How to Avoid the 11 Biggest Mistakes of First-Time
“If you want to change your life,” Harry Beckwith wrote in The Invisible Touch, “write a book.” But, writing a book can also be tremendously frustrating and unrewarding.
Following are the 11 biggest reasons most first-time authors fail to receive the rewards they are due.
1.Unrealistic expectations
Don’t expect to get rich off your book, even if it’s a success by publishing standards. The vast majority of books fail to earn out their advance.
Instead, develop a personal marketing plan to leverage your career off your book. Instead of trying to make money on the book itself, use your book to open doors, promote your credibility, and build relationships with readers.
2.Writing without a contract
Never write a book without a signed contract. Instead, prepare a polished proposal and two sample chapters.
Publishers are increasingly selective the titles they accept. Often, less than 1 in 20 titles proposed are published. Writing a book that isn’t accepted is not a good use of your time.
3.No agent
You must be represented by a literary agent. Publishers rarely accept unsolicited book proposals. Unsolicited proposals are frequently returned unread or are simply discarded.
The right agent will know exactly which publishers might be interested in your book. Agents can also negotiate terms more effectively than you.
4.Weak titles
Titles sell books. The title of your book is like the headline of an advertisement. The title represents your one and only chance to attract the attention of acquisition editors or bookstore readers.
Successful titles stress the benefits readers will gain from your book. Successful titles arouse curiosity and offer solutions. They often include consonants and alliteration (repeated “hard” sounds like G, K, P or T).
5.Title versus series
Focus on a series of books rather than an individual title. Publishers want concepts that can be expanded into a series rather than individual titles.
6.Going it alone
Successful careers involve a nurturing support group of readers and peers.
Your quest should include the support of your friends, other authors, book coaches, readers and others who will help you maintain your enthusiasm while providing ideas, assistance, and feedback.
7.”Event” writing
Write a little each day rather than “going away” to write your book.
Stress is an author’s biggest enemy. When you attempt marathon writing, you’re putting an unrealistic burden on yourself. “What happens if I come back and my book isn’t written?”
Commit to write 45 minutes a day. This reduces stress and continuously reengages your subconscious mind.
8.Self-editing
Avoid unnecessary self-editing. It’s far more important to complete the first draft of your book than to agonize over the perfection of every word.
Editors will ensure that grammar is correct and ideas appear in the proper order. But, they can’t do anything until you submit the final manuscript.
9.Failure to promote
Publishers are not promoters. Publishers are skilled at editing, manufacturing, and distributing books. But, they are not set up to give your book the marketing attention it deserves. A single publicist may represent over 100 books!
If you want your book to succeed, you have to promote it as well as write it.
10.Failure to backup and save
Save frequently when writing. Always save before printing. Never turn off your computer without making a copy of your files for off-premises storage. Never end a writing session without printing out a hard copy of the latest version of the chapter you’re writing.
11.Failure to plan future profits
Before writing your book, create a book marketing plan. Book sales should be just the first step in an ongoing relationship with your readers. Your plan should identify opportunities from consulting, newsletters, audio/video recordings, seminars, speeches, and yearly updates etc.
Conclusion
A book can, indeed, change your life. But, you must take charge take a proactive role in promoting and leveraging its success.
To learn more Visit www.PublishedAndProfitable.com. Subscribe to Published and Profitable and download a free sample lesson from my four-week Profit From the Author Inside You course.
MicroWorld Technologies - Small Company, Giant Leap!!!
“Startups often create innovative products but do not have financial muscle, so MicroWorld turned to a partner that was mammoth in size.”
MicroWorld maybe small, but its ambitions are big. MicroWorld strives to offer cutting edge software security solutions to its customers worldwide. But to even get a nibble in the crowded security space, MicroWorld needed to prove that it possessed the technology required to address customer painsa tough task for the company.
“We do not have huge resources for brand building as compared to established giants,” says the company’s founder and CEO, Govind Rammurthy. MicroWorld’s answer to being small was partnership with one of the world’s largest mail server providers, Deerfield Communications. Deerfield’s MDaemon mail server is used widely across the world.
