Lending A Helping Hand
“You can succeed best by helping others”
One of the first steps in my professional journey was to buy a map. I’m the kind of person who likes to plan trips. It’s a tradition handed down to me by my father. Before every vacation, in those pre-GPS days, we would got down to the Automobile Association of America to get maps of our route.
I’ve done the same thing with my writing. I contacted a successful self-published author I knew and asked him for advice. He pointed me to Carla King’s Self-Publishing Boot Camp. I bought the book. When it arrived, I discovered an email newsletter was also available. I looked up the website listed in the book, so I could sign up and get the latest information.
There was only one problem.
I couldn’t find the spot to give her my email address. I looked and looked. Then I looked some more. Was there something obvious I was missing? Finally, I emailed the author. I gave her a screen shot of what I was seeing. Turns out the form that allowed people to sign up for her newsletter wasn’t there! It had been lost in one of her website updates. She was so grateful to me for pointing out the problem that she gave me a free forty-five minute video consultation!
Which just goes to show, if you lend a helping hand, people often return the favor.