I just did a radio interview with Charles Adler of Adler on Line about a chapter from my book called, “The Five Cs of Buying an Engagement Ring.”

You can listen to the interview here. You can read the chapter here.

Oh and if you listened to the radio segment, you may have heard Charles introduce me as both a fund manager and a carpenter. That’s not entirely accurate. I may well be the first Jew since Jesus to take up carpentry, but not even the Messiah could have found the time to trade the markets and frame houses. No, the truth is I used to be a fund manager. Fortunately for me (& my savings), I got out of the investment industry a couple of years ago and have taken up writing and carpentry.

Last night I performed at Jazzoetry IV, reading one of my essays. It’s about a girl I fell in love with and is called “Heaven on Earth”.

PS - I resisted the urge to add canned laughter to the video, so please bear in mind that there were only nine people in the audience. (Ten if you include the bartender).

PPS - I can’t believe that there were only nine people in the audience! And six of them were performers! That’s absolutely ridiculous. Jazzoetry is an awesome monthly event that combines music with words and takes place at the Liberty Bistro in Toronto. It’s also free! Next one is March 19th. Click here to see a short promo.

… unfortunately, I got news.

I’ve written before about how a major Canadian publisher asked me to submit a proposal for my book. It’s been two months since I dropped it off and “Mr. Somebody” just got back to me by email. His response was “no.” For those who crave the juicy details, I’ve included his email and my own response below.

Oddly enough, I feel pretty good about the whole thing. I’ve been reading Seven King’s book on writing, which happens to be called On Writing. It took King almost ten years to publish his first story, so I can hardly be disappointed with my own minor setback. (This pump-me-up comparison would work better though if I could forget that King was only about eight years old when he first started writing — yikes!) Still, the truth is, I’m pretty stoked that I even captured Mr. Somebody’s interest in the first place. I know my book’s far from perfect. In the last few weeks, I’ve been cleaning it up. So far, I’ve only submitted the book to Mr. Somebody. In the New Year, I’ll submit it across the board. Wish me luck!

_______________________________________

Hi Bruce,

I looked over all of the material that you delivered to me and have now had the chance to review your proposal with our editorial board.Unfortunately, we came to the conclusion that this project didn’t fit our list, so I am passing on it. I’ll send everything back in the mail to you. Do you want me to send it to you at xxx? Thank you for thinking of us, and best wishes with your book.

Sincerely,

“Mr. Somebody”

_______________________________________

Hi “Mr. Somebody,”

Thank you for considering my proposal. I really appreciate you taking the time to give an unproven writer a chance.

It’s not necessary to return the proposal. Please feel free to dispose of it as you see fit.

I realize that a person in your position hardly has time to deal with signed authors (let alone rejected ones) but should you have a moment, I’d love to grab a coffee or lunch with you and pick your brain on my proposal’s pluses and minuses. I’m also in the early planning stages of a new book (a non-fiction career book) which I’d be delighted to discuss with you.

If you’re unavailable (or if that sounds like a huge pain in the neck), I completely understand and look forward to meeting you again one day in the future.

Best,

Bruce Freedman

Well here it is: the video that I’ve been blogging about for what seems like forever. It’s my best effort to visually portray this exciting new stage in my life. It’s taken a lot more effort than I could have ever imagined. Put a bullet in my brain if I ever try something like this again.

The centerpiece of the video is an animated scene of me appearing as a guest on a famous daytime talk show. The idea behind the scene was conceived back in May 2006, only a week after I started writing the book. In a fantastical conversation with friends, I playfully described what I would do if my book were to ever become a success and I were invited on Oprah.

This fantasy percolated in the back of my mind and the decision to make an animated clip, came about in March 07, when I was building this website. (more…)

You know the feeling you get, when something good is happening and you don’t want to jeopardize it by doing anything that could throw it off track. That’s kind of what I’m feeling right now. At the same time, when I started this website, I undertook to be honest and put myself out there — 100 percent. I need to get the events of the last two weeks off my chest, especially since they could prove to be a turning point.

