Roy H. Williams dropped out of college on the second day, choosing instead to “figure it out” for himself. At age 19, he began asking local business owners, “Have you ever done any advertising that you felt really worked? Tell me about it.” After cataloguing their answers, he asked, “Have you ever done any advertising that you thought was brilliant—something you were really excited about—that failed miserably?”
“You only have to ask a few hundred business owners,” says Williams, “before it all becomes crystal clear . . . everyone makes the same mistakes for the same reasons. And the things that work brilliantly have common denominators as well. All the answers, of course, are initially counterintuitive. That’s why everyone makes the same mistakes. I was given thousands of years of collective experience and the results of more than one hundred million dollars in advertising expenditures . . . for free. All I had to do was see the patterns. What a country!”
At 20, Williams began consulting small business owners across America, guiding dozens of them to unprecedented success. Twenty years later, his Wizard of Ads trilogy of business books rose to the top of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.
Williams continues to consult business owners through his online MondayMorningMemo and his private consulting firm, Roy H. Williams Marketing in Austin, Texas. He currently has 54 Wizard of Ads business partners helping grow more than 900 small businesses around the world.
He is also the founder of Wizard Academy, a 501c3 nonprofit business school whose sole objective is to strengthen the small-business backbone of every country on earth. “Profitable companies employ people, give them purpose, and keep them too busy to go to war.”
“We teach big things fast,” says Williams. “The most recent U.S. census tells us the United States has 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Wizard Academy was built expressly for them.” Alumni of Wizard Academy include Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, marketing executives from Fortune 500 companies and “a high percentage of gun slinging entrepreneurs.”
Roy Williams lives in Austin, Texas, with Pennie Compton Williams, the girl with whom he fell in love at the age of 14. They have two adult sons and two young grandsons.
Michael R. Drew has been marketing books for his entire career. He’s become the world’s most successful book promoter, having helped launch nearly 75 books onto best-seller lists, many of them number-one titles. Beyond merely helping authors’ books to sell well, Michael has benefited from these writers’ insights into social trends. He himself has observed up-close the shifting dynamics of society—as with his work on Pendulum—and has seen firsthand the rapid and long-term changes in the publishing industry and how content reaches today’s varied audiences.
Michael honed his skills at such respected publishers as Bard Press, Entrepreneur Magazine, Longstreet Press and Thomas Nelson Publishers, among others. He has mastered the intricacies of publishing and, in adapting to today’s fast-evolving industry, Michael founded Promote a Book to work directly with writers to help them spread their message.
Michael has also helped writers and authors build upon an essential component of continuing success, creating a platform for their writing and their message so that they can expand their audience and adapt to social shifts. Through Michael’s skills in website creation, his strengths as a speaker, his career coaching and in his innovative use of personas to intensify the effectiveness of all sorts of writing, Michael has been a force in the creation of a new generation of thought leaders. He has helped them to become even more effective entrepreneurs who nourish today’s idea-hungry marketplace.
And as shifts in society continue, Michael has expanded Promote A Book’s services to include consulting and planning on everything from Internet distribution and website-building to video creation, book trailers, podcasting and more.