Author's Guide to Effective Book Marketing: Insider Tips from Yvonne Caputo, Author of Dying With Dad

In the tumultuous journey of book launching, Yvonne Caputo's path took an unexpected turn. As she poured her heart into her 2nd book, Dying with Dad, little did she know that her marketing strategies would lead her down a captivating and unforeseen path. With the help of Ingenium Books, Yvonne discovered the power of podcasts, Facebook groups, and reader reviews. But it was her ventures into speaking engagements and book clubs that brought a surprising twist to her book's journey. Brace yourself for the unexpected as Yvonne's story unfolds, revealing the incredible impact of her message. 

In this episode, you will learn about:

• The messages in Dying With Dad about the importance of addressing our own and our loved ones’ final moments, ensuring peace of mind for everyone involved.
• How encouraging discussions about death and dying can foster a deeper understanding of life and personal resilience.
• The realm of emotional well-being practices to shape a healthy, emotionally rich life.
• Yvonne's approach to successfully launch and market a book, helping her share her story with the world. This approach can help you share your story too. 

The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - Introduction to "Dying with Dad", 
00:02:05 - Becoming Comfortable with Talking About Death, 
00:05:36 - The Elephant in the Living Room, 
00:06:39 - The Beautiful Conversation with Yvonne's Father, 
00:11:28 - Fulfilling Yvonne's Father's Final Wish, 
00:18:08 - Launching "Dying with Dad", 
00:21:28 - Protecting Emotional Well-being, 
00:25:00 - Self-Care for Readers, 
00:27:12 - Importance of the Message, 

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• Purchase the book Dying With Dad: Tough Talks for Easier Endings by Yvonne Caputo on Amazon to learn more about her journey of discussing end-of-life wishes with her father. https://ingeniumbooks.com/0d8s
• Write a review of the book on Amazon to share your thoughts and help others discover its valuable insights.
• Follow Yvonne Caputo on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to stay updated on her work and future projects.
• Consider booking Yvonne Caputo as a speaker for your event or organization to learn more about the importance of discussing end-of-life wishes and navigating difficult conversations.
• Check out Yvonne Caputo's page on the Ingenium Books' website to learn more about her other books. https://ingeniumbooks.com/yvonne-caputo/
• Research The Five Wishes, an advanced directive with a heart, to understand how it can help you communicate your end-of-life preferences to your loved ones and medical professionals.

Transcript

00:00:00 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
You really excited to be joined today on the author podcast by bestselling author Yvonne Caputo to talk about her second book, which is called Dying with dad tough Talks for Easier Endings. And if you've been around our podcast or are familiar with Ingenium Books, you will be familiar with Yvonne Caputo because she's been in our stable of authors for a number of years. Dying with dad is her second book, within Ingenium Books, and that follows the book Flying with dad, which I did say when Yvonne and I were chatting before we got started, that I didn't want to talk too much about flying with dad because this is all about dying with dad. And here I go, introducing it right off the bat.

00:01:23 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yvonne, welcome.

00:01:25 - Yvonne Caputo
Thank you. Good to be here.

00:01:27 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Thank you so much. So, Dying With Dad: Tough Talks for Easier Endings, you're probably getting pretty good at this by now because you've been a podcast rock star, being on podcasts all over the place. But tell me and tell our listeners what the book is about.

00:01:46 - Yvonne Caputo
Well, I have to reference Flying with Dad because people who read that first book of mine were intrigued about how I could have a conversation or multiple conversations with my father about what he wanted when the end came. And so that led me to write Dying with Dad, and it's basically my journey of how I became comfortable with talking about the subject of Dying with Dad. Part of it I'm a psychotherapist part of it is that I worked in a retirement community when I was there. There were residents who were in. This is strange. But dying to talk about somebody to somebody, about wanting to go. So, my career led me to be more comfortable. It also led me to The Five Wishes, an advanced directive with heart and for your audience. An advanced directive is the document that lets the medical profession know and social workers know what it is that you want when the end comes. How much medical care do you want? Do you not want? But The Five Wishes goes beyond that in a really beautiful way, and when I discovered that document, I knew that it was something that I had to sit down and do with my father.

00:03:19 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Now, your father wasn't necessarily the easiest guy to talk to about Heart to Heart matters. Do I have that right?

00:03:25 - Yvonne Caputo
Yes. My dad was greatest generation to the core. A sense of duty, a sense of honor, a roof over our head, food on the table there every night when I went to sleep closer to his sons because they could go fishing and hunting and those kinds of things, but not quite sure what to do with a daughter. And then he had this really sensitive one, me, who wanted that kind of closeness with her dad and couldn't seem to find a way to get in. But that did happen. Here we go back to the first book and the writing of flying with dad, because that was the instrument that let my father trust me in this incredible way, so that when it came time to talk to him about what he wanted, in the end, we had the relationship that I needed to do it.

