Category: New Business Development

One of Canada’s secret billionaires
has been outed.
Yep, no one outside of his nearest and dearest
knew his net worth.
(They only do now
because of his nasty divorce
which warrants another post
on the importance of partners).

I figure there are plenty of secret billionaires
and why not?
Why tell folks your business
unless it benefits you?
In this case,
how does others knowing his net worth
help him?
It doesn’t.
It can only hurt him
(envy is a powerful motivator).

I have a few pen names
and because there is no real cross over
in readers,
there’s no benefit
in letting people know
that those pen names are all the same person.
I can’t see how others knowing that helps me
so I keep that information to myself.

In this age of information overload,
try to manage the information
that is available about you.
Not everyone needs to know everything.

I always tell authors
that, for reviews,
you want
(on a 1 to 5 rating scale)
1’s and 5’s.
Some readers will hate what you write.
Some readers will love what you write.
Those two groups care.
2’s to 4’s mean readers don’t care.

Darren Hardy has a great post
on reaching your potential.
One of his points is
to prepare to be unpopular.

“Don’t follow the herd.
Don’t do what’s fashionable, trendy or popular.
What’s popular is what’s common.
Do what’s common and
you will get common results
(aka mediocrity).
You are looking for uncommon outcomes,
extraordinary achievements.”

Work toward 1’s and 5’s.
The rest is simply noise.

Most book selling sites
have reader ratings.
They also have lists
ranking the books
with the top reader ratings.

As a result…
reader ratings are pretty much useless
because other authors
will mess with a book’s rating
to ensure that book doesn’t outrank theirs
on the list.

Nasty ratings or reviews happen
and they don’t always happen
because your product is a piece of shit.

Actually…
they are more likely to happen
if your product isn’t a piece of shit.
If no one cares about your product,
it simply isn’t going to get rated or reviewed
at all.

I don’t take any reviews or ratings,
good or bad,
to heart.
What I look for,
to determine if a book or product is working,
is repeat business.

For book sales,
I’ll watch the waves of buying.
There will be the first launch wave.
Then a week later,
there will be a recommended wave
(those are readers recommending the book
to friends).
THAT recommended wave
is what truly counts.

Ignore the nasty reviews.

I can clearly see
that a year from now
I’ll be writing full time.

Because I can see that,
I’ll all excited.
I have excess energy.
I am really givin’ ‘er workwise.
I’m focused
and working around the clock.

Which will,
of course,
increase the chance
my goal is achieved.

If I would have worked
with the same dedication
starting a year ago,
I would be a full time writer today.

So don’t wait for the goal to be in sight
to work your heart out to reach it.
Give all you can today.

One of my writing buddies
wants to contribute
to a rather risque call for submissions.

She’s scared
and a bit worried about
what others will think
of her contributing.

So a half dozen of us
have issued a challenge.
We will all contribute to this call
if she does also.

She is now entering
because the rest of us are,
not because she’s ‘strange’
(or some other nonsense).

Big steps are less scary
when taken as part of a group.

If you’re thinking of taking a big step
(for the positive),
see if you can incorporate it
into a challenge.

If you know of a friend
struggling with a big step,
the best way to assist her
is to take that big step too.

You never know…
it could do positive things for you also.

I finally have a half decent selling story
under one of my pen names,
one of those breakout hits.

I REALLY wanted to kick back this weekend
and relax.
I didn’t.
I’m writing this post at 2 am
because I had to get another story done
and two cover art requests out.

I have a success today
but the success I have tomorrow
depends on the hard work I do now.

Usually once success finally happens,
it is after a lot of hard work.

The temptation is to then
rest on your laurels.
You’ve earned your success.
Sit back and enjoy it.

The thing is…
success is fleeting.
Continuing that success
requires continuing that same hard work

Unfortunately,
that means no resting,
no sitting back and enjoying it.

BNet has a great interview
with Jeffrey Pfeffer,
a Professor of Organizational Behavior
at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

He talks about power and success.

“Keith Ferazzi, the famous marketing guru,
told my class once—and he’s right—
you are not responsible for your own success.
Your burning ambitions,
or even your hard work,
won’t make you successful.
What will make you successful
are those people higher up
who have power over your career.
Your job is to make them want to make you successful.
And part of that is hard work and good performance,
but part of that are the relationships
that you build with them.
That’s why hard work isn’t enough.”

My latest story,
under one of my pen names,
is flying off the virtual shelves.
It is a good story.
I’m marketing it hard.
It is tapping into a few reader needs.

But what is REALLY helping sales
is that a major author likes me
and likes the story.
She is going out of the way
to pimp the story.

Hard work is necessary
but it isn’t enough.

There are two myths
in new product development.

One is that process is
supposed to be easy.
It should be natural.
It should flow.
The first hiccup is a signal
that you should quit.

The other is that the process is
supposed to be hard.
Every part of new product development
is a struggle.
Don’t expect anything to go your way.
You have to force yourself
to work on the product.
If it is easy,
it means you’ve missed something.

The easy myth is… well… easy to disprove.
Nothing happens without some effort.

The hard myth is more challenging to disprove.
I find, from my own experience,
that if every step, every action
in a product’s development
is a fight and a struggle,
then it usually is an indication
that I’m forcing a product
no one wants.

In other words,
the product is doomed.

New product development
is neither all easy
nor all hard.

I attended a seminar
on writing young adult novels.
I have no interest
in writing young adult novels.
I went because I adored the presenter
and wanted to show my support.

I left wanting to write
a young adult novel.

That would be great
except that I have a plan for my writing,
a very full plan,
a I-don’t-have-a-minute-to-spare plan.
Writing a young adult novel
would mean rewriting my plan.

The problem with most new business developers
is that we love, love, love
launching new products
and playing with fresh ideas
and…
well…
the newest, shiniest object.

Part of being a GREAT product developer
is having the strength
to ignore that shiny object,
to stick to our plans.

Create a plan
and stick to it
unless it is no longer feasible.
Believe me,
there will be more shiny objects
available to play with
AFTER you’re done with your plan.

There are many stakeholders
involved in every new product launch.

Each stakeholder wants something
and often that something
adds costs to the product.

If you, as the project manager,
said ‘yes’ to every request,
you’d have serious cost creep
(or as they call it
with projects – gold plating).
Then either the price has
to be increased
or margins are squeezed.

So a big part of project management
is managing these special requests.

How I do it
is ask the requester
if the number of units sold
will increase by, at least, the cost/effort
of the special request.

If that special blue
marketing wants for the cap
costs 20% more than the standard blue,
will having that color
sell 20% more units?

If the marketer says ‘yes’,
I ask for that in writing
(forcing her to think twice
about her answer)
and I’ll then consider the special request.

If she says ‘no’
than she is saying ‘no’ to her own request.
There are no hard feelings.

Manage your special requests.
Keep your products as simple as possible.