Three weeks ago, I blogged about how I was planning to take these promotional bookmarks of mine and start targeting publishers. The idea was — instead of distributing them outside Chapters — to start distributing them outside publishers’ offices. I’m up to 6,000 visitors now on my website, and averaging over one hundred new visitors a day. I figured it was time to see if I could get noticed by the industry.

People are always asking me if I’ve found a publisher for my book. I get a lot of strange looks when I tell them not only have I not gotten a publisher, I have not even approached a publisher. It’s crystal clear to me that I have been doing the right thing, but not everybody has understood my logic.

Two weeks ago, while disbursing bookmarks outside a publisher’s office, I met somebody who did understand my logic, somebody important within the industry. We chatted for a while; I told him my story. He liked my story. And then that somebody, let’s call him “Mr. Somebody,” asked me if I had approached his company. I told him “no” and I told him why. As I explained my reasoning, he nodded and broke into a big smile. And that’s when he asked me to submit a proposal.

This is a big deal. Most top publishers don’t accept unsolicited submissions. They certainly don’t accept them from non-agented writers who’ve never published anything. So I spent all of last week working on the proposal. My proposal follows a standard industry format and essentially argues the case for my book. It’s about twenty pages long.

Enclosed within the proposal is several chapters from my book. Choosing them has not been easy. I’ve barely looked at my manuscript since April 2007. Partly because the book is finished and I’ve been focusing on my blog. But part of the reason, to be perfectly frank, is I’d kind of fallen out of love with the book.

Not to say I’d fallen out of love with writing. Rather, I’ve felt my writing has improved. The manuscript needs editing, but I haven’t wanted to edit it. There’s a lot to edit! Moreover, I started writing the book only a week before my marriage ended. It came from a angrier, more aggressive place, and I simply haven’t been in the mood to go there.

But as I worked on the proposal, I found myself rereading the manuscript and enjoying it. I may not be in an angry place anymore but I can still appreciate the book for its humor. I got excited. And I fell back in love with the book. I cut a chapter, not because it’s bad but because it simply didn’t belong. It felt good to cut it. And I chose five chapters — thirty-five pages — to include in my submission. I edited them for flow.

I also expanded the title of the book. I think it works better now:

_________________________________________

You Don’t Look Young for your Age
…and other revelations you might not want to hear

_________________________________________

I submitted the proposal on Friday. I prepared a small gift basket, full of rejuvenating creams, wrinkle removers and other anti-aging remedies.* Mr. Somebody personally came out to accept it. In the basket, I included a CD with a rough cut of my video, a stack of bookmarks and of course the proposal itself. Attached to the basket, was a handwritten card. The card read as follows:

_________________________________________

Dear Mr. Somebody,

Here’s hoping you like the proposal. And don’t worry. I never would have given you this joke basket unless I thought you truly did look young for your age.

_________________________________________

* I actually stole one of the night creams for my own use, leaving Mr. Somebody with an empty box. After one week of slaving away on that proposal, I figured I probably need the cream more than he does.

On Sunday, I went to Word on the Street, Canada’s largest book and magazine festival. I figured it would be a good opportunity to do some networking. Unfortunately, I didn’t network much at all. Unless you count the conversation I had with the baked yam vendor.

It was a bright and sunny day — and I was in good spirits — so on the spur of the moment I decided to hand out some of my promotional bookmarks. I stood in a crowded spot and gave away some fifty bookmarks to my target market: those individuals who are 25 years and older and have an air of intelligence and good humor. Oh … and really hot girls.

Regular readers will recall that about two months ago, I had one thousand bookmarks printed to promote my website. I was humbled when I tried to hand them out; nobody actually wanted them. I managed to dispose of only twenty-five bookmarks in the two hours that I stood in front of the Chapters at John and Richmond — with a twitch of a smile on my face.

