Interviewing Quick Guide

In this series, I intend to share my knowledge and experiences. This first book, Interviewing Quick Guide: The Art and Craft, is intended to help writers and other interviewers and their subjects have the best interviewing experience as possible. I hope you en-joy the book and the process.

You might wonder why I would write a book like this. It dawned on me some time ago that there is an art to conducting an interview. I have been a writer for over 40 years and have my own marketing company, Convey Media Group. We help clients, especially independent authors and innovators, with social media and video as well as branding and other traditional marketing. In retrospect, I realize I have been interviewing folks for most of those years whether gathering software requirements as a technical writing in a major corporation or while working as a video producer for promotional videos.

I ran the video committee for the Digital Marketing For Business conference and our group did video interviews with most of the speakers. As I worked with my committee members, some were more comfortable handling these interviews than others. Some interviewers felt more in their element because they had an understanding of the technology. Others seemed to draw comfort from their ability to prepare ques-tions that would set the interviewee at ease.

I realized that there were a few tips and techniques that helped many of the interviewers. This book is my attempt to share some of that knowledge with you so you can up your game the next time you do an in-terview. Although we did not find any hard and fast rules, the experience did provide some important clues to increase the interviewer’s comfort and run smoother sessions.