MailScan, MicroWorld’s mail server content security and anti-virus software, was a perfect fit for MDaemon. Partnering with Deerfield turned the fortunes of MicroWorld. The company tapped into Deerfield’s channel partners and began establishing tie-ups with various resellers, vendors and technology providers.
MicroWorld’s entry into the U.K. market followed a similar pattern. It struck a deal with Paul Smith Computer Services, a leading software company in the U.K. that had many channel partners.
Today, the company has a large network of established partners in various countries- USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, U.K, Norway, Sweden, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
All incoming and outgoing mail passes through the WinSock Layer at the server and client level. MicroWorld’s WinSock Layer (MWL) sits on WinSock Layer. All content passing through WinSock must pass through MWL, where it’s checked for any security-violating data. If such data is discovered, it is removed and the clean data is passed on to the application.
Simply having an innovative product doesn’t advance one in the race, especially when it comes to selling security products. The challenge was to offer 24/7 service.
“All established players earn a lot from customers and partners through various levels of paid support,” says Sunil Kripalani, VP of International Sales. “We are the only company offering free 24/7 technical supports not only to partners and customers but also to important prospects. This has helped us make real breakthroughs.”
MicroWorld has also explored the advantage of offering customized deals, which have enabled them to enter important segments and signup with some of the best names like Vodaphone, Australia and UK, Ford U.S, and WHO.
Use Performance Coaching to Acquire Lovely Results
Performance coaching is a therapy that has become incredibly popular over the last 6 years. The term lifestyle coaching first became likeable in the United States where, together with Neuro Linguistic Programming, it became part of a regenerated mind-blowing wave of highly proactive therapy models.
In many ways both Performance Coaching and Neuro Linguistic Programming are a reaction against certain variants of the human-centred therapy movement, in particular Person-Centred Counselling. A criticism of the humanistic and person centred approach is that it is truly reactive and not highly proactive. Although all that works fantastic with some clients, with other clients long periods of no exit in sight or low return for time and effort occur. Personal coaching and NLP are both person-centred therapy in stance, spending effort on improving a customers smiles rather than looking into the minefields of childhood, as in traditional psychoanalysis. Their emphasis is, however, deliberately proactive and used to make you happy.
Lifestyle coaching is not about preaching to the customer what to do. This is a common misconception. Some lifestyle coaches are comparably successful in their business careers and then make the cross over to performance coaching, thinking that they will at most be required to divulge their pearls of astonishing wise wisdom with the lifestyle coaching customer. Sharing pearls of wisdom is more like mentoring a person in a specific environment. Personal coaching is instead about life as a whole. Easily Achieve offers coaching to help you Boost Confidence.
Word Newsletter Templates - How to Easily Create Them
You can use Word newsletter templates for both Word and PDF newsletters. PDF is one of the most popular newsletter formats because it is easy to read and user-friendly.
Even though plain text and HTML formats are more popular for online newsletters, some people still publish their newsletter in other formats, such as Word and PDF.
You too can create your own Word template easily and quickly. Let me explain how…
You just need Microsoft Word and an HTML template. There are many websites available on the Internet that provide lots of free newsletter templates and free website templates. You can find many great resources in search engines. Just search for “free website templates” and “newsletter templates”.
After finding some free HTML templates, download those which you think would be suitable for your newsletter template. Then, open the HTML file in Microsoft Word and save it as a Word document.
That’s it! You’ve just created a professional Word newsletter template for free! To create your every issue, you can simply open it and write your newsletter in it and then save it as a new document.
Here’s a free Word template I’ve created using the technique I explained above.
Wish you the best of luck on starting your own newsletter!
Ladan Lashkari
How to Find the Value of Your Golf Cart
Do you want to sell your golf cart? If so then you will need to have a rough idea on how much it is worth so that you can get a decent price and also increase your probabilty of a sale.
Knowing the value of your golf cart is a great help as it allows you to price your cart in line with market prices and gives you an indication of how much people are willing to purchase for.
