by Lee Silber

a Review by the editors of Pussycat Magazine.com

You’ve taken the leap. You’ve decided to go for it — you’ve started your very own business. You’ve morphed your talents and ambitions into a company, built a Web site and you’re waiting for the work to come pouring in. But it isn’t that easy. In the business world, it seems that starting your business is the easy part. The hard part is letting people know you are out there, and why they need to do business with you rather than someone else. It is a sad fact, but you could be the best at what you do, but that alone will not make you successful.

You need to know how to promote yourself. Yes, those who know how to shamelessly promote themselves are the ones that succeed, and they aren’t necessarily the most talented guys.

In my town, there is a primo example. A guy I know —we’ll call him Jim — started a publishing company. With one not-so-stellar book on the shelf, he magically made it to the bestseller list, was featured in just about every local magazine, had articles published in the newspaper and was a guest on NPR. He certainly isn’t the most talented guy; most people can write circles around him yet wallow in obscurity. His secret? He knows how to market himself. He is the squeaky wheel who always gets greased.

If you want that kind of attention and don’t know how to get it, Lee Silber’s book "Self Promotion for the Creative Person"is a pretty good place to start. It’s a virtual bible for creative folks who may be heavy on talent, but pretty clueless when it comes to marketing. Silber presents hundreds of doable ways to get the word out about your company and get the work coming in.

Silber is very good at walking you through everything that influences your ability to get work — even things you may not even think of as marketing. He’ll tell you what to put on your answering machine, the best kinds of business cards, how to motivate yourself to get off the couch and go toot your own horn and how to turn customers into raving fans. It’s a book that should be on all of our reference shelves, so we can skip through it when we don’t know what to do next.

The only turn off is Silber too-enthusiastic tone. But if you can put that aside, he does offer a lot of bits of advice and good, mostly inexpensive ideas for guerilla marketing campaigns. At least a couple of them are sure to appeal to you.

Personally, I have checked this book out of the library several times— at very different stages of my career — to mine for ideas that will help bump my professional life up to the next level. At every stage of the game, it’s helped. Every time I read it, I get something new and useful from it.