Now that so many people are broke, along come piles of books eager to show us how to save money. So are books that promise to save your finances worth the investment? FIONA McCANNfinds out
YOU MAY find yourself down to your last few pennies, but several publishers are eager to compete for them with new titles aimed at money-conscious consumers flailing in a brand new economy. A quick glance at the Eason’s business section reveals the usual smattering of old and new names, with celebrity business gurus fighting for space alongside sober-looking financial annuals and motivational speakers eager to help you maximise your fiscal potential.
But in a financial climate in constant flux, with new information persistently replacing the old, how do you know which of the titles on offer deserves your hard-earned cash? And who among them is actually making money from their money-making counsel, and proving popular with penny-pinching punters?
According to Stephen Boylan, books purchasing manager at Easons, the big sellers every year include Colm Rapple's annual money guide, the latest being Family Finance2010 (Squirrel Press, €11.95), and the Finance Annual(Gill & Macmillan, €10.99) from John Lowe, the "Money Doctor".
But according to Boylan, guides to managing money have always sold consistently, boom or boost. “They sell very well every year. When we had loads of money they were selling well, and now they’re still selling well . . . I think whenever the budget comes out, people are always wanting to see what the effect will be on them, and so they buy the books.”
For Boylan, it’s an area where Irish publishers compete well. “It’s a very fertile ground for Irish publishers because we have different tax systems and a different monetary system to the UK.”
New on the block this month from Chartered Accountants Ireland is an ominously red-covered tome by accountant Neil Hughes, called Beating the Recession: the Seven Cs of Business Recovery(€14.95). It also comes stamped with the promise: "This book could save the life of your company."
Hughes’s book is centred on his seven Cs, namely: counsel, which covers the need to take advice from those who can look at your business from an independent and dispassionate perspective, and from the holy trinity of accountant, lawyer and banker; communication, which outlines how to communicate with lenders and creditors effectively in order to gain goodwill and time; cooperation, which means ensuring your staff and co-workers are kept in the loop and can help assist recovery; clarity (of purpose), which tells business owners of the need to restructure the business given the new financial climate; costs, which centres on cost-cutting measures and advice on how to deal with compulsory redundancies; cash, which discusses cash control and credit controllers for businesses eager to keep their doors open; and customers, which reminds businesses of who is always right.
So is this the kind of advice a small business owner might appreciate? “I buy books like that all the time,” admits Jack Murray, managing director of Mediacontact.ie, an online media contacts directory.
“If you buy a book like that you pick up ideas, and learn and improve what you do.” So how does he decide which ones merit his hard-earned cash? “The way I choose what I buy is there are two or three American business writers who blog about business books that they read.
“In Amazon, I look at the recommendations, where it tells you ‘People who bought this book also bought . . . ’.” He admits he tends towards American writers but doesn’t rule out Irish books. So would he consider Hughes’s seven Cs as beneficial reading, given a brief outline of the premise of Beating the Recession?
“The one C he’s missing that’s crucial in my mind is creativity,” says Murray. “Most of the stuff that’s worked for us are things that have a creative element in them. You need to do things that have a little bit of flair and creativity, throwing out the bland and the ordinary, because they’re not going to work now. It’s about being remarkable; you have to try hard to capture people’s imagination.”
Hot on the heels of Hughes’s book is a new release from Eddie Hobbs, whose latest focus is the energy crisis, and the looming consequences of rising oil prices for Irish consumers and investors.
Hobbs talks readers through investing in commodities funds, makes his case for the imminence of peak oil, and advises that “green energy is where the real loot will be made”, although he adds that investors should choose carefully within this sector.
Should we pay heed to Hobbs? “I haven’t read his book, but I have looked a lot at the peak oil theory,” says PJ King, a renewable energy investor. “The story with it is that nobody knows for sure, but I would have to say that there is more likely to be something to it than not.”
King also cautions against jumping on the green energy wagon without doing some serious investigation. “I don’t think anyone would be surprised to think that we are going to have to restructure the way that energy is produced and consumed on earth in the next hundred years,” he says. “You have to be wary of jumping too quickly on some green investments. Picking the sector and picking a winner is not actually the same thing.”
If neither of the above books convinces the cash-cautious to part with their pennies, however, there are plenty of other goodies on offer, including our own Conor Pope's Stop Wasting Your Money(Liberties Press, €9.99), and motivational speaker Kevin Kelly's Basics Before Buzz(€14.99), which promises to teach business owners how to "exceptionalise" their service, jump-start creativity in the workplace and "tap into your innate potential and achieve a compelling vision." International names also pull in the punters, according to Boylan, who points to Duncan Bannatyne's latest How to Be Smart with Your Time(Orion, €13.99) which advises readers on how to get the most of time, how to identify goals and then reach them, and also promises to teach them to make quick, smart decisions. It follows on from his book How to Be Smart with Your Money, and clocks in at under 200 pages, guaranteeing at least a relatively speedy read.
The other big sellers are biographies of renowned business people, such as Richard Branson's many books, or Hank Paulson's On the Brink(Headline, €19.50), the former US treasury secretary's personal account of how the US navigated the economy nosedive.
If all of the above fail, and you still haven’t read yourself out of the recession, all is not lost. There’s clearly one business still booming in these challenging times: the recession-busting book business. If you can come up with an alliterative formula, find a celebrity to slap on the cover, or invent a new metaphor for frugality or financial success, you might be on to a winner.
