Call Me Charlie

Issue 262

You guys,

Cold emails should not feel like spam, yet they often do. I recently got an email from a publicist who wanted their author to be a guest on my podcast and it started, “I hope this email finds you well!”

Now that it was time for me to send a cold email to an author, and invite her to be a guest on my podcast, how could I write a warm, unsolicited message? How could I get them to say yes?

In today’s podcast I had the pleasure of speaking with

Amy Wilson

, author of Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser, and we went deep into the craft of using specificity and examples in your writing to be funny.

Amy said, at one point during our conversation, “The more specific, the more real... The more detail, the more real.” The same can be said for a cold email. On Amy’s website, her contact person was the publicity manager at Zibby Books. I looked up this person and found an article she’d written titled, An Argument Against The 5-Star Book Rating System. I also learned that she was a Division I swimmer in college. I referenced both in my email.

I had to be specific about Amy’s book, too, so here’s how I ended the email:

In my episode on Happy To Help, I was especially drawn to three ways Amy was able to make the reader laugh:

1. The inclusion of fantasies

2. Short and snappy analogies written with alliteration and proper nouns

3. Just using proper nouns!

After I published the episode my husband was listening to it and he said, “It’s good…. Do you know what a pronoun is?” Because throughout the whole episode I was referring to “proper nouns” as “pronouns.” Ah, whoops! Proper nouns… I meant proper nouns.

From a fellow former Division I athlete (field hockey!),

Charlie Bleecker

The next day we scheduled a time for Amy to come on the podcast.

Here are a few other topics we discussed:

• Regarding specificity and examples in your writing Amy stated, “The funniest, most ridiculous details are often the extraneous ones.”

• On publishing: Amy’s first memoir was with HarperCollins in 2010 and this most recent memoir in January 2025 was with Zibby Books. How did she choose them? Or how did they choose her?

• On marketing your book: What goes into a book launch? And what are some ways I can promote my book?

• Find out what memoir Amy’s reading right now, and what memoirs have most inspired her writing.

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Until next week,

Charlie