Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Selling LifeStories in a Recessionary Economy

Denis Ledoux runs workshops for aspiring memoir writers and would be personal historians. He calls his business the Soleil Life Story Network.

His newsletter yesterday had some interesting observations about selling life story products and services in a recessionary environment:

"Hard financial time..."

"Everyone's feeling the pinch..."

"Nobody's buying..."

These are generalizations that you and I are constantly being bombarded with. They are not universally true. While it is true some people are having hard times, some people are feeling the pinch, and some people are not buying, it is not true that this is universally so for your entire contact list. For example...

My friend Don said to me, "My stocks have lost half their value but that's my kids' inheritance. They'll rebound eventually. Meanwhile my retirement income and my wife's are allowing us to have a comfortable life."

My friend David offered, "My state pension is not about to go away, and I'm comfortable for the rest of my life no matter how old I live."
Let these statements remind you that your memoir business need not be on hold until the economy gets back on its feet. You can make your business grow right now--regardless of the doom and gloom you hear and read everywhere.

Below are a few ideas gleaned from the curriculum of my forthcoming Business Development Seminar Tele-Class beginning Thursday, February 19.

1. Review your list of clients and prospects (people who have not become clients but whom you assessed as genuinely interested) and evaluate their income levels.This may call for "best guesses" and that is fine. Use cues like a) "when we get back from our cruise" to add someone to the direct marketing list I am helping you devise and cues like b) "do you offer scholarship/reduced rate" to take them off this action list. (Later, you can offer scholarships to these individuals to fill in a lower than expected enrollment but don't invest prime energy in them at this stage.)
With the list you have just devised of interested and financially stable individuals, begin a direct marketing campaign. That is, you e-mail, call, or snail mail the individual to let him/her know of an upcoming program, a new product, or simply your schedule availability. This effort will produce new active clients. (Introverts will prefer e-mail and snail mail. These are fine first contacts in this campaign, but the best results come from the phone call!)
2) Once the old list is "milked," generate new contacts. In my estimation, the quickest, best source of new clients is the speaking engagement at libraries, clubs, conferences. Again these must target individuals whom you can reasonably expect to be interested in producing a memoir and who can afford your product.

For instance, a presentation on Five Things to Keep in Mind When Writing your Memoirs (the outline of which is part of the Soliel Lifestory Network Affiliate Package) at a library in a fairly wealthy community is likely to attract just the kind of person who will purchase your product. A number of attendees will realize that, while they might go it alone, they would do better to hire your services--as workshop leader, co-author, editor. Of course, you mention these services in your presentation and have promotional materials available to hand out.

To learn not only ideas about business development but to acquire the habit of thinking and acting like a successful business person and to do so in the context of other memoir professionals like yourself, I invite you to enroll in the upcoming business growth tele-class by clicking on the link below

Make 2009 the year you finally understand how to run a financially successful business.
15 Weeks to More Lucrative, More Enjoyable Business Practices

I think the PLC LifeStory is not just for the wealthy. In fact some of our biggest successes have come from people of moderate or "regular" means. I think Denis has a lot of good advice above, but I would encourage our LCs not to prejudge anyone based on their perceived economic status. People will find the money when they buy into the emotional significance of what we do.

Press Release Experiment

I am trying PR.com's press release service:

Priceless Legacy Company Announces Couples LifeStory Book in Time for Valentine's Day

Monday, January 26, 2009

Couple's Life Story Package



Just in time for Valentine's Day, Priceless Legacy is thrilled to announce its first customized format for a LifeStory Package. We call it the "Couple's Life Story" package and it allows two people (presumably a married couple) to present their Life Story package together. The longer format includes two hours of interviews with each member of the pair (for four hours total), up to 150 photos and an approximate page count of 150 pages or so.

The price for the package is $1899 and includes one copy of the book, an audio DVD, a DVD slide show and a protective and decorative box.

It is inspiring just how many couples have indicated that they desired to be remembered forever just has they had lived their lives: together.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Transcriptionist/Editors

One of the unsung heroes of the Priceless Legacy process is our able force of freelance Transcriptionist/Editors. These "TEs," as we call them, are transcription and writing experts who live all over North America. We communicate with them via email and they do an outstanding job converting audio interviews from the field to the "narrative transcriptions" that are the base of the LifeStory text.

Most of these TEs work in relative anonymity and as such we honestly don't think much about how the privilege and impact of preserving LifeStories affects them too.

One wrote this as she submitted a finished job last night:

If you can, please pass on to the (Legacy Consultant) - and hopefully to (the Subject) - that this story touched me very deeply as I transcribed it. It made me cry, it made me laugh, and it made me reflect on my own life. Much of her life I saw in mine. I loved the way she spoke and the way she expressed her life philosophies - truly inspiring stuff. If you could maybe pass that on to her from the girl who transcribed her story, it would be great.

I love how life story capture impacts everyone in such a positive way.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Two More LifeStories Came in Today

Two more LifeStories came back from the printer today. They look great!

Monday, January 19, 2009

PLC Core Values

There are 10 core values at the Priceless Legacy Company:

1. Every life story is precious and deserving of preservation.

2. The preservation of one’s life story is not a vanity but an obligation to the future.

3. The only act of selfishness is to not preserve one’s story

4. Something is better than nothing: do not let perfectionism abet procrastination

5. Our Legacy Consultants have an extraordinary and special mission to preserve life stories; PLC will support their efforts at every turn.

