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Book Review: How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters

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Mal Warwick wrote How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters in the mid-1990s. To the author’s credit, there are some great examples and great pointers in this book that deal specifically with how to generate money where it did not exist before and how to bring back previous donors to your cause. I can only really fault the book on its age and lack of e-fundraising techniques, but that isn’t a reflection on the quality of Warwick’s knowledge. It just shows that the book hasn’t been updated in a while!

One of the nice things about this book is that it uses actual examples throughout to show Warwick’s point. The writing style makes this book an easy read and I suspect that there will be few people who don’t “get” what Warwick is trying to say in each chapter.

I thought that for my purposes, this book just about hit on all of the core pieces of information that I was looking for. I also liked how Warwick came right out and said to put the rules of grammar aside when writing a fundraising letter. For an English Major like me, that’s hard to do sometimes. However, the point is well-taken and clear examples are provided to illustrate when such writing is appropriate.

So if you’ve got a fundraising campaign going on or if you’re looking to begin a new campaign, it may be of some assistance to pick up Warwick’s book and give it a quick read through for some tips and tricks on raising more money.

Book Review: Why We Want You To Be Rich

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Co-authors Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki combined their efforts to write Why We Want You To Be Rich. This is a good read for any one who wants a different, highly successful look at the concept of money and financial education. However, the two authors repeat the mistakes of their previous books by not addressing real-world issues to the readers.

The biggest problem that I have with the message in this book is that both Donald and Robert completely neglect and discussion of existing debt. Granted, my $116,000 student loan debt is a bit extreme, but there is no discussion of how to handle credit card debt, smaller student loan debt, or other types of “bad” debt.

Both authors make implied points that readers should pay off their existing bad debts before they make strides towards becoming financially free, but they don’t address the fact that today’s workers need to work to pay off their long-term debts. Neither of these men have had these issues in their personal life and it shows. Sure, they’ve had huge losses in the business world, but it’s much different when an LLC is at risk of being dissolved as opposed to when an individual is at risk of losing their credit rating.

Unfortunately, there is no discussion of the real problem that many people face today. It’s not a growing debt for existing debtors – it’s a growing number of existing debtors overall. Many people have finally realized that they can’t spend like drunken sailors and that they need to stop using credit cards and taking out high interest loans. These people have indeed stopped these bad habits. However, there is absolutely no option to stop working or start putting money in a different high-interest yielding account when you have to pay to keep the electricity on as well as to pay down your credit card debts.

So, if you’ve got real-world debt and you are literally in a situation where you need to work to continue living – this book is not for you.

Now then, there ARE people who do NOT have large debts or who are lucky enough to have a completely free college education. THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU! Both Trump and Kiyosaki’s take on living and learning in the financial world is exactly what you should have learned in high school and college. Chances are you didn’t learn their take on assets and liabilities (where a house is a liability instead of an asset).

I highly recommend this book for those without real-world debt. For everyone else, save the $20 and put it towards your next long-term debt payment!

Book Review: Why the Left Hates America

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At some point over the course of 2006, I all but gave up my strong political beliefs of disliking liberal-minded policies and lauding conservative-minded ones. Granted, I still vote Republican but that’s because I think the Democratic Party is disorganized and, at this point in time, it fundamentally does not have the right path for this country. This has nothing to do with any wars in foreign nations or any media-fueled policy debates – it has to do with what I call “Putting America First.”

Fleshing that out is a post for another time, though. I bring this up so that you won’t think my review of Why the Left Hates America is written from a hardcore, right-wing slant. I bought this book (in the $5 bin at Barnes & Noble) about a year ago. I probably should have looked a little closer because the book was published in 2002 and much of what is talked about in the book is dated. However, here’s my review anyway!

Author Daniel J. Flynn makes a clear distinction to open the book. Namely this is that he is NOT talking about the Democrats or liberal-minded policy analysts when he says the “left” hates America. For Flynn, he uses words for what they are (something I admire); in other words, his “left” refers to the extremists who go beyond the liberal ideas of a Nancy Pelosi or a Ted Kennedy. Though the truth is that many of today’s liberals are unfortunately heavily influenced by Flynn’s “left.”

