Joe Kraynak

Amazon’s Disreputable Marketing of The Tales of Beedle the Bard

Today, I searched Amazon.com Books for “bipolar disorder.” At the top of the list? J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard. That’s weird, I thought, maybe Beedle the Bard has bipolar disorder. Maybe I should order the book to find out.

On second thought, I doubted that Beedle the Bard had bipolar disorder. I decided to look up something else totally unrelated to fiction and J.K. Rowling. So I searched Amazon.com Books for “foreclosure.” Sure enough, at the top of the list again was J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Now, I know Amazon.com wants to sell books, and this is sure to be a big seller. I don’t mind having the title splashed in my face on the opening Amazon.com page or even in the margins of other pages I look at. I might even be able to tolerate a pop-up ad or two. However, when I search for books on specific topics, I expect Amazon.com to display only books that fit my topic description. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a search tool?

Aren’t We All a Little Psychotic?

Just the other morning, I was staring at a dead bug - a wicked looking red and black insect with wings and stingers and pincers. At least I thought it was dead. I moved my face closer and closer to get a better look at it. When I was only a few inches from it, it started buzzing, and I recoiled and yelled, “Holy….” which instantly woke my wife who was sleeping right next to me.

Yeah, it was all a dream, as starkly vivid as anything I could experience in reality, maybe even a little more real. Sure, it was merely an illusion, something my brain cooked up, but how could it seem so real and how could I accept it as being real? Isn’t that what psychosis is - seeing and hearing things that aren’t there? What was asleep in my brain that prevented me from questioning what I was seeing? What was working overtime in my brain to make me “see” such a nasty looking creature?

I’ll leave all those questions to brain and dream researchers to sort out, but the experience made me realize that we might all be a little psychotic. At least we know from our dreams that we have the capacity for psychosis. When we dream, we become delusional. We hallucinate. We see things that aren’t there and hear sounds in the midst of silence. We have no trouble accepting these dreams as normal parts of our lives.

Yet, when we encounter someone who’s experiencing psychosis, it completely baffles us. We can’t wrap our brain around the notion that while people are awake, they can see things that aren’t there and hear voices when nobody’s speaking. We can’t imagine ever experiencing such a thing even though we experience it every night when we fall asleep.

New Bipolar Blog on Psych Central - Bipolar Beat

Anyone who knows me well is aware that my family has been living with bipolar disorder for nearly a decade. My wife, Cecie, was first diagnosed in 1999 and has had quite a journey trying to discover the right combination of doctor, therapist, and medications to stabilize her moods.

When I first heard the term “bipolar disorder,” I did what I normally do when I’m totally ignorant of something I need to know about - I headed to the bookstore, purchased every book I could find on the subject, and spent every spare moment reading them. I learned a great deal, but none of the books provided me with everything I needed to know about bipolar disorder and what I could do to help.

I thought I could write something better, so in 2005, I pitched the idea of doing Bipolar Disorder For Dummies to an acquisitions editor I knew at John Wiley & Sons, Mikal Belicove. He proceeded to search for and find a suitable co-author for me - someone infinitely more qualified than I was to hand out advice about bipolar - Dr. Candida Fink MD (FinkShrink.com). She had plenty of experiencing diagnosing and treating bipolar disorder in her patients and had already co-authored a book on bipolar disorder in children and teens called The Ups and Downs of Raising a Bipolar Child. She also grew up with bipolar disorder in her family and has a great sense of humor.

A couple years after Bipolar Disorder For Dummies arrived in bookstores, we decided to do our own blog to promote the book. On June 18, 2007, we launched our Bipolar Blog. Now, as anyone in the publishing biz knows, waiting two years to start promoting your book is kind of dumb, but we had a “better late than never” philosophy and figured that our new blog would help us deliver fresh information to the bipolar community and give us a head start should we ever have the opportunity to do a 2nd edition of the book (or some other project).

Recently, John M. Grohol, Psy.D., CEO & Publisher of PsychCentral.com, “discovered” our blog, liked it, and appreciated the way we handled the topic of bipolar disorder in Bipolar Disorder For Dummies. He was in the process of recruiting qualified professionals to blog on specific mental health related topics on his Web site and offered us the opportunity to create and host Psych Central’s bipolar blog. We accepted the offer and have chosen to call our new blog Bipolar Beat. Here, we will be posting articles and insights on topics of interest to those in the bipolar community – people with bipolar disorder and their loved ones, physicians, psychiatrists, therapists, and anyone else who’s interested in learning more about bipolar disorder.

While readers of Bipolar Disorder For Dummies and visitors to our blog are no doubt on their own bipolar journeys, Candida and I have had our own journey of discovery related to both bipolar disorder and blogging. We invite you to explore what we’ve discovered by visiting Bipolar Beat and Bipolar Blog and to share what you discovered with us and with the community we are working to build.

Current Project - Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies

Over the past several months, I’ve been working with Michael Soon Lee of EthnoConnect, a leading expert on the topic of selling to customers from diverse cultures, and sales guru Ralph R. Roberts to develop Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies®. We just wrapped up the writing phase of the project and are currently working through author review - when we have the opportunity to review changes and suggestions from editorial and answer their questions.

We’re developing the book primarily for salespeople who want to expand their business into any of various multicultural markets across the country and around the world. (According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth, the combined purchasing power of the multicultural market has grown from $1.39 trillion in 2000 to over $2 trillion in 2006 and is estimated to reach $3 trillion in 2011.) However, the book is useful for others, as well, including small-business owners, entrepreneurs, and any front-line sales or customer service staff. Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies® provides readers with practical tips and strategies showing them exactly what they need to do to appeal to clientele from different cultures:

• Assess your multicultural readiness (a self-test)
• Develop basic multicultural competency
• Hone your multicultural customer service skills
• Adjust your marketing campaign to make it more appealing to clients from other cultures
• Go beyond marketing to make your entire business multicultural friendly
• Redesign your store or office to make it appeal to a broader clientele
• Adapt your product line for multicultural sales
• Meet and greet prospective clients without turning them off
• Adapt your sales presentation and techniques
• Recognize multicultural buying signals
• Acquire closing techniques that are more effective with clients from other cultures
• Negotiate with clients who may have more experience and expertise with haggling than you do
• Build your referral base in the ethnic community
• Assemble and manage your own multicultural sales team
• Discover commonly held myths about your own culture and others that may be holding you back
• Uncover a host of multicultural resources that can help you transition your business for other markets

The book will be available in bookstores by November 17, 2008 – just in time to make the perfect Christmas present, or Kwanzaa present, or Hanukkah present, or ….