00:04:31 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Which is quite miraculous, actually. So congratulations on that, because I think that is something that challenges many people, and you were able to do kind of a turnaround, oh, if I want things to be different, I'm going to have to do something different. So you did the walk the talk kind of thing, as opposed to digging in and waiting for your dad to do something different to change the way he was, which is I think that's a really important lesson. But okay, so back to Dying with dad. It's a different kind of a book than Flying with dad, digging deeper into this concept of death and dying. And people one of the reasons that I think this is an important book with an important message is that people don't want to talk about it. People just don't want to talk. It's hard.

00:05:25 - Yvonne Caputo
It is. Now, whether it's the first chapter or one of the big in the beginning, I don't remember, but there is a chapter there called The Elephant in the Living Room. And doing some research, found out that this is a phrase that goes way, way back, but I first came across it in drug and alcohol treatment, that there is someone who is suffering from alcoholism. People know it, but it's the elephant in the Living Room. It's there, but nobody wants to talk about it. And the same thing is true about death and dying. None of us is going to get out of here alive. I mean, that's the reality. Death and taxes, okay, so it's there, and it's something that we need to talk about. So it's something that we need to push ourselves to make sure that that happens. Now, one of the things that I can say is it's the most beautiful, rewarding, spiritual mysterious conversation I have ever had in my life. My father sitting on his hospital bed, legs over the side, his gown gaping in the back, so that people can see when they're walking past. He could have cared less. Me sitting beside him in the warmth of where he had just been. And I bring this document out, and I say, this is something dad, we need to talk about. Is that okay? And The Five Wishes makes it so easy because it lays out in the beginning who dad wanted as his healthcare agent. He chose me and then my sister and brother. Then he was able, question by question, to say, no, I don't want that. Do I want that? When it came to medical issues and for dad, he kept saying, if I'm not going to be able to have any kind of quality of life, let me go. And that covered feeding tubes and resuscitation and all those kind of clinical kinds of things. But where The Five Wishes really differed was how did he want to be remembered? He wanted to be remembered for his work with the Red Cross. I was only thought no, I thought it was his participation in World War II and dropping bombs over France and Germany and that wasn't it at all. And of course, I found out much later on when I was doing research for the first book, that he spent 41 years working with the Red Cross. So no wonder he wanted to be remembered in that way. It also talked about how he wanted his funeral to be. So he was very clear. He wanted a high Mass in the Roman Catholic Church. He wanted the children and grandchildren to choose whatever scripture wanted to be read. He did not want people to get up and speak about him. He said in his inimitable way, if they haven't talked about me to my face, then they damn well better not do it when I'm dead. Something to that effect. Okay? So he was very clear about those kinds of things, what he wanted us children to know. He wanted us to know that he loved us. He wanted us to know that he was proud of the people that we had become. So here's this paper document full of all of these kinds of things. So that when the time came and I was with dad, we lived on opposite sides of the state. Took me 7 hours to drive home. 2 hours after I get there, he's on the floor. I call the EMTs, they come. They did tell me that it didn't look good this time. And I said I brought out the five wishes. And one of the EMT said, well those won't work. They're too old. I don't believe that's. Now, true, but I had already talked to the hospital when dad was in the hospital the days before to make sure that there was a DNR on his chart, a Do Not Resuscitate order current. So I called the unit that dad was on and I said, they're bringing him into the hospital. Get the DNR over to the emergency room. The blessed emergency room. Doctor called the EMTs a minute after that request and said you can stop working on him at this point. He was out at the end of the bed, laying on his back. And I laid down beside him, put my arm across his chest, started talking in his ear, and told him I loved him, that I missed him, that I would miss him rather, that it was okay for him to go, that he would be with my mother. And then as a family, whenever we were at Mass together, hands would be held during the Lord's Prayer. So I said the Lord's Prayer in his ear, and he was gone. He was gone. And throughout this process of talking to dad, one of the things that he would say very frequently is, I want to be carried feet first out of my home. And that's exactly what happened. Now, northwestern Pennsylvania, the snows coming down an inch an hour. Beautiful, soft lakes. The EMTs put him on a gurney, took him out to put him into the ambulance. We're going to the Er to have dad pronounced. When I looked at his face and the flakes falling on his face, there was this soft, sweet smile that said, I'm where I want to be. It happened the way I wanted it. And I felt such joy. So if you can imagine, I'm throwing my fists in the air in the V signal, the Victory signal, and going and the EMTs are looking at me like I'd lost whatever head I might have had. And I said to them, you have given my dad his final wish. He wanted to go feet first. And that's what happened.

