One of the not-to-miss books for for the first half of 2011 is Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken. McGonigal is making a persuasive argument that games bring out the best in us and we should find more ways to incorporate the qualities of games into real life. McGonigal was in Portland last night at the OMSI Science Pub. Here is a short clip from her talk where she talks about the four superpowers we acquire as we play more games. Continue reading

I had been wondering lately if we needed a different way to quantify the length of a book given the variability of the digital experience. There is no way really to tell how long a book is going to be when you download it electronically. Weight and thickness have disappeared. The screens you read on are smartphone small to desktop big. And it struck me: time is the standard for digital products. I wrote a whole essay on the subject for Publishing Perspectives, which they posted today. I hope you'll check it out. Continue reading

Today is the one year anniversary of Fixed to Flexible. There have been almost 17,000 reads of the ebook and I have been contacted by people all over the world who were helped. I launch a new project today called Pricing Pictures. What I wanted to do was show in a very simple way that pricing has a multitude of dimensions and those dimensions create opportunities for new business models, continuing the message I started in Fixed to Flexible. And I do it all in ten pages. Pricing Pictures View more presentations from Todd Sattersten. Hope you enjoy Pricing Pictures... Continue reading

I spend an enormous amount of time reading. This is something that I already knew, but I decided to track my reading more closely as a sort of New Year's resolution. First, I want to better see the number and types of books that passed through my hands and secondly, I wanted to better assess the amount of time I was spending on this particular task. I started using Daytum, the tool created by designer Nicholas Felton, well known for his elaborate yearly reports of his personal activities, and interactive designer Ryan Case. The service has a simple system of... Continue reading

Both of these books appeared in my mailbox this week. Both of these books are about solving similar problems--about completion and what keeps us from getting there. The promised solutions though are very different. Piers Steel wants to recognize all of the things that have been stopping you from doing and deal with your delaying. Russell Bishop wants you to find a new way through your cluttered and complicated life. Now let me ask two questions: which one would you pick up based on the cover? And, which one do you think will sell better in the long term? The... Continue reading

With 800-CEO-READ's announcement of Rework as their Business Book of The Year, we can officially close out the year that was 2010. To try and make sense of all the year-end selections various sources made over the course of the last 60 days, I decided to put together a spreadsheet to see if there was any agreement about what shined brighter than the rest. The methodology was simple: each selection at each source got one vote. Nineteen sources were used in the compilation (see sources below). The top business book was The Big Short by Michael Lewis, garnering 12 votes... Continue reading

In this interview, I talk with Bill Taylor, author of Practically Radical: Not So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, And Challenge Yourself. Taylor is always on the lookout for individuals and organizations who are practicing a better form of business. He is searching for leaders who are taking a different path and finding success.Taylor did the same thing when he was at Harvard Business Review and when he founded Fast Company Magazine with Alan Webber. Practically Radical is full of stories about large organization who are finding ways to reinvent themselves, a kind of journalism that... Continue reading

Chris Brogan wrote this week about using Twitter as a real-time prospecting tool as an author. In his case, he was looking for people who were at Barnes & Noble and might be interested in his book Trust Agents. This is great example of how authors could be using Twitter. Is there a more opportune moment to talk to a reader then when they are standing in front of hundreds of books? In his Database of Intentions, John Batelle describes sites like Twitter and Facebook as collectors for "What I'm Doing?" and "What's Happening?" For authors, these sites also capture... Continue reading

In this audio interview, I talk with Michael Burchell, the co-author of The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How To Keep It, and Why It Matters. [Robert Levering] identified the relationship between employees and their leaders, between employees and their jobs, and between employees and each other as the indicators of a great place to work. Relationships at work matter, and in particular, the centrality of these three relationships influenced by people's loyalty, commitment, and willingness to contribute to organizational priorities. If leaders implement practices and created programs and policies that contributed to these three relationships, employes had a... Continue reading

JWT has a interesting Slideshare presentation called 100 Things to Watch in 2011. There are a number of their points that could relate back to the world of business book publishing. #14 - Breaking the Book: This is the most important publishing idea in the deck, and I am not sure we have even seen how this will play out. Ebooks are already change our value perception of how much we will play for the written word. Chapters are already being sold like tracks on an album. Expect more atomization to satisfy all the types of interest under the demand... Continue reading

May 2010 my husband, Todd Sattersten, and I visited Bastyr and NCNM to see which (if either) school and city we would like to move to. We had narrowed it down to these two schools primairily based on geographic location. Although, I had already talked to at least one admission counselor and 3 students from each of these two schools and from SCNM in Arizona. I also talked to a student at CCNM in Toronto, Canada and a person who had visited Univ. of Bridgeport in Connecticut. One of the students I talked to had been told an interesting analogy... Continue reading

