Tomorrow my 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge kicks off – over 10 days I’ll take a group of business people and would-be authors step by step through the proposal document, helping them to clarify their thinking about their book idea, target readership, competition and so on. I first ran this challenge in June ane while […]
Continue readingI recently gave a talk at a weminar with a ‘secrets and spies’ theme. My brief was to talk about ‘succes and agility’ – obvioulsy I tunred to 007 for inspiration. (The best-looking slide deck I’ve ever put together.) Here’s a sneak peek, from my BookMachine blog… What is James Bond’s most effective weapon? Could […]
Continue readingThis week’s Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast episode features Giles Colborne, one of the world’s leading experts in user experience. His book Simple and Usable is, as you might expect, utterly beautiful from a design perspective. I asked him about the parallels between user experience design and writing: AJ: It made me laugh when you […]
Continue readingI’ve always loved the Northern word ‘canny’. There’s a calculating edge to it, but in a wholesome, no-nonsense, practical sort of a way, rather than any underhand scheming. It’s not a bad word to describe my approaching to writing, either. Here’s a bit of etymology for all you word geeks out there: Can (modal verb) […]
Continue readingThis is Day 1 of a who-knows-how-long-streak. Here’s the blog post that kicked it all off: the decision to commit to run and blog every day emerged in the process of writing this article… http://birdsontheblog.co.uk/what-seth-and-ron-taught-me-about-streaking/ And it’s all Seth Godin’s fault.
Continue readingRachel Bridge, author of Ambition: Why it’s good to want more and how to get it, is an extraordinary woman. I interviewed her on the Extraordinary Book Club Podcast recently, and her energetic, creative approach to writing made me reflect on how things are changing across the board. Rachel and I hooked up in the […]
Continue readingMight online bookstores one day become passé? The social web is where we share ideas and consume content, and increasingly it’s where we purchase, too. In the Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast this week I talk to Marcus Woodburn, Vice President Digital Products at Ingram Content Group, about Aer.io, their new social selling tool (Ingram was an early […]
Continue readingIt’s a terrible irony of nonfiction publishing that the people with the most interesting things to say are often too busy actually doing their thing to sit down and write a book about it. Business leaders are not natural writers, at least not usually. They’re often great communicators, especially on a conference stage or in […]
Continue reading…I’m naturally a publisher, not a writer: I’m an extrovert, I get my energy from connecting and engaging with others, not sitting alone with a keyboard. The interesting thing is that this holds true for many people, particularly entrepreneurs, many of whom have fascinating books inside them that will probably never get out if they […]
Continue readingA Blank Page is a Gift You know how when four different people tell you how great something is in the space of a week? That was the point at which I felt compelled to investigate Morning Pages – a practice recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. You write three sides of letter paper (translation: A4) in […]
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