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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is how to ask for help in a way that people are more likely to say yes.

We all need people to help us out from time to time.

Maybe you want a neighbor to water your plants while you're on vacation.

Or you'd like a colleague to make an introduction.

Every time I have a book come out, I hope that the various other authors

and influencers I know will share my work with their audiences. Of course, I get requests from

other authors to share news of their books, too. And over time, I started to notice something.

Some of these requests were far more effective than others. Some people clearly sent the same email to everyone,

and sometimes this mass emailing would even be acknowledged as such in the first sentence.

Sorry I don't have time to write you all individually, but would you do this for me?

Now, I generally try to still be a good citizen of the author world and help out,

but I know that part of my brain would always be thinking,

well, if you don't have time to write me individually,

why should I make time, individually, to do what you're asking?

And if I'm thinking this,

then probably other recipients of the mass email are thinking the same thing.

And maybe they're just deleting the email. So sure, the sender theoretically saved time,

but he or she didn't get the wanted results, either. But when somebody I've met writes me

...