There are many ways to find out how much your golf cart is worth, however the tip I’m about to share with you is by far the easiest and most accurate method.
Instead of comparing your golf vehicle at dealerships and asking loads of dealers how much they will purchase it for, it is far better to to make a private sale as you get to set the price yourself which increases the chance of higher sale price.
To find out how much you should list your vehicle for, all you need to do is go to ebay.com and type in the make and model of your cart and click search. A list of similar carts will appear with prices next to them. These prices are set by buyers but we can tell they are acceptable to the buyer by looking at how many bids each auction has.
For instance, if an auction is selling a Yamaha golf cart for $1000 but has no bids and there is another selling it for $800 with 3 bids then we know we are more likely to find a buyer at $800. I would also recommend looking at completed auctions to get an idea of the prices that the cart has sold for in the past.
There are many places where you can list your golf cart for sale including online auctions and classified ads sites. Find out more and get more tips at buying golf carts
How To Purchase Designer Tops That Provides Back Your Money’s Worth
Obtaining and carrying off designer trousers is no mean feat. In spite of this, thanks to good value ready to wear clothing and increasing disposable salaries, the majority of us shopaholics should afford to get a gorgeous piece of fabulous designer clothing every now and then. Nevertheless, there are likewise certain issues associated with designer clothing that are also not there with your traditional high street clothing, with the most principal ones being the clothing design and the cost of such skirts.
Designer tops charges noticeably more than even the best brands available in the market; and the reason why designer clothes cost so much is because designer clothing not only offer folk marvellous quality and outstanding styles, but because they are exclusive. Even low cost ranges in designer trousers carry only limited editions, so there are wonderfully low chances that you may notice your neighbor wearing the same terrific dress that glamourous shoppers recently bought. For this seasons Stella McCartney check out the Matches Fashion website.
To select the best kind of designer tops for yourself, pay attention to a number of things. If women are not a regular designer skirts buyer, then chances are that low cost is a selling point with you. In such a case, it is even more foremost that you select brilliant designer skirts that will often in fact give you back your money’s worth.
To do this, the 1st rule to follow is to buy phenomenal high fashion clothing that compliments your shape and weight, If women don’t do this, then even the greatest designs may end up making fashionable people look a mess. Do follow the basic rules of not buying baggy skirts that will make you look stout or stumpy and not getting vertical patterns and really dark colours if you are extraordinarily slim etcetera to buy t-shirts that match your body shape, colouring and features.
The other principal thing to think about is if you want your outstanding high fashion clothing to last you are to acquire pieces or designs that are timeless in nature like a navy skirt suit.
Informative Info about Buying a Digital Versatile Disc Recorder
Do you crave for DVD quality; but miss your old video recorder’s (VCRs) potential to record your much-loved action television shows? Well, you are capable to get the best of both worlds with a Digital Versatile Disc (more normally known as a DVD) recorder, thanks to its resourceful taping options as well as its DVD excellent sound & vision.
There are presently many brands of Digital Versatile Disc recorders on sale, each with exclusive qualifications and features. This means that whatever your requirements, there will be a make of Digital Versatile Disc recorders available in retail stores to suit you.
DVD Recorders have never been so reasonably priced. In fact, costs are sinking so speedy that getting rid of that old Video Cassette Recorder (more frequently refereed to as a VCR) and swapping to Digital Versatile Disc or Hard Disk Drive recording makes further sense. Yet, it is a consumer industry ruled by technology and innovation which thus means DVD features are improving monthly. Find amazing prices on DVD recorders at Digital Direct!
If you’re bewildered by the distinction between DVD-R, DVD-RAM & DVD+RW, we also present you with an easy breakdown of the formats on offer - which companies are following them and what the most modern developments are.
Pioneer produces a collection of DVD recorders, a number of which have HDD capability; letting you to record many hours of TV prior to transferring them on to Digital Versatile Disc when needed. Pioneer also produces a variety of outstanding Digital Versatile Disc players and Digital Versatile Disc home cinema systems including HDMI compatible models.