00:12:32 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
So that's pretty powerful in a number of ways. I'm thinking about this is a payoff, really, that you did something difficult, and the payoff is twofold. Your father was listened to and validated, really, and so were you.

00:13:04 - Yvonne Caputo
Absolutely.

00:13:05 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
In that sense. I know this part of the story, but you have the two perspectives to compare. You have the death of your mother and your experience with that. You did not do the five wishes with her circumstances, and all kinds of things were different, but can you just talk about that a little bit? So this experience of what the grief is difficult, it's individual. There's no prescription for how long it's supposed to last or any of that, but you really had two very different experiences. Can you just talk about that a little bit? And then I've got some other questions to take us in a bit of a different direction.

00:13:51 - Yvonne Caputo
Sure. So mom was in the early stages of dementia. She and I had had a conversation a month prior to her death where she turned and looked at me and said, Yvonne, I want to go. And I sat up and put my feet flat on the floor and took a deep breath and said, mom, tell me. And she said, I'm not doing stuff I like. I hurt all the time. I physically hurt all the time. And she said, I know I don't remember things and I'm scared. So I said to Mom, I think I understand, and you're just not doing what you love doing. And know that I will miss you, but talk to God and you and God decide when is the right time. So mom was then maybe a month later, put in the hospital. Her dementia was getting so bad that she was very difficult to deal with. Dad wasn't sleeping at night because she would come and pull on his toe because she thought he was dead. It was just really awful. So her doctor said, I want to see if we can't get her on some medications that will keep her calmer. And he also said to dad, he said, you can't do this. You need some sleep. You need some rest. So the last conversation that I had with my mother on the phone, she was screaming at me, get me out of here, Yvonne. Get me out of here. And luckily for all of us, she died that night. She died in her sleep. Now, here's this beautiful angel, this social butterfly, this gardener with roses blooming, who dies alone in a clinically antiseptic, smells like cleaning fluid.

00:15:55 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Hospital.

00:15:58 - Yvonne Caputo
And when I saw the five wishes and knew what it could do, I said, here's an opportunity for me to at least try, because I know Dad's end is coming sometime to see if we can't do something different. So that's my mother's story and that compared to my father's story, are polar opposites.

00:16:26 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And what you feel, what was your grief experience like between the two experiences?

00:16:33 - Yvonne Caputo
I was so angry at my mother. My grief was a trip of absolute anger. How dare she die alone? And I believe that we choose when we're going to go. I think there is some choice. And later on, much later on, I came to understand that mom wanted to do it alone. She didn't want anybody to see her go. And hospice people will tell you that that's the case. So that's mom, and then here's dad, and here's dad, and we did the document, and he went the way he wanted to, and the smile on his face was beatific. It was totally different. So I don't grieve the loss of my father in the same way I grieve the loss of my mother and my brother. Totally different. Sure, there's a missing and boy, sometimes I just let it out and cry like a baby. But there's also this joy that's attached to it of being so intimately involved with this beautiful man that we came to love each other in such a wonderful way.

00:17:51 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Well, congratulations on it all, on having the conversation, on the results that you achieved both for yourself and your father through his end of life experience and for a pretty exciting launch period for publishing the book Dying With Dad. So you very close to launch day, published day, which was jeez, I can't remember what the date was. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. But you achieved bestseller status, number one new release in a couple of categories, and you were an Amazon bestseller in a couple of categories, and the book continues to do well. So that is a congratulations. Now I want to talk to you a little bit now, switching hats from what the book is about to what your process was, the process that you went through with respect to launching the book. So I'd like to talk about that a little bit and get your perspective on because this was different between book one and book two. So how did you approach the launch of Dying with dad?

00:19:02 - Yvonne Caputo
Well, I hired a marketing team, and together, Ingenium Books is my marketing team. We set out the kinds of things that I needed to do the podcasts, the setting up a private Facebook group, putting posts on in terms of what was going on with the book and encouraging people to write reviews. It was a total, and still is a total marketing strategy to hit all kinds of different avenues. For example, I'll be talking to a library I've done for the first time, a Ingenium Books, podcasts, interviews, you name it. I am pitching to conferences, to national conferences to be able to talk about my experience, because obviously I so believe that my experience is an experience that I can share with others. Yes, and others can share with their loved ones.

00:20:23 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, well, you've done a fantastic job. And even though you've hired help for this, I also can attest to the fact that you did your own share of heavy lifting on that front. So you're a passionate advocate for meaningful conversations. And there's a thread from the message in Dying With dad about dig deep and have the tough talk for an easier ending. That's the subtitle. That thread carries through what you do as a psychotherapist, and it carries through how you behaved and handled yourself as a teacher and in your career in the retirement community. But that doesn't mean that you have an easy time talking about this. So one of the things that comes along with promoting and marketing the book Dying with dad is you're talking about death and your dad's death all the time. Tell me about how you are working to protect yourself from the repeated emotional exposure to that.

