Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got (What To Do When Times Are Tough) By Jay Abraham Piatkus £12.99 (UK)

If you are fishing at 40 degrees below freezing, the fish will be frozen solid when it is pulled through the ice. Obvious enough. But a fur trader in Labrador - Clarence Birdseye - noticed the fish were tender and moist when thawed, almost as good as freshly-caught.

The quick-freezing process pioneered by Birdseye produced frozen food that could be sold to consumers. The rest is history.

Jay Abraham's point is that you should be on the lookout for new ways to improve your business performance by capitalising on what has always been seen as a limitation.

Getting Everything You Can is that peculiar American recipe of pop psychology and apple-pie analysis and How To Win Friends And Influence People springs to mind on opening its pages. But if this "you too can be a Henry Ford" tone grates on our sceptical European perspective, it is sobering to see numerous examples of fortunes being made by making an obvious connection.

For example, the modern flush toilet was invented in 1775 but nobody thought of toilet paper until 1857. There was ice cream in 2000BC but we had to wait 3,900 years for the ice-cream cone. Meat precedes civilisation, bread was baked in 2600BC but it took 4,300 years to put the two together.

Abraham is keen to stress his message applies to everybody and not just to salespeople. He says everyone is in sales. You need to sell yourself and your ideas to increase your income, success and influence.

The name of the game is finding out what you do or can start doing that gives you an edge over the competition. This is the "unique selling proposition" - the distinct idea that sets your business apart. There is no shortage of advice from Abraham on how to do this. Like all good recipe book writers, he does this simply and in detail.

If you are one of those timid souls who pales at the thought of ever going online, Getting Everything You Can provides step-by-step tips. Abraham says the most important thing to remember about success on the Net is forgetting about technology - it is simply a powerful but different type of marketing vehicle.

We should think of the Internet as the cheapest printing press in the world, which allows businesses to deliver a message around the clock, without having to fork out. And he reminds us that everything online is changing so fast that assumptions made today may be outdated in a heartbeat.

Abraham provides useful examples of how business people profited by doing what he told them to do, although it is a pity he felt compelled to change the names.

Most unusually, he takes account of non-material riches and says you can't get what you want until you know what it is. He happily cites the example of an airport shuttle driver who was happy with his job because he and his girlfriend didn't have to share work problems in the evening.

Getting Everything You Can would be indispensable if it delivered on making you richer for reading it, but you have to take account of hard sell and there is no shortage of it here.

But if this book isn't anything exceptional, it is a pretty good marketing primer.

jmulqueen@irish-times.ie