Once upon a time in another life, I had a real job. Not that I don’t work now, but it’s pretty hard to convince people I have a real job when most days I sport PJ’s until I hear the dogs barking at the side door, alerting me to my husband Eric’s arrival home from his real job and leaving me mere seconds to transform from my happy-but-haggish self to almost-put-together office-at-homer. In that old life, I was the Vice President of Human Resources and Legal for a refining company in the Caribbean. I wore Ellen Tracy suits, Puerto Rico-high heels, and (sometimes) makeup. I dispensed justice from my large office. People said, “Yes, ma’am,” to me, and gave me stock options.
Unfortunately, I hated it. I liked some of the people I worked with a lot, though. In fact, one of them I liked so much that I quit my job and married him (yes, Eric). But, even though I am so much happier in my new life, I experienced some amazing things in that old job.
One of those amazing things? Media training. That’s right. Media, as in TV, radio, and print. We brought in from New York to our little island the awesome T.J. Walker of Media Training Worldwide to work with those of us who had communications responsibilities. I was a member of what we called the Incident Command Staff, and I filled its Communications Officer role. That meant that in the event of a crisis, my ass might end up in front of a camera taping me talking to a slick reporter. Yikes. Luckily I never had the misfortune to need the skill in an emergency, but I put it to good use in day to day public relations on behalf of the company.
It certainly comes in handy now when I’m appearing publicly or giving interviews for the books I’ve written. I did a radio show (blog coming soon) and gave four print interviews recently, for instance. By the way, as you can imagine, print is way easier than live radio or TV.
T.J. put us through a grueling full day workshop where we crafted our message points for pretend disasters and delivered them in video’ed statements. He taped us as he grilled us with questions, and he critiqued our responses. How cool is it that I was paid to receive that kind of instruction? It really was invaluable to me. T.J. also worked with us on delivering presentations, and to this day my husband invokes T.J.’s name when he prepares to give a speech.
T.J. and I became friends. I took him on my infamous Annaly-to-tidal-pools hike. He toured the fabulous Estate Annalise, who is about to star in three of of my novels due for publication in late 2012 and thereafter. See, T.J.? You’ve had your brush with greatness (Annaly’s, not mine).
When I published The Clark Kent Chronicles, T.J. asked to read it. I was honored, as T.J. has written and published many books of his own, several of them bestsellers. You can check them out by Clicking Here. He also gives away an amazing amount of valuable information on public speaking and media, on his website. You can access them by Clicking Here. *highly recommended by me * I hung on every scrap of advice he dispensed on publication and marketing, too.
So after T.J. read Clark Kent, what do you think he did?
Just went and taped the world’s most awesome video review, that’s all. Seriously, it rocks. And I wanted to share it with all of you. Because I’m generous like that. And because you can ask people to review your books through their webcam and post it to Amazon. Yeah, it won’t like quite as incredible as T.J.’s, because he is a professional with a professional studio. But it will still be pretty darn cool. Great stuff for an indie author, and easy to do.
With no further ado, here’s T.J., and I’m outta here.
