Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
After spending years as marketing director, convincing attorneys at Faegre & Benson about the best ways to sell, Brian Freeman wrote a thriller. Then he turned his skills to his own product.
“It’s been encouraging that all the things that I was telling the lawyers that work — they in fact do work,” Freeman says. He left the Minneapolis law firm April 1 when sales of Immoral abroad reached a decent level.
“I shared the belief of many writers, if you write a great book it will sell itself, and that’s just wrong,” he says. “The selling process is based on personal relationships and connections.”
His first connection to an agent came by luck. He had hired a person in London to work at the Faegre office there, and she said she wanted to send out weekly spreadsheets listing everyone whom each staff member was contacting.
The first spreadsheet included the fact that a Faegre intellectual property lawyer in London was having dinner with one of the biggest literary agents there. Freeman asked the lawyer to make the introduction, and he did.
“I thought that trying to get in the front door was not likely to be productive. Agents receive thousands of queries every year,” Freeman says.
A few weeks later he was checking e-mail in Denver, and talking to his wife on the phone. “An e-mail popped in from the agent. She said, ‘I stayed up until 1 a.m.’ ” reading his book, and she’d be happy to represent him.
“After I peeled myself off the ceiling I called her and we were off to the races,” Freeman says.
Through the London agent, the book started getting European sales. “Whenever we’d sell a city in Europe I’d get in touch with the editor and offer my help, and start feeding my ideas. They’d never had an American author offer to be so personally involved.”
For example, his publisher in Spain wanted to ramp up its e-mail marketing. Freeman suggested that anyone who ordered his book online would get an automatic reply e-mail from him as a thank you, and recommendations of other books with that publisher that Freeman likes.
He also garnered selection-of-the-month status from the Literary Guild and Book of the Month Club, a rare boost. “For a first-time thriller, it may be unprecedented,” Freeman says.
He contacted the editor-in-chief of the Literary Guild, knowing that book clubs want to differentiate themselves from other types of booksellers like amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. He offered one of his short stories to be bundled into the book sale, for members only. She loved the idea, and a week later he learned his book was a selection of the book clubs.
He’s working on the second book of his two-book deal, to deliver in December. Immoral will ship from the publisher, St. Martin’s Minotaur in New York, Aug. 17. Always the marketer, Freeman adds it’s available to pre-order now at www.amazon.com
Brian Freeman: 612.802.5889; br***@***********ks.com; www.bfreemanbooks.com
