Day 2 of the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge, and today we’re focusing on target reader. This is perhaps the most fundamental of all the bits of thinking the challengers will be doing over the course of the challenge – the synopsis, selling points, contents, marketing plans, EVERYTHING falls out of that understanding. I was […]
Continue readingOne of the most interesting of many interesting launches at London Book Fair was the UK version of Swedish publisher Bonnier’s Type&Tell, a new self-publishing platform that offers authors a range of publishing services. Publishers have tried this before, most notably Author Solutions which was briefly owned by Penguin and notoriously sued for ‘deceptive practices’. […]
Continue readingThis morning I went for a run in glorious spring sunshine. ‘I must start promoting the next 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge a bit more strenuously,’ I thought to myself as I trundled along. ‘I know, it’s such a lovely day, I’ll record a quick video outside to tell people what it’s all about. People […]
Continue readingToday’s blog is over at BookMachine – Brand building for publishers: it may not be what you think https://bookmachine.org/2017/03/08/brand-building-for-publishers-it-may-not-be-what-you-think/
Continue readingYesterday was a real career high: I was interviewed by Joanna Penn for her legendary podcast The Creative Penn – one of my all-time favourites, and one that inspired me to begin my own podcast. She has such a natural, warm way about her and obviously enjoys talking to her guests enormously, and that gave […]
Continue readingIn this week’s Extraordinary Business Book Club episode I talk to Alan Weiss, the author of Million Dollar Consulting and more than 60 books in total. He also blogs and vlogs regularly. That’s a significant amount of content generation for someone who’s running a multi-million dollar consulting firm as the day job. It turns out […]
Continue readingThe 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 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 readingThis week in the This Book Means Business Bootcamp we’re focusing on how you can use the process of writing your book to build your professional network (and indeed use your professional network to write your book – nice bit of bilateral symmetry). I love this week’s task as it always creates so many ‘aha’ […]
Continue readingBecause of my poorly planned travel arrangements, I missed Terence Mauri’s keynote speech on innovation at the IPG Spring Conference this week. But I’ve just read the write-up in The Bookseller, and discovered this phrase which I thought was worth sharing: Arguing that in order to innovate, businesses need to make the familiar feel unfamiliar, Mauri proposed […]
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