You know about the Curve, even if you don’t think of it in those terms. You’ve noticed how successful businesses have been developing offerings at a wide variety of price points, and how they’ve been focusing particularly on giving stuff away in order to get people’s attention and engagement. You…
Amy Wilkinson pulls off an extraordinary feat with The Creator’s Code: she interviewed 200 top entrepreneurs to discover what had made them successful, then rigorously distilled down her findings into 6 universal skills – the Code. The research, on ‘the biggest data set currently in the entrepreneurship world on high-scale or…
Seth Godin is my hero. Whenever I need an example of a clean, authentic, punchy writing style, he’s the one I turn to. When I’m talking about interesting new publishing models, he’s my go-to guy. It took me quite a while to work up the courage to invite him onto the show.…
When Barbara Gray thought about pulling together the research she’d done over her years as a top-rated equity analyst into a book about the fundamental disruption within the fast-moving market, she asked some friends for advice on publishing. ‘The publishing model is broken, Barb,’ they told her. ‘Sorry.’ She did have…
A landmark episode this, with one of my all-time podcasting/writing heroes, Joanna Penn, who started herThe Creative Penn podcast before the term was even invented. Her new book The Successful Author Mindset brilliantly demystifies the process of writing, and in this episode she shares how she’s overcome her own demons of…
In this week’s episode I chat to John Bond, former MD of Press Books at HarperCollins and founder of Whitefox, which provides publishing services to authors and publishers, about how publishing has changed over the last few years, where it’s going, and what that means for authors. ‘Writers are getting…
In this week’s episode I’m joined by The Author Maker Ginny Carter, book coach and ghostwriter. We talk about why the ‘bestseller’ label can be a vanity metric, how to streamline your book and your marketing, and what Ikea furniture can teach us about ghostwriting. Alison : I’m here today with…
In this episode I speak to Brant Cooper, author of The Lean Entrepreneur – which was a crowd-funded book – and founder of Moves the Needle, about treating your book as a startup. Brant has some awesome practical examples and advice for business writers on identifying market segments and needs, building…
When I first put out the call for recommendations for extraordinary business books, Gay Hendricks’s The Big Leap was one of the titles that just kept coming up. When I read it I understood what all the fuss was about. The two central concepts – the ‘Zone of Genius’ and ‘upper-limiting problems’ – are…
The Space Within: Finding your way back home is a very different type of business book. And to be fair, Michael Neill – transformative coach and mentor to CEOs and ‘creative spark plug’ to celebrities, CEOs and royalty – is no ordinary writer. If you’re getting tired of chasing after the…
