Next book

EMAIL MARKETING THAT DOESN'T SUCK

HAVE FUN WRITING EMAILS YOUR SUBSCRIBERS WILL WANT TO READ (AND THAT WILL ACTUALLY MAKE YOU MONEY!)

A book of lively and relatable marketing advice.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

A plan to transform newsletter emails from annoying to alluring.

For his nonfiction debut, lawyer and entrepreneur Klinck sets himself a seemingly impossible task: to change marketing and business-related mass emails from an unpleasant part of a person’s workday to something that will actually generate results—and maybe even prompt a smile. The author, an entrepreneur and Harvard Law School graduate, wants to remodel his readers’ email marketing habits in order to teach them “how to find and cultivate raving fans, the kind of fans who will buy anything you have to sell.” The key understanding, according to Klinck, is that email marketing is just like any other kind of marketing, which explains the author’s decision to spend time on explaining the basics of that field before applying those basics to a new medium. One problem with the conventional wisdom surrounding email marketing, the author claims, is that the people offering it don’t understand the difference between marketing and selling. He describes marketing as “offering the right product to the right person at the right time, with the right message.” Selling isn’t about the customer’s needs, he asserts, whereas marketing is “relentlessly interested in the needs of the buyer.” After clarifying this key difference, Klinck dispenses practical tips; for instance, although he grants that an email marketer’s goal is to generate responses, he advises that one shouldn’t track reply statistics, so as to avoid becoming obsessed with such numbers. In short chapters, enlivened by occasional black-and-white personal photos to make specific points, he presents many insights into the new world of marketing.

The author’s main point is that email marketing practices can only be effectively improved by infusing routine business emails with genuine personality, even if it means expressing opinions that part of your audience may not share. Klinck presents positive feedback for his approach that he’s received from others, but the best possible illustrations of his main point are the readability and approachability of this book. The author is a funny, vigorous writer, always ready with a cultural reference (with the movie The Princess Bride an apparent favorite), a joke, or a self-deprecating aside drawn from his own past. His core message is one of clear communication, and several of his sharpest points involve finding a personal voice for all kinds of marketing emails. “If you talk like Hemingway, write like Hemingway,” he writes. “If you talk like James Joyce…there’s something wrong with you. Knock it off.” (“Don’t write like the Queen of England,” he adds. “Unless you are the Queen of England.”) His advice on this score is often invaluable, as when he invites readers to record some of their own conversation, transcribe it, and look at “the cadence of how you actually talk when you’re talking to a friend. Try to adopt that in your writing.” Readers involved in any kind of marketing will also appreciate Klinck’s breezy optimism and insistence on viewing email recipients as real human beings: “They’re your friends, the people you serve.”

A book of lively and relatable marketing advice.

Pub Date: April 19, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5445-2737-6

Page Count: 266

Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 59


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 59


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 48


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

WHO KNEW

MY STORY

Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 48


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.

Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.

Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.

Pub Date: May 20, 2025

ISBN: 9780593317877

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025

Close Quickview