The KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) interface is not what you’d call a thing of beauty. It’s fine. But it’s pretty clunky. Listening to The Creative Penn podcast this week (while grinding out a treadmill run) I heard Joanna Penn mention BookReport, a new way to analyse Kindle sales data. I looked it up immediately I […]
Continue readingA milestone today: the 50th episode of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast. It doesn’t seem 50 minutes since I was hovering over the ‘publish’ button for episode 1, wondering whether I’d hooked up the plumbing correctly between LibSyn, iTunes and the WordPress site. 50 days was the point at which I realised there was […]
Continue readingToday’s blog post is over at Birds on the Blog: http://birdsontheblog.co.uk/thank-terrifying-things/ I’ve come to welcome that flutter of anxiety, the sensation of shrinking inside and vertigo that is how I experience fear. Now I try to breathe into it, to welcome it as an infallible sign that I’m on the brink of a marvellous new adventure. […]
Continue readingThis morning’s run (day 167) took me through the churchyard of St James’s church here in Bramley. I’ve always loved running through graveyards (in bright sunlight, obviously, I’m not sure I’d be so keen on a dark night): the stark contrast of on the one hand a profound sense of being alive, here and now, […]
Continue readingToday, the last day of half term, I took the kids up to Oxford to meet up with one of my first authors: Judy Hayman. Judy is the mother of my best friend from university days, Kate. Edinburgh was a long way from my home but just down the road for Kate, and over the […]
Continue readingOne of my bootcampers impressed me this week with a quite brilliant idea: she’s carving out one day a week to focus on her book, and on that day she puts an out-of-office autoresponse on her email. But instead of a generic ‘I’ll get back to you tomorrow’ message, she took the opportunity to explain […]
Continue readingToday’s blog is over at BookMachine: https://bookmachine.org/2017/02/22/jvs-affiliates-better-together/. It’s a fact of life – of my life certainly, and I’m pretty sure yours too – that you can’t do everything on your own. Sometimes you need to bring specific skills and experience into the business by recruiting, sometimes you need to partner with another company, such as […]
Continue readingIt’s half term here in Hampshire, but I managed to bribe the kids to stay quiet long enough to allow me to fit in a fabulous podcast interview today with Tim Harford, aka The Undercover Economist, presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less, columnist for the FT, and author of Messy: How To be Creative and […]
Continue readingThe Full Monty is one of my all-time favourite films. I love that triumphant freeze-frame finish, as the hats that were preserving the last shreds of modesty are flung aside and six blokes stand there butt-naked while the room goes wild. Nowhere to hide, nothing left to the imagination. In the This Book Means Business […]
Continue readingI had an interesting conversation today with a fellow-runner today about cutural norms in different countries. One that particularly came to mind was escalator etiquette on the London underground, which is a particular obsession of mine. I am one of those people who get irrationally enraged at people who stand on the left – a […]
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