So who are these leftists that Flynn talks about? Well, he begins by citing internal attacks against America from the inside going as far back as the 1800’s. Much of what drove these attacks were not physical disagreements or land disputes, but rather an ideological disagreement between the dissidents and the government. How was this dissidence most blatantly and prominently displayed in modern times? Communists!

Flynn cites many cases where Communists were found employed by the United States government, yet under the direction of the Soviet Union. This part of the book also talks about how the theoretical underpinnings of social revolution in Europe eventually made their way to America and have taken root in our collegiate system (which, anyone who is unbiased and attends America’s colleges can easily tell you is true).

Then he talks about something that I feel quite strongly about and though he doesn’t use this title to describe it, he talks about the bastardization of certain words in the English language. What does that mean? That’s when people use the word “tolerance” to describe a non-violent acceptance of every thought, idea, or way of life in the world…except those with which they disagree. How many times can you watch a cable television talk show and hear a pundit say that we all need to hold hands and sing kumbaya and then in the next sentence have that person bash America’s Heartland, the Catholic Church, conservative values, or any of a myriad of causes or institutes that are not included in their definition of “tolerance?” It’s mind-boggling.

Or how about the asshole who talks about the need for multiculturalism and then rails on about how Western Civilization (a.k.a. white Anglo-Saxon males) are the cause of all of the world’s pains? These people are the far left that Flynn talks about – he cites two different times when academics actually take up and revel in the literary works of people who told blatant lies about other cultures. And all in the name of proving their point and being able to tell America, “You’re wrong.”

Pathetic.

I won’t give away the rest of the book, but Flynn begins to talk about how Hollywood hates America and has embraced anti-American causes, etc. For anyone beginning to get into this type of political debate, I recommend this book. As for those of us who have been more politically engaged over the last few years, you can pass this one by.

Book Review: Controversy Creates Cash

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Eric Bischoff is a guy that I’ve always been a fan of in the wrestling business. His brash, in-your-face, “up yours” style is one that I admire and one that I’ve employed successfully over the last decade of my life from college to the workplace to my small business to even my volunteer work! So naturally, when I heard that he had finally written his biography and focused it around business end of the wrestling industry, I knew that it was a book that I had to pick up and read.

And I’m glad that I did. This book reaffirms all of the things that I like about Eric Bischoff. He talks (in detail) about how he viewed the wrestling business in a completely different way than how the old veterans of the business viewed it. He calls wrestling the “purest form of marketing.” And you know what? I agree with him 100%. He’s right. Wrestling is as basic as it gets in terms of entertainment. Two wrestlers are in a ring and they have to sell a “product” or, in other words, their feud. If it works, they get the cheers of the audience; if it fails, they get the jeers.

The other thing that I really liked about this book was that Bischoff had a chance to put the record straight on many issues and he hits the internet “dirt sheets” pretty hard. Most of this criticism is deserved since his basic premise is that the dirt sheet writers were not just pro-WWE, rather they were anti-WCW and even more anti-Eric Bischoff. And why were they anti-Eric Bischoff? Well, for the same reason that many of the old school wrestlers were against him – he was an outsider to the industry and he took a much different approach to running a wrestling company than they were used to seeing.

And that’s a great way to sum up this book. It’s Eric Bischoff’s tale of being an outsider to the wrestling world and then, in a matter of only a few years, finding himself rising from an entrepreneurial third-string announcer to the head of the biggest wrestling company on the planet. Not many people liked his rise to power, but many of these same haters made a lot of money from his out-of-the-box ideas. Bischoff also tells the real story of the corporate suits who killed WCW. He pulls no punches when he talks about how guys like Vince Russo had no chance of helping WCW and how the people who were making decisions for AOL Time Warner were completely unrealistic in terms of the wrestling industry. It was nice to finally read this all from Bischoff’s point of view.

