Public Relations is the core of our business – services include:

• Strategic Planning & Consulting
• Customized Media Lists
• Press Kit Development
• Creative Story-Telling
• Media Relations including product launches and media tours
• Live Radio Remotes
• Press Interview Management
• Community Outreach
• Reputation Management
• Sponsorship
• Media Events
• Grand Openings
• Community & Charity Events
• Ghost-writing articles, op-ed/guest editorials and even books

Marketing
Businesses don’t market themselves, but we market you effectively, to maximize your exposure.

• Strategic Planning & Analysis
• Brand Positioning
• Media Planning & Buying
• Print, Broadcast, Direct Mail, Web
• Promotions
• Campaign Management
• E-blasts – we write them and match you to the best email services

Social Media
Social media makes the world go round … when you have a strategy that works for you.

• Consulting and strategizing
• Customized Online Personality & Voice
• Blog Creation & Maintenance
• Daily Management Implementation & Engagement
• Analysis

Books, Authors, Publishers and Self-Publishers

Having written ten books on healthcare marketing and related business topics, only to see my publishers drop the ball, promotion-wise, I began promoting my own books. I did this so successfully – selling out entire press runs on three consecutive times – that three of my publishers retained me and my team to promote their other books and authors. Since the mid-80s, my team and I have worked with individual authors, as well as directly with publishers, to promote both books and authors. We specialize in positioning authors to news media decision-makers, positioning them as experts who can help explain breaking news to the media’s audiences. (read more)

My initial experiences as a royalty-published author – ten instances where I sought out and negotiated book-publishing contracts with half-a-dozen publishers – led me and a partner to create a literary agency, which we maintained until my partner’s untimely death. This occurred after more than a decade of success in placing books and authors with publishers.

As it has done with so many other businesses, the Internet has changed the publishing world forever. With the advent of both self-publishing and the remarkable growth of Kindle, Nook and other eBooks, that literary agency experience proved decisive in helping self-publishing authors reach target audiences with compelling book-sales messages.

My team and I use our expertise in both traditional author promotion with digital self- publishing and digital promotion to guide clients to success with both eBooks and – increasingly – print-on-demand self-published books. On occasion, for the right client and the right book, we also dust off our literary agency credentials and represent those clients to traditional royalty publishers.

Creative Services

• Graphic Design & Production Oversight – we select the best creative services and guide them in meeting your needs
• Printing
• Collateral Materials
• Content Creation For Social Media Marketing
• Web Design & Optimization
• Branding

Ghost-Writing, Co-Writing, Editing and Writing Coaching

My first and fourth published books were both ghost-written, and that latter book earned the “named” author the Healthcare Marketer of the Year award presented by the American Marketing Association. Since then, I have ghost-written a dozen books on a diverse range of business and personal (to the author) topics. One of those books, a practice-marketing guide for plastic surgeons and aesthetic dermatologists, is now in its 5th printing. Clients have ranged from corporate clients and publishers to specialty surgeons, attorneys, trade associations and software developers. At any given time, we are ghost-writing books and blogs for clients, as well as helping new authors as writing coaches and editors – we even develop custom promotion strategies designed to help books not only achieve best-seller status, but to also serve as tools to grow the “named” author’s business, medical or legal practice. (read more)

Becoming a successful ghost-writer isn’t as easy as being able to write. A decade before publishing my first book, I became a speechwriter for two governors of South Carolina, focusing on economic development, and later served as a speechwriter for a college president and a number of political candidates, including a congressman running for re-election and a state lieutenant governor running for governor. In this role, I learned several important lessons I’ve applied to ghost-writing, including writing in the named author’s own authentic voice, and writing for the target audience.

This speech-writing experience led me to successfully writing a number of ghost-written or co-written books, always in the author’s own voice and always with an eye on the information needs of the targeted readers, who are a writer’s clients. Ghost-written and co-written books are the same except, in the case of co-written books, my byline is included (in second place) along with the named author’s name.

Recent Work

New Product Launch

For a trade association which had developed a new metric tool ideal for its thousands of members, we created and executed on a week-long new-product launch campaign to introduce this tool to the members at their annual convention in Washington DC. Because this tool would also prove useful to members of the news media which routinely cover this organization, this launch was extended to include introducing it to the media attending this organization’s annual convention.

