A few years ago, my car got a flat tire on my way to work. I had just left the house, so I drove to the auto garage in my town. The owner of the garage quickly summoned someone to look at the tire. He discovered a nail, pulled it out and patched it up. When checking out at the cashier a few minutes later, the owner simply said, “Hey, no charge today, when you need work done on your car, just come back and see us. Thanks!”. I was floored and amazed.
What did that auto shop do as a business that day? They fixed a lot of cars. But the most important thing they did was that at 9:18 a.m. they earned a customer for life. That garage does not advertise on TV, they don’t mail out coupons and they don’t have a loyalty rewards program. They earn customers for life one by one, face to face, every day. They traded $25 in sales that day for decades of business in the future. And I have never gone anywhere else for car service since.
Years later I went to a local donut shop on a Sunday morning. I had found an old coupon in a drawer that I wanted to use. I knew it had expired but thought I would give it a try. I ordered the donuts and presented the coupon to the owner. He said it had expired two years ago and could not accept it. We went back and forth without any change in his stance. I looked around. I was the only one in the shop. 7.2 billion people on Earth had chosen not to be in his store that day. He only had one potential customer in his store. Frustrated, I finally gave up the fight and left empty-handed. And I have never been back since.
Yeah, I guess I can hold a grudge, but it was not about the money. And no coupon, advertisement or incentive could get me back into his store. The owner lost a long-term customer that day while worrying about a couple of bucks. Maria at the donut shop a half mile away was very happy to see me that morning, and I came home with her donuts instead.
I once attended a wedding weekend for a family friend in Gilbertsville, New York. It is somewhere near Cooperstown, and no, I had never heard of it either. I think the residents like it that way. It is a tiny and quaint centuries-old village with a charming main street and people that all know each other’s names. My wife and I walked around town one morning and we poked our head into a few stores. On our way back we noticed an old barn that looked interesting, down a long side street, tucked into the woods. We made our way to the barn, which had an old “Antiques” sign out front. When we entered, we were greeted warmly by the elderly shop owner. She gave us coffee, introduced us to the locals who had come to gossip with her that morning, and showed us around the store.
She brought us up to the second floor of the barn, where Civil War soldiers had once stayed, and some of them had signed the wall with paint. “John Mason, 1863” read one inscription. We learned about her and her family and she got to know the story of ours. We left the shop after an entertaining hour, with a bag of wares that we probably did not need, but that the owner made it very easy and comfortable to buy. If your store sells antiques and is down a wooded side road in the middle of nowhere, then you need to go above and beyond to earn your customer. Even if that customer might never come back to the area again.
If you write a book and publish it, then you are an author. But you are also now an antique dealer. Your product was invented in 1439, when Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press and brought books to the masses for the first time. Beyond being digital now, books have changed very little in the last six hundred years. They are still words on a page. An author owns his own antique store, in the form of an Amazon book page. And that store is also down a very long wooded road in the middle of nowhere. There are millions of books for sale on Amazon, so your lonely antique store can be very difficult to find, even for folks interested in your subject. So, if by some miracle someone does find your store, the author should treat them right, give them a robust sample, and then make the decision to buy the product very easy.
That is why I chose $5.99 as an eBook price. When folks come to my antique store, I cannot buy them coffee, ask about their kids or show them around. But I can make the decision to leave with a book an easy one. “Hmmm, that’s the price of a good cup of coffee, and I will learn something. Sounds good”, should be a customer’s thought while in my antique store. Do I think my book is worth more? I am biased, but yes, I do. But the words on a page mean nothing if they do not end up in a reader’s hands. The lessons taught in the book are worth nothing if they do not enter the mind of a reader.
If the goal of writing a book is to educate people, entertain them and help them grow, then the author should make it very easy for potential customers to follow that path. There may not be anyone else in my antique store today, so I will not send a customer away empty-handed. That customer may be the only person that comes into the store that day to look around. Other author antique stores may charge more for their product, but a customer will not get more for his money than at my store. And hopefully a great visit and reading experience may create a customer for life.