This was a man who brought professional television writers to the wrestling world to help stretch storylines over the course of two to three months (a practice now used heavily by WWE). This was a man who saved untold hundreds of thousands of dollars by moving WCW’s syndication to a sound stage in Florida (a practice now used by TNA). He was the first to go live week in and week out, he was the first to break the wrestling business down to its 4 core “wheels” of revenue, he was the first to shun the “inside” fans and dirt sheet writers (though not the last)…

Eric Bischoff has made a remarkable contribution to what we watch each week on RAW, Smackdown!, Impact!, and ECW. This just cannot be denied. A lot of what is out there on the internet about Eric Bischoff just isn’t true (even his birthday isn’t properly reported online). For the objective reader, this book finally puts a lot of the bullshit to a halt and gives Bischoff the credit he deserves for restructuring the wrestling industry.

Before I give my recommendation for the book, I have to say that the biggest problem I had with the book was the spelling and grammar errors. I don’t see how the publisher could have let this book go to print when there were punctuation errors, misspelled words all over the book, improper grammar used… Hell, they even labeled a picture of “Sensational Sherri” incorrectly as “Missy Hyatt!” That’s just basic stuff that made what should have been a nice, smooth read a pain in ass sometimes.

I highly recommend Controversy Creates Cash for the fan of professional wrestling. For those of you who aren’t wrestling fans, I wouldn’t bother with the book unless you’re one of these entrepreneurial types who looks at the world of business a little bit differently. You may enjoy this book for its look at the business side of professional wrestling.

Book Review: Superstar Billy Graham: Tangled Ropes

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This is a great read for fans of professional wrestling. The story of Superstar Billy Graham is one that tells the tale of the wrestling world from the 1960s through the early 1980s – a time overlooked by many of today’s wrestling fans. Did you ever wonder how those black and white grappling-fests that you see starting off WWE programs transformed into the entertainment phenomenon that we watch each Monday night? Well, the transformation was one that was carried, in large part, on the backs of the wrestlers themselves. And of those wrestlers who changed the industry, Superstar Billy Graham might have been the most influential.

Any guy who can say that he’s influenced Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Jesse Ventura, and Dusty Rhodes (among others) is someone who deserves a second look. Any guy who can say he influenced these luminaries AND was the professional wrestler who brought the business into the “entertainment” era is someone of legend. Billy Graham is that – a true living legend in the wrestling business.

Looking at him now, one might say, “Eh, he looks like a mix between Ventura and Hogan.” You may say this because his look is very reminiscent of what Ventura looked like in his heyday and because Graham might be pointing at his “22-inch pythons, brother!” Well, hell, that sounds like Hulk Hogan, doesn’t it?

Nope – that’s Hulk Hogan borrowing material from the original and Ventura admittedly dressing like the Superstar.

That is the story of Billy Graham – he was “the first.” He was the first to break kayfabe outside of the ring. He was the first to be a muscle-head at heart and still win over wrestling fans. He was among the first to get the “Austin Heel Heat” where he was so good at being bad, the fans loved him for it. He was the first one to ignite the microphone throwing out raps that were literally taken from the boxing world’s Muhammad Ali.

Superstar Billy Graham was even the first one to bring a major lawsuit against Vince McMahon, Jr. which prompted the federal steroid investigation against the promoter. Billy Graham has done it all.

This book is a great chronicle of his life and times as a professional wrestler both in and out of the ring. It follows him from birth through his time as an evangelical preacher then to his time as a bouncer and ultimately to his time as the first “superstar” in professional wrestling. The Superstar is very candid about his drug use and how it almost killed him just as he’s very candid about the ladies in his life and how he missed out on some special moments with his young children. To their credit, they speak openly in this book about how his divorce from their mother hurt them. Again – this book pulls no punches in telling Billy Graham’s real-life story.

I enjoyed reading about Superstar’s induction into the WWE Hall of Fame and the story about him coming back to a WWE locker room for the first time in a decade is also touching. It must also be noted that Vince and company give away some of their thought processes towards the end of the book in terms of how Vince views the WWE Hall of Fame and how Jean Paul Levesque views himself as a member of the McMahon clan. Interesting stuff…

Much like his DVD, this is a book for true wrestling fans. It’s not a long read, but it is a very interesting one. I give Tangled Ropes the highest of recommendations – go for it!