Online dating expert Laurie Davis releases debut book

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Laurie Davis has always been a risk taker at heart.

She took a risk while at Canton High School in going out for the school musicals, and she later took a bigger risk when she left college early to get a jumpstart on her career — a decision that led to a series of “amazing and life-changing” opportunities in the fields of marketing, business, and the performing arts.

Laurie Davis (Michelle Kinney Photography)

Perhaps for this reason Davis did not panic when her once promising gig as a Fortune 500 marketing consultant started to show cracks during the global recession of the late 2000s. Instead she saw the writing on the wall and decided to “pivot,” reinventing herself as an online dating guru after a bit of late-night soul searching.

“I realized that I had been helping people date online for years, and I had all of these success stories already,” recalled Davis, a 2000 CHS graduate and a self-proclaimed early adopter who “grew up in chat rooms and on Instant Messenger.”

Starting in 2009 with only “50 bucks and a Twitter account,” Davis launched eFlirt Expert, an online dating consultancy dedicated to helping singles “navigate the vast and often confusing intersection of dating and technology.”

Over the past three years, Davis has helped hundreds of clients, ranging in age from 19 to 70, market their single selves online and find “meaningful, in-person dating experiences.” She has since hired a roster of online dating coaches and has been profiled in numerous national media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Good Morning America, and Entrepreneur Magazine, among others.

Just this past week, Davis took the next big leap in her professional life with the release of her first book, Love @ First Click: The Ultimate Guide to Online Dating.

Published by Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, Love @ First Click offers online daters a how-to manual for finding love on the web, from “choosing the right site, creating a profile, and navigating dates, to logging off with their perfect match.” Inspired by Davis’ own personal successes and failures, the book also offers tips on how to flirt through text and email, how to balance multiple matches, and how to stay safe both online and off.

Davis said she got “tons of interest” in the book from several different publishers; however, she decided early on to “stop dating other people” and sign with Simon and Schuster.

Love @ First Click was released January 8.

“I knew from the moment I went to Simon and Schuster that they were going to be the one for me,” she said, “because they really got the digital aspect of it and really allowed me to spread my digital wings. At the same time, everything I’ve done has been so digital that it seems like a more dramatic milestone to have a book to hold in my hands.”

Davis said the early buzz about the book has been very positive, although she stopped short of predicting any sales figures.

“This is such a labor of love for me,” she said. “I’ve put so much heart into it that it will at least be [a success] to me and hopefully to the readers as well. What matters to me most is that it impacts people with their love lives.”

And unlike some writers who see a how-to manual as a path to easy money, Davis actually practices what she preaches, having dated online for more than a decade after posting her first profile on match.com at the tender age of 19.

“I had always been really fascinated with technology in general,” she said, “and then I realized you could meet people beyond your friends every day online, too. And I just kind of grew my social life that way.”

At the time, Davis recalled how there was a stigma attached to meeting people online, and for many years she kept her virtual persona a secret from her friends and family members.

“There were no blogs back then,” she noted. “There was really no one to talk about online dating other than people online. You couldn’t tell your friends. It was really a secretive thing.”

Nevertheless, Davis said she’s “had a blast and met some really great people,” eventually learning her way around the web on her own. And as online dating became more socially acceptable, she started convincing her friends to try it, helping them to write their own profiles and teaching them the “ins and outs” of the online dating scene.

Recently, Davis used her digital savvy to find love in her own life, meeting fiancé Thomas Edwards on Twitter, of all places.

Edwards, a Hyde Park native, also happens to be a dating coach, although his specialty is helping people offline with their confidence and communication skills through a venture he calls The Professional Wing Man.

Davis had noticed Edwards on Twitter while perusing the dating section, thought he was “really cute” and insightful, and sent him a message suggesting that they meet up. The pair then quickly hit it off, and their romance blossomed over the next several months.

“Life comes full circle in so many ways,” said Davis. “I started in an AOL chat room talking to my friends in high school, and I ended up meeting my fiancé on Twitter. We even outlined the last chapter of my book together. It’s about how you can continue using technology to develop your current relationship.”

The chapter focuses on how to be a “2.0 couple,” and Davis and Edwards are perhaps the poster couple for incorporating digital communication into their love lives. Both have seen their dating businesses take off in recent years, and both divide their time between New York and Boston, although Davis works with clients all over the U.S. and beyond.

At the same time, Davis describes herself as a “Canton gal through and through,” and she regularly goes home to see her parents, Rob and Lorraine Davis — two Canton High School sweethearts who met the old-fashioned way.

Davis actually wrote half of Love @ First Click while in Canton and the surrounding area, and she is planning a book party in her hometown for sometime in February (details are forthcoming).

As for the book itself, Davis encourages all singles, regardless of their age or comfort level with technology, to at least give it a try.

“This book is full of tips and tricks,” she said, “but at the end of the day it’s about meeting the right one. And you might meet the right one at a 7-11 or at a bar or at a grocery store, but the truth is that today, you might meet them on Facebook or on a dating site — or even on Twitter, like I met my fiancé.”

Love @ First Click is available now in bookstores and online at www.eflirtexpert.com/loveatfirstclick. For information on Davis’ upcoming book tour, go to www.eflirtexpert.com/tour.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=18280

Posted by Jay Turner on Jan 10 2013. Filed under News. Both comments and pings are currently closed.