Publicity Through Philanthropy For Writers – Writing
Publicity Through Philanthropy For Writers
Zachary Weiner
I am twenty three years old, have sold over four thousand copies of my first book in a matter of a month after its release and recently been contacted for contracts with Random House and Harper Collins for two new titles. I think a good deal of my recent success is highly correlated with my Reading for Charity Contest and the attention it has drawn. Ill explain the entire background, but as pre-thought I think it first manifested itself through a combination of my looking for a good way to market my first book, while balancing out my karma a bit. A way to interweave my love of novel writing, increase my books visibility and provide a benefit to society in some way shape or form. All of these tasks have seemed to be accomplished- although my karma could still probably use some more balancing.
What is the Reading for Charity Contest: Over sixty organizations, a group of corporate sponsors, and a handful of volunteers are the result of the charity contest. I took my very recently published book and decided to give away a certain percentage of its profits to charity. There was a catch though, the charity I will give my book profits to is being voted on, by the readers. So once you read my book, you can go to my webpage or find me at one of my book tours and vote for your favorite cause and the highest voted cause receives the profits Which should be quite a bit. That was the reading for charity contests basic beginning. Its the focal point of everything else that now surrounds the contest and of course my book. The contest was than expanded on by a few different means which, furthered the accomplishment of my goals.
1 Rather than your basic book tours I turned my book tours into a way to highlight the organizations participating in the contest. I have a large stand representing all of the participating organizations with their information and donation cards. Next came along a couple of benefit events- a silent auction, a couple of benefit dinners etc... Things that were really quite easy to put together, but could have a great benefit for the charity groups I was working with. Now this may seem like a good deal of work, which it was, but the benefits for the organizations had been huge, and the benefits for me personally has been equally spectacular.
The benefits all of this had for me: I was able to get involved with over sixty non-profit organizations and use my book and contest as a way to highlight their efforts and eventually provide them with a financial benefit as well. There is no truer statement that giving is a two way street. In return for my help with the organizations the organizations did their best to help out me. I am featured with my book in over fifty non-profit newsletters, on a large number of webpages, as well as postings and fliers from the organizations. Some organizations have newsletters with readers in the ten of thousands. It is equivalent to being featured in fifty newspapers across the country that are targeted directly to the reader.
2 The book tours are not only philanthropic, but also bring in a good deal of people and create a lot of buzz. After some attention a number of companies offered to sponsor the events. I was able to receive all of my marketing material for my book and contest for free from corporate sponsors. T-shirts, fliers, book marks, posters, business cards, mail outs, coffee cups, even mousepads with my book cover on them. My entire marketing plan which is now pretty extensive costs only about five dollars a month to cover the price of my website, that is it and nothing more.
3 When you have a purpose and are providing aid you directly relate with the community you are assisting. Since the organizations I have involved are spread out throughout the entire United States it has proved to be an excellent source of publicity, from radio, to newspapers, to magazines, even a couple of upcoming television shows. It has given my book an unbelievable pr hook in a market where it is difficult to get a story in a paper just because you recently published a book..
4 In basic when people read my book they are doing more than just being entertained, each copy bought goes directly to a great cause. The readers of the book are allowed to interweave their love of reading with a greater purpose in an interactive fashion. Once again a win-win situation.
I would like to expand a bit on the reading for charity contest idea. I think there are a world of ways to further the efforts and provide the joint benefit for some organizations out there, and assist me in my publication and book marketing endeavors. As a model however it has been incredibly successful, I think there are a lot of incredibly creative ways to market a book on a low budget like I originally had and turn it into a success. Once again I will state that giving something always brings in something, and in my case, it brought in an incredible book career.
About The Author
Zachary Weiner is 23 and has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers. He is the author of the recent novel "City at Night" and the upcoming novels "A Simple fate of twists" Ballantine Books "The Experts Speak" Harper Collins.
The Way of Light – Writing
The Way of Light
Remko de Knikker - Caprio
The Netherlands is a country known for its religious, ideological and ethnical tolerance. But what is perhaps less known is that it is also a country religiously divided into a northern part dominated by a culture of Calvinism and a southern part, which is predominantly Catholic. Today, when people speak of below the rivers they refer to the Catholic provinces and when they talk about above the rivers they are pointing to the Calvinist provinces north of the geographical border of the rivers Maas, Waal and Rhine, which roughly run parallel to this historical and cultural border.