I was too shell-shocked from the experience to try it again. So I hired “Carol.” Now, while I sit in a nearby Starbucks puttering away on my laptop, she’ll stand on that same corner and give my bookmarks away. She does at least three times the volume I did in the same amount of time. She’s handed out over 500 bookmarks since she started working for me.

Sunday was an exception, and it reminded me that I’ve no inclination to personally engage in the prickly business of sidewalk marketing. Occasionally, I do find a special occasion to personally dispose of a large quantity. My friends and I gave away a very substantial 200 bookmarks the night of my stand up debut at Yuk Yuk’s.

So despite my initial fears that my bookmarks would decorate my bookshelves for eternity, I’ve now disposed of that first batch of 1000 and have printed a second batch.

The bookmarks are definitely bringing people to my website. Since I started monitoring my website traffic in July, I’ve had 3,168 “unique” visitors. The bulk of these visitors arrived at my website via a search engine. But about 20 percent — 545 visitors — arrived by typing “www.brucefreedman.com” into their browser. My rough calculations suggest at least 400 of these visitors must have received a bookmark.

I’m now ready to take my bookmark distribution strategy to the next level. Next week, Carol will distribute bookmarks outside the offices of Toronto’s prominent publishers. She’ll cover a zone that envelops the building’s entrance and the closest coffee shop. She’ll be there between 9 and 11 am; editorial staff get off to a late start, I’m told.

Unfortunately, despite my reluctance to return to the fray, it looks like I will have to go with her. You see; we’re starting at Random House. Random House’s office building has two entrances: one on Toronto Street and one on King. There is a Starbucks near the King entrance where the lower echelons can get their affordable five dollar venti lattes. The senior executives prefer the ritzier Mercatto. So Carol and I will have to split up and tackle one zone each. The question is, who should target the executives?

On July 25th, I set up my very own Facebook group. Now for those of you who have yet to emerge from the darkness, let me explain what a Facebook group is. It’s essentially a distinct web page — a gathering place — within the Facebook umbrella. Each group has its own theme and and its own unique content: descriptions, news updates, discussion boards, photos, videos, links, etc. As a group’s creator, you might, for instance, set up a group called, “Goldendoodles are cute but what a dumb name for a dog.” Facebook members could then join this group to show their support for the “Eugene”s of the dog world. My Facebook group is called “You Don’t Look Young for your Age.” It essentially promotes my website via links, pictures and videos. It actually contains little information other than what you might find on my website.

The group is part of my Facebook strategy to build an audience for my book. It sounds pretty useless doesn’t it? Well, it took me only about 15 minutes to set it up and I spend no more than 20 minutes a week managing it. But setting up a Facebook group has been a smart use of my time because in the last month, two hundred and fifty of my website’s 1,800 visitors arrived via a Facebook link. One hundred and twenty-three arrived directly via my group page.

The real attraction to me of Facebook groups though is not the website visitors that I have gotten. Rather it’s the blue sky potential. With a bit of luck, Facebook could prove a tipping point in building awareness of my writing. You see, whenever someone joins my group, all of their Facebook “friends” can see that they’ve joined it in their “newsfeed.” I’ve seen new members join my group simply on the back of copycatting what their friends did. But the really cool feature is that any one of my group members can “invite” people to join my group at the click of a button. It takes just a little bit of leverage to elicit this endorsement.

For instance, I had a Facebook friend email me a few weeks ago. I barely knew the guy, but— knowing that I used to be a fund manager — he wanted to meet me for a drink. (He‘s doing his MBA and wanted to pick my brain about the finance industry). I hungrily observed his four hundred strong Facebook friend count. I playfully agreed to the drink but only on the condition that he invite his friends to join my group. He did. I saw my group membership swell by fifty within two days.

Most people join Facebook groups very quickly. It’s no skin off their backs to click that button. It doesn’t mean anything to them. Many of them never go to the group page more than once, I imagine. They may not read a word of what I write. So why do I care? I care because I am hoping to convert many of these “joiners” into readers.

