, I thought, what if we had a psychologist who found money interesting but who found people with psychological issues not that interesting? He is from a small town in the South, first to college, first to grad school, and had never heard of a financial advisor in his life until he met a woman at college who was planning on becoming just that. Fascinated, he decides that he is going to become a therapist or counselor … just to…

Gary Miller is a highly successful insurance professional running a third-generation family firm in Spring House, Pennsylvania. He didn’t want a book to drive business—he had all the business he could handle—but instead, he wanted to get a passion project across. He wanted to teach teenagers how to assess risk. Teenagers, Gary believes, minimize risks because their brains aren’t fully formed, and, well, they are teenagers, so they do stupid, reckless things. Mostly, they get away with those insane choices. Sometimes, however, they don’t. Conversely, Gary points out, teens can be overly risk-averse and miss out on opportunities for growth or happiness. Maybe they won’t try out for the school play or the football team or ask that girl or boy to prom. And then they have to live with the disappointment and frustration over “what could have been.” Measuring risk is what Gary, and his father and grandfather, spent…

I want you to be really careful if you are going to put serious money into a book marketing campaign. There are some awesome book marketing people out there. I know who they are, so drop me an email, and I will let you know who is great, depending on what you are trying to accomplish. The most important thing I can say about spending money on book marketing is proceed with caution. There is more disappointment around book marketing than practically any other aspect of getting a book done. Some of it is just plain silly. If you spend $10 on book marketing, you will not be sitting next to Oprah next Tuesday on a special. Let’s get real. But it is more than that. As I say elsewhere in these pages, one of the hardest things to do in the world is sell copies of your book to…