Pioneer is a well-liked television and hi-fi brand that caters for the home, car, multimedia & DJ consumer industries. Pioneer began as Fukuin Shokai Denki in Tokyo in nineteen thirty-eight. The company originally began life building speakers and changed its name to Pioneer in 1961. Since then it has launched a number of firsts onto the market, which includes the world’s first GPS car navigation system in 1990 & the first ever DVD recorder in nineteen ninety-nine.
Buying Investment Property in North Cyprus
As far as buying property and overseas investment goes, North Cyprus is one of the most celebrated places in the world. Since 2000 prices have been soaring from £2000 per donum to £30,000 per donum in 8 years (in UK terms, that’s £6000 per acre to £90,000 per acre in 8 years). And prices are expected to continue appreciating; with reunification of the island, many experts are arguing that prices could accelerate because of the respective strengths of the two parts of the island, with the already established tourist industry of the Cyprus merging with the continuing boom in Cyprus properties in North Cyprus.Before the election of Christofias to presidency in the Republic of Cyprus, the reunification issue was almost redundant; that is to say that, whilst the rest of the world hoped for some solution, the respective presidents of the two sections of the island were strongly opposed to any discussion of the issue. Tassos Papadopolous and Rauf Denktash, who both held their posts for a number of terms - including, in the case of Denktash, the début presidency for the TRNC, which he held until as late as 2005 - continually refuted any international attempts for a reconciliation of the two parties. In fact, when it came to the Annan Plan Referendum of 2004, when citizens of North Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus were given the chance to vote either for or against a settlement on reunification, both leaders strongly urged their citizens to vote against the move. Despite that, North Cyprus citizens voted in favour of Cyprus reunification, though Republic of Cyprus citizens rejected the referendum. Because it was agreed prior to the vote that both sides would have to agree, the reunification plan was scrapped. During the talks though, it became clear that in North Cyprus there was a number of politicians who were willing to challenge Rauf Denktash, and one of the most prevalent was Mehmet Ali Talat, who was at the time prime minister, and took over from Denktash as president in 2005. He publicly urged citizens of North Cyprus to vote in favour of Cyprus reunification, so that when he took presidency the international community rejoiced. Cyprus Reunification and the Rise of Property in Cyprus It was in 2004, during the Annan Plan Referendum, that property in Cyprus saw its first price acceleration. Prices on Cyprus properties had been rising steadily for some four years up to that point, but the price rise seen around the reunification talks was notable indeed, and they sparked the rise in price now, where rekindled reunification talks between pro-unionists Mehmet Ali Talat and Dimitris Christofias are having a similar effect. The two reunification pushes of the last 10 years have established North Cyprus property as some of the best real estate in the world. Prices are still far lower than those in the south, but could rise, according to some experts, by almost 200% in two years. North Cyprus, then, is the very definition of real estate investing.
Short Term Stock Picks
Payforprofits.com offers short-term stock picks along with market signals for the short-term investor.
Traders and investors are going to this website by the droves to see what the next stock pick will be. By joining this service for less than $1 a day, you can make $1,000’s on the next hot stock ready to breakout to new highs.
At Payforprofits.com a member was quoted as saying ” You don’t have to be a math guru to see almost 10% in one day. I don’t expect you to be right 100% but with the stops I can see this is going to be fun and profitable. Thank you for restoring my faith again. Can’t wait for the next picks.”
The benefit of Payforprofits.com is amazing. There is so much value in this service. When you signup you receive a weekly synopsis of the stock market, Buy/Sell signals for the short term and intermediate term and stock picks that perform consistently in a short period of time.
Payforprofits is now limiting their membership to 1,000, so we urge you to signup now before they cutoff new member signups.
Email Newsletter Marketing Is Alive and Well: The case for continuing newsletter efforts
With the arrival of syndication or RSS technology, many claim
the email newsletter is dead. Not true. Newsletters continue to
offer companies a marketing tool that allows them to build and
retain relationships with their clients.
