Reading about marketing, two brief reviews

I've recently read two books about marketing and I'm going to save myself some work and review them in one post. First is How to Market and Sell Your Art, Music, Photographs, & Handmade Crafts Online by Lee Rowley and the other is Rubies in the Orchard: How to Uncover the Hidden Gems in Your Business by Lynda Resnick.

I picked up How to Market and Sell Your Art, Music, Photographs, & Handmade Crafts Online at the library a few weeks ago. Before checking it out I double checked the publication date, as anything about technology gets outdated so quickly that I didn't want to waste my time if it wasn't going to be helpful. This one was published in 2008 so it seemed like it would be fairly accurate. As it turned out, the book itself was really aimed at someone with a little less computer experience than I have and didn't really give me a lot of new ideas. I can see that there is a group of people who could really use the book, but I am not that person. The book it divided into chapters about buying a computer, creating a website, hiring help, and other similar topics. There is a chapter on social media as well, but it emphasized using MySpace with only a brief mention of Facebook and that's about it. I learned a tiny bit about keywords, but that's pretty much the only thing I got out of it. The plus side is that I "read" it in a couple of hours and was done.

Rubies in the Orchard: How to Uncover the Hidden Gems in Your Business was sent to me directly by the author, or rather by her company POMWonderful, back in February. Resnick and her husband are (or were) owners of several well known companies, including POM, Teleflora, and Fiji water. I looked forward to discovering how she managed to turn the companies into a success. However, I quickly got the feeling that the book itself was nothing more than a giant ad for her various companies, and having received it directly from her just confirms this feeling. I read through the marvelous success of POM, and then that of Teleflora, and then her brilliance with the Franklin Mint before I got tired of hearing her pat herself on the back. Unfortunately, hearing her brag wasn't what I was looking for in a marketing book and I decided not to finish the book at all. I'm very glad that I did not pay for this one.

You can find more reviews at:
Savvy Verse & Wit,
Lost in Books,
book-a-rama

Did I miss yours?

What marketing book or advice do you like? Do you ever read business books? How do you feel about an author using his or her book as a giant advertisement for their product?