For the last ten years, my primary source of correspondence over the internet has been hotmail. In any given day, I still receive twenty-to- fifty emails promoting penis enlargement pumps, porn and Viagra. Thanks to hotmail’s anti-spam defenses, these emails go straight to my junk mail. I don’t click on them and I’m sure few of you do too. I can’t imagine spammers getting a lot of positive response from this blanket approach. But what about in the early days? What about the first time I received spam? The very first time I used hotmail? Did I click on these emails? Of course I did. And the same goes for you. Somebody had to fund all those Nigerian bank-scamming assholes that still spam us ten years later.

Now after ten years on hotmail, I suddenly seem to be receiving the bulk of my personal email through Facebook. The same goes for most people I’ve talked to. But there is no spam on Facebook — yet. I’m hoping to change that. I want to be the first.

You see, when a person joins my group, then I — as group creator — have the power to directly send emails to their Facebook email account. The emails come from my group address and are not considered spam by the powers of Facebook. This is an important consideration. Sure, I could randomly send emails to these same people, but my account would quickly be shut down for breaching Facebook’s spamming policy. Sending an email to an individual who has voluntarily joined my group is not considered spam.

So every time I update my blog, I can theoretically send an email to each member of my group. Since there is currently no spam in Facebook, I reckon there is a high likelihood that a group member who receives that email will at the minimum — start to read it. Now, they may have joined my group with no idea of who I am or what I do. But if they get an unexpected email, it might trigger them into becoming a regular blog reader and fan. There’s no downside. In the worst-case scenario, if a recipient doesn’t like my blog or my email message, they’ll simply leave my group. But if they do like it, then it becomes that much easier to convince them to get their friends to join my group. The sky’s the limit. Or is it?

I say “theoretically” because there is a flaw in my strategy. The flaw is Facebook itself. At first, my “spam” strategy worked quite nicely, but once my group membership — now at 330 — surpassed one hundred, the group-messaging feature stopped working. Apparently, Facebook’s teething problems are preventing group messaging from reliably functioning in those groups with large memberships. I contacted Facebook support who said they are “working on fixing” this problem but it’s been a month now, and the problem has not yet been resolved. I sent them a second email asking what the problem was and they essentially told me to calm down. Blue skies? Perhaps above the clouds…

So, I now plan to start a new competing website that truly services social networker’s needs. Until the website is launched, I’ll be signing up new members manually. Females, you can email me at brucebook@brucefreedman.com and provide me with your personal details (i.e. name, age, favorite books, bra size and anything else you think is pertinent). Males can send their contact details to junk@brucefreedman.com

Brucebook membership is far more exclusive than Facebook — we don’t just accept anybody. Interviews will be granted only to a select few and assuming you meet the bare requirements, membership will be granted.

So I finished the video that I’ve been talking about for so long. I signed off on the final version last week and my director, Mark forwarded it to another guy, Rick, who’s highly skilled in video editing and optimization. Rick puts a link to the video on his website for me to look at.

Now I’ve seen the video many times and have been very happy with it. But this is actually the first time I’ve had it in my possession. So now that I’ve got the link, what do I do? I show it to a few friends. And what do they think? The truth is they were confused by it. Their response: it was visually great but they didn’t “get” the storyline. Since I’m the guy who’s supposed to be a writer and the guy who wrote the friggin’ story, this left me rather sad.

The video is essentially a playful rendition of the chapter, “You Don’t Look Young for your Age” — also the name of my book/website. Part of the problem with the video, I think, is that I no longer completely accept as true the message in that chapter. That’s because my own life has changed since I first wrote it. The phrase “You Don’t Look Young for your Age” has taken on a whole new meaning for me.

When I first wrote that chapter, I was simply making fun of all the mid-thirties/forties people who try to hang on to their youth: people who believe that “they look young” when in fact the truth is they look as haggard and wrinkly as their friends. I effectively say to them in the chapter: “shut the f**k up, you don’t look so young, no you don’t.”

