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…
This week’s guest is Dr Penny Pullan, author of Virtual Leadership: Practical Strategies for Getting the Best Out of Virtual Work and Virtual Teams, and one of the winners of my recent 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge! Penny describes how she fell first into the world of virtual working and then into…
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 a world in which we’re bombarded with information and have choices available to us every waking moment, curation – ‘selecting and arranging to add value’ – is just as important as creation. Michael Bhaskar argues that it’s essentially a business model: you have a responsibility to your customers, your…
Book coach and mentor Karen Williams found writing her first two books easy, but quickly realised that not all her clients felt the same way. So she put together a course to help them, and in the process earned several thousand pounds and wrote another book! In this interview she…
Bryony Thomas knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote her bestselling book Watertight Marketing: ‘Lots of people write a book and then go, “Now what?” I thought, “What do I want to be? Ah, a book’s a good way of getting there.”‘ What she hadn’t expected was the…
Sometimes you’re not just writing a book, you’re starting a movement. That’s what Malcolm Durham’s aiming for with Wealthbeing, a new way of achieving and measuring success for a more balanced life. The book is the centre, but there’s a whole raft of online and offline services around it. In the process, he…
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…
Melissa Hood is one half of The Parent Practice – with partner Elaine Halligan she has just been named one of the top parenting gurus in the UK by The Daily Mail. Her book Real Parenting for Real Kids, published by Practical Inspiration Publishing in April 2016, was described by Carl Honoré as…