My year started with some big questions about what was next and in May, a trip to Oregon answered many of those questions. Seth started a shipping meme yesterday. Here is a list of what I shipped, a list I am very proud of. Launch Fixed to Flexible ebook Wrote a book proposal that made sense to no one but me :) Started literary scouting service focused on business books and now have clients in Spain, Brazil, and Russia Moved family from Milwaukee, WI to Portland, OR in ten weeks I spoke to three classes at the University of Chicago-Illinois... Continue reading

2010 had several books worthy of your attention. Chances are you have only read one or two of these and I would encourage you to go back and pick up one or two more. Let's start with a book that was published in December 2009, but really found its legs in 2010. In Drive, Dan Pink's latest riff on the future of work, he argues that the methods of motivation we used during the Industrial Revolution do not work well in the Information Revolution. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are at the core of his Motivation 3.0. Think of Drive is... Continue reading

My wife found a copy of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time on eBay for $5.00, so we decided to buy it. We knew it was used but it really has been used! The previous owner had read 10 selections, was in the process of reading two books and had three more on deck. While most purchasers would have been disappointed, I rejoiced at seeing someone's interactions with The 100 Best. The blue ink shows Jack and I were successful in engaging the reader to examine what they knew and what they wanted to know. What more could... Continue reading

Yesterday, Seth Godin announced his new venture The Domino Project powered by Amazon. There is a blog post that philosophically describes his move into publishing (or actually back into publishing; he was a book packager in a past life) and a FAQ page to cover some of the details. Seth is making some distinctive bets: Amazon is a large enough platform to support a publishing company. Speed matters. The distance between creator and receiver needs to shrink. Distribution should be global from Day One. Digital matters just as much as print (maybe more). Books still matter. Most publishing professionals would... Continue reading

I wanted to quote this blog post by Nelson Minmar titled "Information wants to be free," but it is short and plithy, making the choice of excerpt difficult. Just go read the whole thing. Continue reading

Very busy prepping for BizBookLab, but there are two things you should definitely be checking out today. Google launched Google eBooks. This is huge. It put another huge player in the middle of this emerging market. Check out the launch of Figment, site for kids to both read and write. Continue reading

If you want to write a business book and have it published, you won't get very far into a conversation with an agent or editor without the word 'platform' coming up. Right after you explain your idea, they'll start to ask you to describe to the consulting business you have built, the clients you have worked with, the speaking you are doing, the size of your email list, and the number of Twitter followers you have. As you do that, those folks are constructing the size and reach of your platform in their head. And it may sound strange but... Continue reading

I was reading a short piece written by Neil Robertson, the CEO of Trada, for the book Do More Faster this morning. Here are the first few paragraphs: I first gave a talk about product management at TechStars during the summer of 2008. One of the things that I said that night caught the attention of all the founders, and we ended up talking about it for hours: "As long as I listen to my customers, I never need to have another original idea." It's a simple concept. Go get customers, then listen. It really can be that simple. The... Continue reading

In an article about how Brazil's economy is evolving, the Economist's Schumpeter column visits Heliopolis, one of Sao Paulo's largest shanytowns and finds"[a]mong the books in the favela's surprisingly well-stocked library is Tom Peters's The Circle of Innovation." BusinessWeek profiled the fast-food chain Panda Express and its founders Andrew and Peggy Cherng in their November 22, 2010 issue. "[Andrew] Cherng is an avid consumer of self-improvement programs. He urges his Pandas to maintain health lifestyles and eat a well-rounded diet; he recently challenged the Pandas to run three miles in under 36 minutes. He has since 2003 been a participant... Continue reading

All of you who are reading played some part in the amazing year that has passed. Some of you helped us make a 2000 mile move to the West Coast. Some of you shared your knowledge and your connections to help me grow my business as scout and coach. Some of you read what I wrote and wrote me to say thanks. I just wanted to say thanks to all of you. Continue reading

From the Atlantic's feature 14 3/4 Biggest Ideas of The Year, Information Wants to Be Paid For is a strangely dull piece from Walter Isaacson, where he tries to make the case for how magazine and newspapers for going to be able to charge for digital subscriptions and that this will "usher in a new golden age for them." His piece doesn't convince me of that or what made it a Big Idea. Forrester just released a new report on ebooks, so you are seeing glimpse into some of that research appearing on their blogs. James McQuivey's wrote a post... Continue reading

delusion |diˈloō zh ən| nounan idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder I am delusional at times. More Space was a delusional attempt to change a mistaken viewpoint about how bloggers were not really writers. Delusion is an important quality. You can be taken advantage of in that state, but delusion also gives you room to create wonderful things that most thought impossible. I wonder if, at some point, we'll accept delusion as necessary rather than mistaken. Probably not. Look... Continue reading

Lynda Obst has a piece in The Atlantic about how summer blockbusters get marketed. The article is great because she conveys with wonder how people like Warner Brothers' Sue Kroll and Sony's Jeff Blake manage to get people interested in movies. "If they like it, they will keep coming. But thinking they will like it is the job of the marketing department, and if a movie does not have a "unaided awareness"—i.e., it is an original idea, or not a sequel or based on a big or well known comic—it is increasingly dependent on the genius or lack thereof at... Continue reading