But as I’ve followed this more creative path in my life, I now see things a little differently. I’m not saying that I suddenly think I look young . (I’m thirty nine). I’m not saying that you look young. (No, you definitely don’t look young). What I am saying is: don’t let age be a factor. Don’t let it limit you in your dreams. Live your life for you. Do what’s right for you. And f**k anybody who tells you otherwise.

I’ve tried to capture this shift in my philosophy in the video. It’s possibly a little too subtle. But there’s actually a bigger problem, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Here’s the description of how the video is supposed to look to the viewer:

_________________________________________________

Scene 1 (INT. BRUCE’S APARTMENT)

Bruce (played by me) is in his apartment working. He gets a phone call. His (fictional) agent is calling to tell him that Gaia (a fictional talk-show host) has discovered his blog and loves him. It looks like Bruce’s new writing career is about to take off. Perhaps leaving his old career wasn’t a mistake. Bruce decides to go out that evening to celebrate.

Scene 2 (INT. NIGHTCLUB)

Bruce walks into the nightclub and dances his way to the bar. He is obviously out of place because he is much older than the mostly twenty-year old club goers. But he does not realize that he looks much older. He thinks he fits in. (More importantly, the viewers of the video think that he thinks that he fits in).

Sitting in a corner of the bar is a forty-year old businessman in a suit with slicked back hair. He is sitting with his forty-year old lawyer girlfriend. Let’s call the business guy, Brutus. Brutus is a finance guy. He thinks Bruce is an idiot. (Now the actor playing Brutus is also me, because he is my alter ego in the real world. He is the “me” from five years ago. Whoa! Isn’t the irony delicious?)

Bruce goes to the bar and gets drunk, (more…)

If you wanted to get in touch with somebody who was really famous, how would you do it? Conventional methods won’t work. If you send them an email or a letter or a fax, it would just get lumped together with all their other junk mail.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I’ve put together a ninety-second cartoon, which features me as a guest on a famous daytime talk show celebrating the success of my book. The cartoon — which takes place sometime in the indeterminate future — will be integrated with a live-action story and released as a three-minute video.

I asked the animator to make two versions of the cartoon. In one version, the talk show and its host are fictional. They don’t exist in the real world. This may be fitting given that I’m hardly an award-winning author in the real world. In the other version, I’m a guest on Oprah.

I’ve been 90 percent convinced by friends and family not to use the Oprah Winfrey version given the muddle of laws surrounding privacy and “use of likeness.” I grew up in a family of lawyers, so I can be a bit anal when it comes to the law. But part of me still wants to use this version, because it’s a much funnier clip.

I know there’s only a one-in-a trillion chance that Oprah would ever give me permission to use her likeness. But I can’t even get that chance, because I’ve got no idea how to get in touch with Oprah — until a friend showed me how to use Google AdWords. (more…)

12 percent of all visitors to my website arrive via Google. These visitors end up on my website not because they know me, or were told about my site, but because they typed something into Google and somewhere in the results, my site popped up. So what have people been googling that brings them to my website? For the most part: information on penises.

One of the amusing things about having a website is analyzing its visitor data. There is all sorts of nifty information I can glean about my visitors: pages visited, traffic sources and keyword search terms to name a few. For instance, in the last two weeks, there have been over four hundred visits to my website. Granted, many of those visits were my own — I really do enjoy my own writing. Total visits fall to 272 once I strip out my own narcissistic tendencies. And before any of you ask, I’ll admit that my mother accounted for 16 of the remainder. So we’re down to 256.

Obviously there is a difference between visits and visitors because, believe it or not, some people do come to my website more than once. Tallying distinct visitors reveals I’ve had 154 unique individuals come to my website in the last two weeks — excluding me and mom. These 154 visitors spent an average of 11 minutes each on my website. Now, I’m certainly not complaining about these numbers. 154 is better than nothing. I’m glad I can provide those of you who are bored — and perhaps taking a break at work — with some form of entertainment during your busy day. I don’t at all regret giving up my former career. If you like, perhaps after I finish writing this blog I could mow your lawn or take out your trash? (more…)