Hello Authors!
I have just become one of you. During this quarantine I’m typesetting two books I had just finished writing ar the end of December of last year.
One of these books is intended to help employees transition to self-employment, something many people may find helpful for the future.
For those of you who have a business connected with your book, or who know that it isn’t just enough to put a self-published book on Amazon to sell your book, I’m shortly going to start posting helpful books, articles, etc about selling.
In the past couple of years self-publishing has risen forty percent. This means that there is a lot of competition in the book market. I recommend using social media and/or a web site to help sell your books during this period of so many library closures.
So, today I want to start a revamp of my Authormaps site. I’m posting the best sales pitch that I’ve ever received by email for a tech company’s product.
I’m a retired Certified Novel Engineer, so the topic of this advertisement, Volume Structures, was familiar to me. But I was curious to see how they were promoting their product, Techtools for Macs users. Here’s Micromat, Inc.’s ad:
What are Volume Structures?
Now that most of us have GPS enabled devices in our pockets, it is (mostly) straightforward to find our way when we’re out on the road. When it comes to your hard drive, macOS needs its own GPS to find where your files are located when you need them. This GPS, or map, is how you can think of your drive’s volume structures. When the map is damaged, your system loses its way and may be unable to navigate to your important files.
For most Mac drives, volume structures come in one of two “flavors,” Mac OS Extended or APFS. If you are using macOS High Sierra [operating system] or later, your startup drive uses the newer APFS. While APFS adds new features to better support the solid state drives used in almost all modern Macs, Mac OS Extended can still be found on many external storage drives.
Whereas mechanical failures such as bad blocks or SMART errors most often require that a drive be replaced, volume structures problems can often be repaired. In essence, a volume structures repair is akin to drawing in the missing pieces in the map, provided there is enough data to determine what is missing. The Volume Structures test in Techtool Pro can determine if there are holes in the map, while the Volume Rebuild tool is for repairing the map. A note here that repairing your startup disk requires starting up from an alternate disk. Here is more information on using either an eDrive or Protogo device to perform volume structures repairs.
Pro Tip: We can’t say it enough – make sure your back up is always up to date. See our previous pro tip for backup tips.
Notice that the first paragraph explains clearly, by analogy, how their product works for users.
The second paragraph, (1) names MAC users as the buyers they are seeking, and (2) adds to showing their expertise by giving buyers a short and sweet distinction between two types of hard drives in Mac computers.
And the third paragraph (1) adds even more details about Mac volume drives and what their product, Techtool Pro 12 can do for buyers, and (2) gives links to further information about two devices needed for fixing volume structures on Macs.
Moverover, as a sweetener, they add a short Pro Tip link to an article about backups.
This is the best customer-oriented sales pitch I’ve seen in a long time! You may want to use it as a starting point for creating a marketing plan for your book.
I hope you’ll come back soon – look for my next post, Book Review – The Introvert’s Edge by Matthew Pollard with Derek Lewis later this week.