00:21:41 - Yvonne Caputo
It isn't easy, and I will admit that. And knowing my own physical constitution, I know when I'm being told, hey, you need to put some brakes on here. So I'm very much a believer in exercise. I am very much a believer in yoga and stretching. I am very much a believer in breath work. So in 1972 this is really strange, but in 1972, I took my first high level wellness course. Now, this is way before anybody was even talking about wellness, but my clinical supervisor, when I was trying to get my certification and license, was really into wellness. And he taught a high level wellness course at a local university and I took it. So self care has been on my agenda since 1972 and so I practice all of those things. And I will also admit that I know when I'm on a thin thread and I pick up the phone and call my therapist and say I need a tune up, I need a tune up. Those are the kinds of things that I do. I also have to remind myself that the book not only is about meaningful conversations, but it's about divine paradox. And that's very much something that I talk to my clients about. Sound mental health is the ability to contain the paradox. Now that's a headful. You can and you can't, you will and you won't. It isn't and isn't on one side there's the negative and on the other side there's the positive. And trying to keep those in balance is what mental health is all about. Life isn't easy. M. Scott Peck of The Road Less Travel once you accept that life isn't easy, it makes it easier. So life isn't easy. That's the one side of the paradox. But the other side of the paradox is getting through what isn't easy is what brings joy. Getting through what isn't easy is what brings self awareness and self satisfaction and compassion and all kinds of things. So I have to keep that in mind. And I also have to recognize when I need a break, when I need to put it aside, that I can't do it anymore, I can't talk about it anymore. It's time to actually I am weeding a spot in our garden that is so overwhelmed with weeds and it's tough work and it's sweaty work, but when I'm doing it, I can't think about anything else except pulling weeds. So it takes me out of myself for a specific period of time.

00:24:54 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And this is important because it's important for a bunch of reasons. But the message in Dying with Dad for the reader who is looking for maybe a way to approach the impending death of a loved one or family friend or something like that, and is interested in some guidance on how to have conversations that would be meaningful and discover what that loved one actually wants around the end of their life. They are preparing to have that conversation a single time within a within a time frame. I mean, obviously we have more than one death to face in each of our lives, but it's really at this particular time and then months or years later, it may happen again. You're having these conversations several times a week so that self care piece can apply to the person reading the book in terms of how to handle that emotional thing. But it is kind of on steroids for you. So I appreciate the fact that you are once again sitting here with me and talking about this on this podcast because I believe that the message is important. And then one other quick thing is that you and I have had the conversation about the divine paradox a number of times. And you may have noticed this, but it just hit me that your subtitle encapsulates that paradox. Tough talks for easier endings. Yeah. Okay, final question before we run out of our self imposed, totally arbitrary time schedule. And that is, what role does the belief in the importance of the message play in your willingness to put yourself through talking about this again and again and again?

00:27:12 - Yvonne Caputo
It's core. It's absolutely central for anyone who's in social service work, for anyone who cares about people. For me, after I had done some therapy very early on, I thought about that. My passion was helping people to cope. To cope. And that comes from meaningful conversations. So what drives me to continue to preach the book is that if there's one, just one person who gets something out of this, but having it be in a book, there is this potential that many and so that's what I latch on to. Okay? Every time I have a conversation, every time I bring it up, there are more people that are hearing this and more people who will then possibly and actually, I already know it's true, because people have gotten back to me and have said, you know, my parents have come to me and they have wanted to talk about this, but I have shut them down. I won't do that anymore. Others have come to me who are elderly and said, I never thought about this before. It's time for me to do it for reviewers of my book who say that they have purchased the five wishes and they have done it with their family. I mean, what more could I ask for? So I have to keep that central to the number of times that I have to talk about a subject that's hard to talk about.

00:29:00 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. Okay. Yvonne Caputo, author of the best selling book Dying with Dad: Tough Talks for Easier Endings. And Yvonne is available to keep talking about this. So if you would like to recommend a podcast to Yvonne or you're a conference organizer or something like that, Yvonne is available to come and attend and talk libraries, that sort of thing. And you can find Yvonne Yvonne@Yvonnecaputo.com. Or you can visit Yvonne's author page on Ingenium Books website that is Ingenium Books.com/yvonne-caputo. And in the show notes, we will include those links. And once again, Yvonne, thank you very much for joining us and continued good success with your book.

00:29:51 - Yvonne Caputo
Thank you.

00:29:53 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of Ingenium Books podcast, please, like, share and subscribe subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. But also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel, where you can see these episodes in addition to hearing them.