I have been warned that all press releases should be capped at 400 words maximum. I was told to say how my life experiences provided the material that would interest anybody in reading the book.
The problem is that I could not reduce the text to under 650 words. Now you know why the first book was 400 pages and this one 616 pages. If I continue the cycle, my next book will be 832 pages, published at age 94.
Years ago, when I took on too much work and needed an editorial assistant, I sought help from the Cara Community. Thirty minutes later, I received an email, “I want to be that guy.” I asked for a reference. He replied, “My name is Wally Exman, and you might know me as the editor of Peanuts.” I am not often taken aback, but in that case, I fell off my chair. Before he died, we had become friends.
With the help of another long-time member of the Cara Community, I reduced my original book promo from 651 words to 481, as follows:
At the age of 80, the Trader Wizard Bill Cara’s new book “Stock Market Literacy” is based on his long career as a securities industry insider.
Cara joined the industry in 1981, and by 1986 he had founded and built the eastern Canada full-service broker-dealer operations of Canaccord, the biggest non-bank-owned competitor in the industry. After years of semi-retirement in the Bahamas, he returned to Canada as the system designer and CEO for the start-up of Qtrade Investor, the electronic broker most frequently rated #1 by Canada’s Report on Business. At 62, he founded the Cara Community, named by Forbes magazine “Best of the Web.” At 65, he became a Bahamas-licensed securities investment advisor with a worldwide clientele. The following year his first book, “Lessons from the Trader Wizard” received outstanding reviews. At 77, he passed the SEC Series 65 to become a Financial Advisor in Florida.
Bill Cara acted in many roles as advisor, negotiator, and intermediator during his professional career. In 1987, he joined the Government of Ontario Task Force that reviewed the Canadian unlisted securities market problems. That year, the Government of Canada retained him to negotiate a substantial transaction with the commercial agent of the People’s Republic of China. He also toured three Asian countries promoting investing and trading with Canada’s international trade commissioner. In the early 1990s, in South Africa, Prince Buthelezi named Bill as financial advisor of the Zulu Nation. Also, in the 1990s, the Bahamas Prime Minister asked Bill to save the British Colonial Hotel in Nassau, which became the Hilton after Bill brought in the architect and developer. In 1996, Bill introduced the head of Russia’s central bank gold trading and the chair of a leading bank of Russia to the head of the Bank of Canada international trading operations and several prominent Toronto broker-dealers.
Also, in the late-1990s, the Canadian Securities Administrators named Bill as the public’s sole representative at their forum to establish guidelines for electronic trading in Canada. The Senate of Canada Banking Committee Task Force then selected Bill to represent the public in a national hearing on the future of Canada’s financial services industry. In 2007, the SEC invited Bill to join a committee educating investors. In 2009, the head of the Communist Party of Cuba asked Bill and his wife Pat to Havana to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the revolution.
Never one to take political sides, in 2011, the former Deputy General Secretary of the China Mining Association and Vice-Chairman of the Geological Society of China arranged for Bill’s consulting appointment to introduce the ranking number two geologist in China to North American mining company CEOs.
With his new book, Bill continues to educate and empower investors to become market-fluent and independent of Wall Street. His motto is, “Principal owners of capital must take control back from the all-powerful, self-interested, and conflicted robber barons of the financial services industry.”