Jeannie and I had a talk this evening. She seemed a bit sad because, while Amazon kept running low on BRAVE, her book, Jeannie’s BRAVE Childhood, never had. I didn’t know exactly how to explain this to her, but it seemed she wanted to talk.
“Why do you think this is?” she asked. "Why do you think my book isn't selling as well?"
“Well, Jeannie, I think there are a lot of reasons. BRAVE was only out one year and lots of people hadn’t read it yet and felt like they should read it first. BRAVE has been selling! They will catch up.”
“Maybe,” she said. “That kind of makes sense, but they could read my book without reading BRAVE. My book was the one I wrote to help them understand children who had bad things happen to them. They need to know that.”
“You are so right,” I said. “It is a book for everyone who works with children, but especially teachers. I understand so much more than when I was training future teachers. I wanted to tell them what I didn’t understand—and maybe some things I did understand but had never written about. You helped me do that.”
I could tell Jeannie was thinking hard about this.
“Maybe, we didn’t market it very well,” she said.
I almost laughed at the thought of a child thinking about marketing, but then I probably would have done the same thing as I child. I was quite precocious. She had a point.
“We had lots of ideas didn’t we Jeannie? But then our life kind of blew to pieces and we didn’t get to do most of them. Some of them sounded like such fun.”
“I know,” she said. “I was sad that we didn’t do the Alice’s Tea Party Book Signing. Maybe we can do that one day.”
“I do think we should try,” I answered.
“But, what do we do now?” Jeannie asked.
“Well, I was thinking about the fact that there is so much more in your book than people think is there—especially about teaching! It is really like BRAVE for Teachers.”
“I loved my teachers,” Jeannie said. “Or at least I loved most of them. Some of them didn’t like me, I don’t think. I really couldn’t ever sit still and there were lots of things I couldn’t seem to learn. I am so glad you found out it wasn’t my fault. I always tried very, very hard.”
“Yes, you did try very hard Jeannie. You always tried very hard. No one except Daddy ever understood how smart you were.”
Jeannie looked sad and said, “I miss him, but he would tell us that we could figure this out and get more readers for my book. And more reviews. He would tell us to be brave and keep working at it.”
“Yep! That is exactly what he would tell us. What if we take some of the sections for teachers and post them so they understand we meant this book for them?”
Jeannie’s eyes lit up and she grabbed her book to begin looking. We had a plan. We always could come up with a plan.
“Tell the teachers to start watching for posts,” Jeannie said. “They will understand and buy my book! I am sure they will and it will help them understand children like me.”
“Yes, I agree. I am sure they will buy your book. We want to understand children don't we?”
Jeannie agreed and then grinned mischievously. “I want our publisher to have to send more books to Amazon. Our teacher friends will help us, won’t they?”
“Yes, I am sure they will," I laughed. "They are super busy starting school right now and have spent a lot of money on their classrooms, but we will remind them! Maybe their friends will buy a copy for them. We can think of all sorts of ideas, can't we?”
Jeannie nodded yes, and settled in next to me to begin a new marketing campaign.
BRAVE for Teachers.
She felt so much better now that she had a plan.