When the Netherlands declared independence from Spain in 1579 by the Union of Utrecht and were recognized by the peace agreement with Spain by the signing of the Treaty of Munster in 1648, the Low Lands as the Netherlands is literally translated, did not include the southern provinces. Only with the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 were these provinces included, and not until 1831 when Belgium gained independence were the borders constituted that comprise the Netherlands as we know it. Culturally though, the southern provinces and especially the province of Limburg the hind leg of the Dutch lion where I grew up belonged to the Catholic sphere of influence. Even in present day the Netherlands, it makes a huge difference in attitude and perspective on life if you are from above or from below the rivers.
As a child I slept in the attic room of our home, which had 5 windows that looked like embrasures cut out in the rooftop. In the small distance that separated the small town of Papenhoven from adjoining Obbicht to the south, I could see the church belfry in the center of town rising high above its surrounding, the short line of farms and single family houses of red brick stone and tilted tile roofs. Looking out of a loophole in my little fortress in the attic, to the west I looked over fields of golden grain stalks billowing like ocean waves to a slight breeze. From my window I could clearly see the river Maas cutting through the landscape meandering along, and at the other bank of the river, Belgium. I lived on the narrowest stroke of land in the Netherlands, where Belgium and Germany squeeze the hind leg of the Dutch lion. On the other side of our house was the Juliana canal and only 2 or 3 miles further to the east lay Germany, the old heartland of Charlemagne, buried in the nearby famous Dom of Aachen. Like in Belgium, most people in Limburg are Catholic, so are the schools, the soccer clubs and of course the fanfare, the drill band to be found in each small town in Limburg. The Episcopal College, my secondary school, was located in Sittard, a border town with Germany and 5 miles from my home. Diligently for almost 6 years, I bicycled every morning through the alternating corn and grain fields, meadows and small villages on my way to school.
I never liked school very much, not even my Catholic primary school, the Saint Joseph school. At first of course, I didnt think much of it, like small children never do. The world to small children is simply what exists immediately around them. To the young childs mind, there is no other happiness than the one that surrounds them. At Catholic school we would say our prayers each morning before lessons started, and on Friday and Tuesday mornings the local priest would teach Bible classes. All this constituted my childhood happiness in which I participated wholeheartedly like all children did, even though my parents were from above the rivers, and even though now the faithfulness of Catholicism is a strange entity to me. As a young child I didnt give it much reflection, nor could I. With the wisdom of hindsight, it might look cruel that it was always Mohammed, the Moroccan kid whom the substitute teacher used to pick on, until one day the teacher, holding him firmly by his neck, pushing him out of the classroom, ended up busting his head through a glass panel in the door. Yet, I didnt think much of it. Now, of course I recognize the scholastic methods of Jesuitism, and the dominance of structured discipline in Catholicism at my school over the Protestants care for nurturing each childs inner nature and the diversity of individual personalities. I didnt think much of it, even though my most profound school memory has always been boredom and aloofness from the Catholic methods of education.
My parents of course did not grow up in Limburg, but they moved there when I was barely a few weeks old. They raised me in the progressive spirit of northern reformers like Comenius, Rousseau and Froebel, allowing me as a young child to explore my own needs, drives, feelings and thoughts and form my own personality freely and spontaneously. The only limitations I faced were the limitations of common reason, which were without exception explained to me rationally after which it was left to me to decide on my actions AND bear the consequences that resulted from them. This of course was the worst preparation for attending a Catholic school one can imagine, with its more rigorous perception of social hierarchy and educational method. Yet, alternatives to attend other schools are scarce in Limburg unless you are able and willing to travel more than an hour daily to reach one of the few Montessori schools in the south. Thus, my parents being pragmatic and practical people, I completed Saint Josephs elementary school and entered a Catholic secondary school called the Episcopal College, a name reminiscent of its past when it was an integrated part of the monastery still located in the adjacent building. A few monks even taught some classes there until as late as the early 80s. I will not draw out all the petty arguments, my naively offending inquiries into the reasons for certain rules and disciplinary measurements that followed, and the tensions between me and the school master and head teachers that arose. Enough to draw out a particular scene, which engrained itself in my precious and unraveling awareness as a budding teenager. It was this experience, which was to become my sobering way of light while finding my way through the dreary labyrinth of the world.
