The other day, I was at a large payments conference in Phoenix Arizona. This conference was put on by NACHA and is attended by the executive management of all of the countries regional payments associations. I had recently delivered a keynote address for WACHA, one of the regional associations, based in Wisconsin, and I had already heard positive comments about my talk there. So since I had a supply of books with me, I was seeking out the CEOs of each of the associations to give them a signed copy of Grounded.
I was signing a book for the CEO of EastPay, when a woman approached me and said, “I am reading your book right now, it is amazing”! I’ll admit, I was initially surprised, after all, the book has just been released and the 300 attendees at the WACHA conference are the only ones that would have received a book. She explained that she was with FIS, a large payments vendor who was exhibiting at the conference. I thanked her for her kind comments and asked if she was an attendee at the WACHA conference. She said, “No, but a co-worker was and after she read the book, she gave it to me and said I needed to read it.”
After our chat ended, I got to thinking, that is the power of a physical book. Not the fact that she took the time to thank me or even the recognition that comes with being an author. No, the fact that the book was already read by one person, who then passed it on to another. That doesn’t really happen with an eBook, even if it is possible to do so.
Now maybe you sell less books, after all, the person speaking to me didn’t buy a copy of the book, she received it from her co-worker. But the message of the book will travel. Maybe she will think enough of the book to buy her own copy. Maybe she will order 5 books and distribute them to her team. I will likely never know. But the fact that the book resonated enough for it to BE passed on to a co-worker is in some way a validation of the content within.
Want to check out Grounded for yourself? You can get a copy of it here
www.davidpeterson.com/buygrounded.html
