“After graduating from college in 1980, Prescott had labored for almost three decades to become a best-selling novelist, writing more than 20 books under various names. He enjoyed critical praise and some successes.
But when 25 publishers passed on buying his thriller Riptide, Prescott thought the gig was up. Then, on a whim, he decided to self-publish it as an e-book.
Today, the soft-spoken Prescott, 51, is living his dream. He is one of 15 self-published authors whose e-books, often selling for just 99 cents, have cracked the top 150 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list this year, threatening to change the face of publishing.
For Prescott and a handful of others, the numbers add up. Prescott says he has earned more than $300,000 before taxes this year by selling more than 800,000 copies of his self-published e-books.
Five of Prescott’s thrillers have logged a total of 42 weeks on USA TODAY’s best-seller list.
‘If someone in this year had told me I was going make a lot of money with e-books, I wouldn’t have believed him,’ Prescott says. ‘I thought maybe a couple of hundred dollars.’
E-books are changing the way authors and readers connect.
Today, authors such as Prescott can bypass traditional publishers. They can digitally format their…” [Read More]
Are you as excited as I am? Leave a comment and let us know what is on your mind!
I don’t know about you, but I find it very entertaining to watch how the Internet continues to evolve. It truly boggles the mind when you realize just how fast technology is advancing. This new Google update is a welcome change since I feel it can only increase the quality of the search results. Not everybody agrees of course.
“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.[Read more]
What are your personal feelings regarding this new update to Google’s algorithm update? Please leave a comment.
I stumbled across this really great essay on Paul Graham’s website that is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA. The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but I find his method of “hacking” the corporate world to be great advice for any young, motivated 20 something who is feeling a bit hopeless due to today’s plummeting job market:
“The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?
Like everything else in technology, the cost of starting a startup has decreased dramatically. Now it’s so low that it has disappeared into the noise. The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn’t cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker. You can probably start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you’re prepared to live on ramen.
The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never could have before.
The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. I’m not so excited about founders who have everything investors want except intelligence, or everything except energy. The most promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are those who have everything investors want except experience.
Market Rate
I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I’m now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued.
Or more precisely, I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds. [1]
Till now the problem has always been that it’s difficult to pick them out. Every VC in the world, if they could go back in time, would try to invest in Microsoft. But which would have then? How many would have understood that this particular 19 year old was Bill Gates?
It’s hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they’re individually inconsistent. That last one is a big problem. When you’re young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you’re smart. So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things, as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you’re going to get a lot of false positives.
Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high. And so the idea for most of the twentieth century was that everyone had to begin as a trainee in some entry-level job. Organizations realized there was a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the belief that it was good for even the most promising kids to start at the bottom, so they didn’t get swelled heads.
The popularity of social media seems to have come out of nowhere for most business owners. This leaves many scratching their heads wondering how exactly they’re supposed to utilize sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Mashable gives us 5 great tips for a successful social media content strategy:
“1. Know Your Voice
Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand. It’s something Skittles does well. Some of its status messages garner more than 1,000 comments, and many exceed 10,000 “Likes” on Facebook.
Why are these little content snippets so successful? The writing is just like the candy: colorful, playful and imaginative. The pithy, daily, flavor-packed observations are reliably surprising. You can relish today’s post and look forward to tomorrow’s — like candy in word form.
2. Time Your Content
Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to say and when you’re going to say. Make sure it’s relevant to where people are in their lives and the season. Nobody cares about Santa Claus in January, but a whole lot of people care about sales after Christmas. A quick look at Google Trends will confirm that.
Banana Republic’s tweeters got the memo.
Macy’s and Walmart didn’t.
3. Know Your Audience
Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something. Make sure you deliver. Here’s SKYY Vodka on Twitter with a message that’s relevant to most of its…” [Read more]
What is your social media content strategy? Leave a comment below!
I stumbled across this great article the other day and just had to share it with you all. I know it’s hard to believe that something as small as your headline can have such a huge impact on your bottom line, but it’s about time you started believing. Your headline can indeed make our break your offer.
“They say that if your web site has a bad opening headline you’ll loose over 50% of your visitors in the first few seconds after they arrive at your home page. Headlines are the most important part of a web page, but what constitutes a good headline?
In today’s article I’m going to list the top 12 best direct response headlines ever created. How do I know these are the top 12 headlines ever? Simple. I read this article. I’ve written quite a few headlines over the last few years. Some worked and some didn’t. The headlines below have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of products over the last 50 years, and best of all you can adapt each of these headlines to suit your own business.
1.‘They laughed when I sat down at the piano – but when I started to play!’
This is *the* most popular headline of all time. It has been used in direct marketing to sell millions of dollars worth of products, but what is it about this headline that makes people keep reading? I think it’s the anticipation. As a reader you ask yourself ‘well, what happened when he sat down at the piano? Did they like what he played? What song did he play?’. This makes you want to keep reading to see exactly what ‘they’ did when ‘he’ started to play the piano. Can you use anticipation to build curiosity in your headline?
2. ‘They grinned when the waiter spoke to me in French – but their laughter changed to amazement at my reply.’
Again, the use of anticipation. ‘What was her reply?’ you ask yourself. ‘If they didn’t think she could speak French, then what country was she from?’. When I see this headline I picture a group of mature aged women sitting around at a fancy restaurant with a waiter by the side of the lady who replied in French. How can you use visual imagery to create a killer headline for your web site?
3. ‘Do you make these mistakes in English?’
When I was writing our most recent newsletter I decided to give this headline a try. ‘Do You Make These Mistakes When Attracting New Clients?’ is the headline I chose. The headline is followed by a paragraph about our web master secrets email course. I think when you see this headline you immediately ask yourself ‘What mistakes is he talking about? What if they are costing me and my business money?’ This headline is easy to flip and use for business. Can you flip it?
4. ‘Can You Spot These 10 Decorating Sins?’
Similar to headline #3, this headline provokes thoughts of embarrassment. Obviously this headline would’ve been used in craft magazines targeted to female homemakers, but what you do you think the inner monologue of a reader would have been when she saw this headline? ‘Decorating sins? I’ve spent so much time decorating the family home. I hope I haven’t committed any of these decorating sins. Let me read on just to make sure.’ What ‘sins’ might your potential customers be committing? Can you use this headline on your web site or in an article?
