Reading List
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
Reading books is one of the most important things that I can do to invest in myself and in my success. Reading allows you to gain different perspectives, learn new things and enrich yourself; even un-learn bad habits or blocks. I also recommend having down time with fiction. The best way to generate new or fresh ideas, or solve a challenging problem, is to turn off your operating mind, and activating your INTUITION. Here are some of my favourite non-fiction books to support your success journey.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
The tagline "The only book you need to lead you to success" could indeed be true. When you have the skills to manage people, it will naturally help so many other elements fall into place. In the day and age of 140 character and text messages, client management is suffering. New business owners are not learning the fine art and etiquette of communication, negotiation and conflict resolution. If you only read one book off this list, it should be this one. Warning: there are long stories in this book, so if you're short on time or attention span, google the title and find a summary version.
influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
This book opens with a great story that will open the eyes of many small business owners , especially those with fears over pricing. It really demonstrates how certain innate principles drive us, and how impressionable we really can be. A terrific read for anyone who wants to know more about how our minds work, and give ideas for implementing practices that make our products and services irresistible to our clients.
The small BIG: small changes that spark big influence
I love this book! I found it accidentally while perusing books in the library and it was a game changer! Having studied Psychology at school, this book really hit home about how subtle elements like wording and placement can have huge impacts. After returning it to the library, I immediately went out and bought it for my forever collection.
A bit 'ranty' to start, very blunt and direct, and yet I found myself pretty riveted, because of the truth to it all. We lead our lives within societal constructs, yet we have dreams outside of those constructs. Think 9-5 grind for little money, but big wanderlust dreams. This book gives you an entrepreneurial kick in the pants, and helps to show you that it's just as risky to take your own destiny into your hands, as it is waiting for someone to take care of you in your life and retirement. Not everyone will become an entrepreneur because they are happy or complacent or a bit of both, in their current lives. But as photographers, we usually want the dream - income to sustain us while doing something out of choice, and passion. Less on the marketing side, this book attempts to wake us up and walk our own path.
Especially for photographers just starting out, this is an essential guide to understanding your camera settings, so that you can always be improving your photography. After all, if you don't have adequate photography skills, then all the marketing in the world won't help you. Now, it's not to say that you have to best photographer - far from it - that's a personal growth decision. But you have to have the capability to produce work that is well-taken, in order for people to want to give you dollars in exchange. Brushing up on the basics is never a bad thing. And don't forget, improvement in photography means commanding more money for service.
I have this book in my collection and flip through it about once every six months as a refresher. What this book does is remind me that I seek emotion, moments, interesting things and amazing light, rather than chasing technical perfection. It helped me understand my style, and thus that translated into whom I wanted to serve, and how I want to serve them. Our photography style matters to our vision, our brand and informs how we approach marketing.
This is an important book. Using real-life companies to illustrate each principle, you can clearly see how these universal concepts work, or fail if transgressed. As photographers, you may feel that these ideas only apply to big corporations. Indeed some of them relate to things like grabbing market share or having huge budgets to try to diversify product lines, but the underlying principles are valuable even if not directly applicable. There is much to be learned here that can be scaled even to a tiny business. Considering that many photographers don't know or understand marketing, reading this book and being able to implement even one or a few things, can be a competitive edge in and of itself!
Another gem by the authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, but this time with a focus on branding. Again, they describe basic and universal principles governing business success, or else risking failure. And once again they relate this to big businesses, but with valuable lessons for even the smallest of us. For example, diluting a brand can have very negative consequences, even though we may be tempted to do so. Often what we feel we ought to do, may be counter-intuitive to what actually works. It's a great gut-check and helps us ground our decisions from a better, more rational place.
The Long Tail is important because it illustrates a shift in the economy and our buying habits. It used to be all about the big sell - blockbuster movies, books on the the New York Times Bestseller lis. On a graph, this would be represented by a big boom in sales, with a drop-off, then another boom. Nowadays, things like the indie movie scene, and recommendations on Amazon of similar books to the one you may be searching, have changed things. We find niches that we become loyal to, and though small, they continue to have sales from a dedicated tribe. So the graph, instead of just dropping to zero (until the next big things), keeps going with a small amount of sales but indefinitely - hence the tail. This is super-positive news for all of us who play the game in the tail. Find your tribe, have them be your advocates. You may not be Chase Jarvis, Sue Bryce or Jasmine Star, but you can cultivate a loyal following who can sustain you and your business quite successfully.
This book is indispensable for any photographer, and especially those who are struggling to find their footing and stand out. With a very common sense tone, Jeff lays it all out - why you have to find your edge (and even that isn't enough - it's the edge of your edge!) in today's market, how to do it, and profiles of successful photographers who followed his advice and how they incorporated it into their businesses. It's a very easy read that will have you nodding your head thinking "why haven't I done this before?" I made some significant changes after reading this book and it helped me get to a deeper level of my own photography and who I wanted to work with. And when you hit on your 'right recipe', marketing yourself becomes so much easier! Highly recommended not only by me, and by many others on Amazon. And it's selling for less than $4 on Kindle - go get yours, NOW!