New Book Launch

In connection with the Presidential Campaign, we staged a national launch – beginning with a press conference in Washington DC and concluding with a media tour in New York City – of an insider book on one of the major presidential primary contenders. Our press conference at the National Press Club in Washington attracted 40 reporters and four TV crews, and subsequent press coverage included an appearance on a cable news program and a Sirius Satellite Radio program interview, as well as an in-depth interview by one of Washington’s daily newspapers and more than 500 discrete articles (as tracked online) in newspapers, magazines and online publications.

Writing and Editing Coach

A dynamic young life coach and motivational speaker asked us to help guide her as she writes a book based on her hard-won answer to overcoming grief, coupled with her strong philosophy for leading a productive and rewarding life – what she calls “Livin’ the Dream.” After mapping out the book, we’ve taken it chapter-by-chapter, with her developing first drafts and the two of us teaming up to edit the final-draft copy. Completing the book’s writing and rewriting on January 1, 2018, we immediately transitioned into working on the successful book launch and subsequent one-year speaking and media-interview tour, which will run through 2019.

Marathon Blogger

We recently completed a six-month contract to write a weekly series of blogs to help a company capture fans’ emails (with permission), for use in their other marketing programs. This agreement required the production of 50 blogs per week, ranging from 250 to 750 words. Had this been done on a 40-hour week – which it wasn’t, as I had other clients and responsibilities as well – that would mean producing a blog every 48 minutes. While this assignment called for a lot of writing, it was also a lot of fun. I could write whatever I chose, as long as each of the blogs I wrote reflected on one of their four topics – for example, people who wanted to go back to college after years in the workplace.

Blog-to-Book Project

Another just-completed project included writing and placing 40 blogs for a client. This was done with the up-front intent of later converting those blogs into a ghost-written book for use by the client in promoting their business, which we did. The blogs dealt topically with all aspects of drug abuse and recovery, while the client focused on providing a new medical approach to overcoming addiction.

Ghost-Written Book

On behalf of a long-term client, we took dozens of ghost-written trade-journal magazine articles and stitched them together into the framework of a book focusing on marketing specialty physician practices. In addition to those articles, we produced another 175 pages of content to deliver a book, start-to-finish, in just six weeks. We successfully met the client’s not-to-exceed deadline. This book had to be – and was – completed and published in time to be featured at an annual trade show, where it helped the client (the named author) to land a number of important, high-value physician practice clients for her practice marketing consulting business.

Some of these ghost-written or co-written books include:

The Basic Guide to Hospital Public Relations – I wrote this book twice, in two distinct versions: once for America’s leading for-profit hospital company, for use at its 457 hospitals, and again, the same basic information but in a very different format for the American Hospital Association, for use by all of its 6,200 member hospitals.

Hospital Marketing: Step-by-Step – I wrote this as a co-writing project, after my publisher concluded that it would sell more effectively if it was ascribed to the award- winning marketing Vice President at a major for-profit hospital chain, though in the end, he contributed nothing but his eminently-marketable name. This book sold for $497 a copy, and sold out two 1,000-book press runs, ultimately being purchased by one-third of America’s 6,200 hospitals.

New Hope for Cancer Patients – this book was ghost-written for a specialist cancer surgeon who’d recently relocated from his prestigious academic position in New York on a medical school faculty to a private surgical practice in Palm Beach. He needed a way of boosting name recognition in this new market. We chose this book, which focused on research breakthroughs which he expected would receive FDA approval within the next five years. This book met his patients’ information needs; effective promotion of the book successfully positioned him within the Palm Beach market as the expert he was.

How to Select the Best Accounting Software Package for your Small or Mid-Sized Business – this ghost-written book was developed for use by one of the leading accounting software developers. They published it for use as a strong sales tool. It remained in print for nearly a decade, which suggests that it met or exceeded all of my client’s expectations.

Beautifully Profitable – Forever Profitable – this ghost-written book guides plastic surgeons and aesthetic dermatologists in marketing and promoting their private practices, as well as their spas and clinics. Based in part on an ongoing series of articles published in a professional medical marketing journal, this book greatly expands on those articles to create a complete guide to specialized medical practice marketing. It’s now in its 5th Edition.