6. Mistakes are OK. The failure to learn from them is not.

7. Time is of the essence. Priceless stories are lost when we do not attack aggressively in the marketplace.

8. Respect Client’s and Subject’s wishes for privacy and confidentiality.

9. Conduct yourself with fairness and integrity at all times.

10. If we “do the right thing” for our Clients, Legacy Consultants, staff and investors, good things – including financial gain – will ensue.

Friday, January 16, 2009

A Question of Love

Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies contains a brilliant piece of writing regarding what I call life story capture. It beautifully captures what we are all about at Priceless Legacy. Please read it very carefully .. . and often. I have bolded certain sections not the author.

Eventually, we would all die, and when our bodies were carried off and buried in the ground, only our friends and family would know we were gone. Our deaths wouldn’t be announced on radio or television. There wouldn’t be any obituaries in the New York Times. No books would be written about us. That is an honor reserved for the powerful and famous, for the exceptionally talented, but who bothers to publish biographies of the ordinary, the unsung, the workaday people we pass on the street and barely take the trouble to notice?

Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.

My idea was this: to form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared – and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of a life.

The biographies would be commissioned by friends and relatives of the subject, and the books would be printed in small private editions – anywhere from fifty to three or four hundred copies. I imagined writing the books myself, but if demand ever became too heavy, I could always hire others to help with the work: struggling poets and novelists, ex-journalists, unemployed academics, perhaps even Tom. The cost of writing and publishing such books would be steep, but I didn’t want my biographies to be an indulgence affordable only by the rich. For families of lesser means, I envisioned a new type of insurance policy whereby a certain negligible sum would be set aside each month or quarter to defray the expenses of the book. Not home insurance or life insurance – but biography insurance.

Was I crazy to dream that I could make something of this far-fetched project? I didn’t think so. What young woman wouldn’t want to read the definitive biography of her father – even if that father had been no more than a factory worker or the assistant manager of a rural bank? What mother wouldn’t want to read the life story of her policeman son who was shot in the line of duty at age thirty-four? In every case, it would have to be a question of love. A wife or a husband, a son or a daughter, a parent, a brother or a sister – only the strongest attachments. They would come to me six months or a year after the subject had died. They would have absorbed the death by then, but they still wouldn’t be over it. They would want to bring their loved one back to life, and I would do everything humanly possible to grant their wish. I would resurrect that person in words, and once the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold for the rest of their lives. Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all.

One should never underestimate the power of books.




Thursday, January 15, 2009

Why is LifeStory Preservation Important?

Life stories are critical to our understanding of who we are. As humans, we all have a basic psychological curiosity about where we are from, what shaped our beliefs and values, and how our life fits into society. Much as an adopted child will search for a biological parent or families trace their genealogy back generations, we all have a need to know and understand our roots.

Each minute, five Americans pass away. In most cases, their stories die with them since no attempt was made to capture and preserve those life stories. Therefore, there is urgency to our mission and we need to act quickly!

At Priceless Legacy, we believe that every life has dignity and that every life story should be preserved. It is important to the existing family and current generation, but even more important to future generations. Picture the excitement of a child reading about his or her great, great grandmother and what her life was like, the times in which she lived, the daily challenges, and the tragedies and the triumphs. Life stories help us answer questions about our past, avoid repeating mistakes, and address the challenges of the future.

Today, we have a unique opportunity and, we believe, an obligation to future generations. Advancements in digital recording, digital printing, information technology, and Internet communications have emerged that allow us the ability to provide LifeStory preservation at a reasonable price for all.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Most Lives Vanish

A friend referred me to a 2006 novel by Paul Auster called Brooklyn Follies. Towards the end of the book there are a few pages that capture with wonderful precision the need for our company. I will excerpt a few paragraphs over the next few days.

Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.

Monday, January 12, 2009

A Higher Authority

3 what we have heard and known,
what our fathers have told us.

4 We will not hide them from their children;
we will tell the next generation


Psalm 78 says it pretty well . . . Like Hebrew National Hot Dogs, we at Priceless Legacy clearly answer to a higher authority!

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Harlen Ellison

A post by Bob Milner on the ListServ of the Association of Personal Historians drew my attention to a quotation attributed to the science fiction writer Harlen Ellison. It is very fitting to what we do:

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Another Legacy Consultant's Experience

Another of our Legacy Consultants speaks of her experience and how it has impacted her personally.


Thursday, January 8, 2009

The Priceless Legacy Client Experience

The granddaughter of one of our first subjects speaks about her experience as a client of the Priceless Legacy Company.


Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Legacy Consultant Experience

In this unedited video, Priceless Legacy Consultant Danielle Heles talks about why she became a Legacy Consultant and what the experience means to her.

Danielle is a married mother of two and has two LifeStories to her credit since signing on as an LC in late October, 2008. She is typical of our successful Legacy Consultants. She loves people, stories and helping people preserve their legacies.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Compensating Legacy Consultants

This week we will unveil the official compensation plan for the Priceless Legacy Company.

Like all compensation plans, the Company seeks to influence LC behavior through this plan. Since I prefer to be up front about motives, please understand that we as a company are hoping to encourage two types of activity; both with an eye to capturing and preserving ever more LifeStories and furthering our noble mission.

Selling and servicing LifeStories and attracting and sponsoring other Legacy Consultants are our primary goals. LCs who achieve these goals on a consistent basis will be amply rewarded and celebrated.