RSS complements, not replaces the email newsletter. Some readers
refuse to read email newsletters and only view content in RSS
feed readers. So cover your bases by offering both options.
The same thing applies to weblogs, also known as blogs. These
online journals are updated on a daily, weekly or whenever
basis. When you release a new issue, keep your bases covered by
linking to your newsletter and its feed in the blog.
By the numbers: email marketing prevails
In October 2004, the Online Publishers Association (OPA)
released the Internet Activity Index (IAI) stating users go
online for two primary reasons, content and communications — 40
percent for each. Pew Internet and American Life Project’s data
from November 2004 indicates 59 percent of adults have been
online and 92 percent send email. This data supports the idea
that email marketing is still the most effective use of the
Internet for marketing purposes today.
Web pages are static and require users to search for them. Once
found, the page must be bookmarked, or it will be lost again.
Email, however, lands directly in a user’s inbox, avoiding spam
filters and must be actively deleted to be lost. If the email
also satisfies the second most common use by supplying valuable
information to the reader, then it has a greater impact.
Email marketing fuses email and research into a single channel
and provides marketers with a powerful, yet affordable, tool.
This type of marketing remains inexpensive, supple and easily
tailored for any given demographic. You might think that email
marketing reaches a small audience, and other more traditional
marketing channels will provide better saturation, but that is
rapidly changing.
Internet World Stats indicated 182 million users used the
Internet as of September 2004. About 25 percent sign on each
year, and in 2005, we’ll reach one billion users. According to
Burst! Media, 60 percent of those connecting to the Internet
from business use it for email. The second reason is to check
the news, followed by looking up weather information.
It’s the content, baby
When a newsletter full of valuable information arrives in the
user’s inbox, it capitalizes on these two main uses: email and
information.
When applied in a business-to-business application, email
newsletter marketing has even more power. Almost 60 percent of
employed people have Internet access at work. Eighty percent of
professionals and managers use the Internet, and 70 percent of
those in sales, technical or administrative support positions
use it. Therefore, email newsletters in a B2B application miss
only a small percentage of your target market, the decision
makers. And even this small gap is rapidly closing.
Internet use in the workplace is growing at a vigorous 54
percent rate annually. Soon, email newsletters will saturate a
market as completely as direct mail, print, radio or television
advertising.
Not all email newsletters are effective, however, despite the
impressive demographic support. Here are tips on how to maximize
your capitalization on Americans’ Internet use patterns.
Ask permission
An effective email newsletter gains a readers’ permission before
putting them on the mailing list. Such marketing builds
communication and goodwill without annoying the reader.
We know about spam all too well and we don’t want to put such
email in people’s inboxes. Spam causes serious and expensive
overloads to both ISPs and individual recipients. Since it is
poorly targeted, it is ineffective. Therefore, build your
mailing list by asking people to opt-in to receive your
newsletter.
As you know, opt-in email asks users to agree to become part of
an email list, and they are not subscribed to the newsletter
unless they take action. Such lists are powerful because they
indicate every person on the list has given permission to have
their email addresses included in the marketer’s database.
Content is king (or queen)
The second most important hallmark of an effective email
newsletter is its content. People will give permission to send
them your newsletter if you give them something in return, like
content that helps them in their lives. Newsletters distributed
with information that is relevant to the audience’s lives are
anticipated and eagerly read.
Many marketers, whether professionals or otherwise, reflexively
want to tout their own company’s achievements. They want to
climb onto the mountaintops and scream about how great they are,
how many sales their company made, the partnerships they are
forming, and how their product is the best thing to happen since
sliced bread.
The problem with this is these marketers are distributing
information that is important to them, not to their readers.
Select articles or other content that pass the following litmus
test: Does the content provide value to my customers, or is it
self-serving?
Once your newsletter is in tip-top shape, make the most of your
online marketing efforts by integrating all available options
including email newsletters, RSS feeds, blogs and a Web site.
It’s a cheap and effective way to reach your prospects and
clients.