Once, we were given back our graded Latin exam to review. We could take them home with us, but had to hand them in the very next day. Of course, it came to be that I forgot to pack my papers and I apologized, pledging I would bring back the exam the next day. But it caused my teacher great anger and he punished me by ordering me to hand copy the schools regulations and hand them in with the exam the next day. Unfortunately too, I was the only student who had forgotten his exam and I suspected a personal vendetta in his harsh and unreasonable punishment. Now I understand his reaction was a typical scholastic pedagogical method that must be common in the Catholic training of a teacher, but I also resented his incompetence as a pedagogue who failed to acknowledge the reasonable nature of the child I was.
At first I didnt, no couldnt, take his response serious and in a calm manner of disbelief I politely replied: I am sorry, I will return my exam tomorrow. I couldnt and still dont see the loss of returning the exam one day later, but it seemed to make a huge difference for my teacher, who insisted.
The next day I came to school and handed in my exam without the composition, which as a result accumulated to a doubling of the writing imposition for each extra day I was late. In the following lessons again it was doubled until finally I was excluded from Latin classes overall and was called into the principals office to explain my behavior.
The school principal, Bitsch, had the posture of a saturated pig, adorned with a friendly neighbors smile, in which I hoped to find the insight of reason. Maybe I should have abandoned all hope the moment I entered his office and heard him recite a quote from the Bible. Of course I forgot the quote, as I also did not know the answer to his question of where in the Bible the quote was located. He provided the answer for me, although I could not know if he was sincere in answering, more than I had been. His compromise was for me to copy the school regulations ten times by hand, encouraging me to be the wiser of the two and just swallow my pride. This halfhearted attempt to reason made an even weaker impression upon me than the complete lack of it in my authoritative Latin teacher Hanssen. The punishment was ridiculous from the start and I could not submit myself to ridicule. The main conclusion I drew from this was that my enthusiasm for formal education definitively cracked and it was not long after this that I would drop out of the Episcopal curriculum.
Despite dropping out of school, I never lost my enthusiasm for learning. However, I never lost my skepticism for formal education and have become an autodidact by heart. I consider learning a life-long obligation without end in the line of Comenius thought. I think back of my days at school now with a certain bitterness for the professional pedagogues who could not recognize a childs nature and instead of stimulating it to find its own path, they attempted to curb and bend it to serve their own purpose. Nevertheless, I am a warmhearted supporter of education for all and the principles promoted more than 400 years earlier by the Czech educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius. Comenius was born in 1592 and brought up in Bohemia in the present day Czech Republic; and like I did, Comenius suffered from incompetent teachers as a child. But despite their incompetence, he grew to love learning and proper education as the pillar of societal reform and human progress.
In a time of fierce religious conflicts, Comenius was the head of the Union of Brethren, the first Reformed Church in Europe, which followed the principles of the Czech reformer Jan Hus 1369-1415 and was brutally suppressed by the Jesuit King Ferdinand of Habsburg. Despite the incredible hardship he would suffer in life, from an early loss of parents, wife and children, home and experiencing the Habsburgian contra-Reformist suppression and the cruelties of the 30-Years War between the Catholic League and the Protestant German princes, Comenius was able to find his way out of the Labyrinth of the World and regain the Paradise of the Heart. His book of that title would become a classic in European literature, while Comenius himself grew to become one of the most celebrated educational reformers in history. He advocated reforming the old medieval scholastic method and introducing a more child-friendly method of education, which in our time has become so evident.
Being a refugee most of his life, Comenius was finally settled in tolerant Amsterdam in 1556 until he died in 1570. He now lies buried in the Wallonian Church in Naarden, the Netherlands, a place of pilgrimage for many Czechs, to whom Comenius is one of their biggest national heroes. Still his name is associated with the Comenius Education program of the European Union and the Comenius Medal, one of UNESCO