Funny, I never realized how similar Amazon and amazing was. Well, they are. Whether you like what there doing depends on whether you are in their way or not. Having just came back from the book industry conference (BEA), I can say that there are many publishers, wholesellers, and distributors that are worried. I heard Jeff Bezos speak and he absolutely has a compelling story. He knows what he wants and pulls together the resources to deliver it and he has some big audacious goals.
One item to keep an eye on is the Kindle, Amazon’s eBook reading platform. Amazon claims that sales of Kindle books are 6% of overall Amazon book sales. With only 125,000 titles on Kindle, that is a lot of sales per title. What the means for us is that we need to publish books on their platform. The lower margins to the publisher is a concern for me, but there’s nothing that can be done if you want to play on this platform.

What the Kindle does is keep a constant electronic connection to the Amazon shopping platform which gives you the ability to buy and download a book in a minute. Jeff’s goal is to have every book ever printed in every language available on the Kindle platform. This means that you will be able to have access to any book, any time, any where by allowing the Amazon one-click mechanism to charge you. Pretty amazing job. Keep an eye open for other unique announcements and ideas from Amazon.

The Indus Entrepreneur organization (TiE), throws an annual event with 3,600 participants. The best part about the event are the CEOs that only make it out to network once a year. Of the 60 business cards I gathered over a day and a half, 5 were from CEOs of companies in the $10-20m range where the CEO has not networked all year and although they say they want to network more, probably won’t network the rest of the year.

What does that mean to me? I can try to put myself in a trusted coaching position. Add some value, help them get on the right path and some opportunity might open up for one of my companies. Pretty simple, fairly straight-forward and lots of fun regardless of the outcome.

We ran a webinar surrounding the book “Collaboration 2.0″ written by David Coleman and Stewart Levine. The price was $99 until two days prior and $125 from then on. We had 35 folks attend and every participant received a free copy of the book.

The authors had a chance to make some money, but more importantly get a chance to present their ideas and concepts to their customers. Not only did they get direct feedback, but they bounced ideas off for additional educational programs, books and activities. Another benefit is that the 10,000 people who read about the event were made aware of the book which wasn’t a bad thing for sales.

The participants got the chance to hear content directly from the authors, get a free “signed” copy of the book and learn directly from the authors. A win-win for all involved.

Today was the first day of two when I went into a middle school classroom to share some lessons about life. What a great way to impress our youth (I hope) and a great way to reinforce the values I want to live by myself.

The program is called “Choices” and there’s prepared content that helps the students realize the importance of their choices for the future. It covers the outcomes of your choices, time and money management, how closely aligned school is to working and how little time has been spent by the time you’re 14 and how your choices today will so greatly effect your future.

If you’ve never done anything like this before, try it. Having given thousands of speeches to tens of thousand of adults, I found myself a little nervous getting in front of 30 14 year-olds and talking about life and choices. Quite humbling and very refreshing. I suggest you try it as you’ll find the lessons you want to embark upon them (self-discipline, confidence, don’t be afraid to fail and learn from it, how best to use your “free” time, etc.) are lessons you want to reemphasize yourself.

I’m wondering why human nature typically has us doing things at the last minute. Take a look at this photo to see the quantity of last minute filers that wait to send their taxes on April 15th. Of course, I was one of them with the heart-ache and head-ache of trying to rush to get it done. What would happen if it was done a week before, or a month before? There’d be a whole lot less stress. Why don’t you try finishing your next deadline early and see how it feels.

I conducted a teleseminar today with Dan Janal. He and I sent a blast out to our lists two-days ago and we had 60ish people there. It was amazing. Some of my old contacts were awakened and some of Dan’s were amazed to hear my POV.

It reminded me that the old stuff still works. Getting in front of an audience to share your message is a great way to drive awareness and action. I offered a free white paper (normally $99) for those that wanted to download and 45 picked it up so far. They signed up to an autoresponder that will send a second e-mail in a week asking if they liked the content, are ready to write a book and how I can help.

Note to self: Need to do more…

Guess what I like Animals too

Check out a book about animal written by a 8 year old Duncan.

Happy About Animals: An 8-year old’s view on sharing the Earth

Check it out at

http://www.happyabout.info/animals.php

Happy About proudly presents

The next controversial book

“Jesus Drank, Judas Repented and God Divorced His Bride” by Steve Brown

Check it out this coming September 1

http://www.happyabout.info/myfaith/jesusdrank.php

Hello Bloggers and Readers:

Happy About will be releasing 8 new books, check them out

• Overcoming Inventoritis
  
• Scrappy Project Management
  
• Offshoring Secrets
  
• Happy About Being a Baby Boomer
  
• I’m On LinkedIn — Now What?
  
• Foolosophy
  
• Happy About CEO Excellence
  
• Happy About Open Source
  

Check out Happy About’s Upcoming Book, ” “All You Need Is Luck…
How I Got a Record Deal by Meeting Paul McCartney” by Paul Tennant.

This book is not just another story about the Beatles and the magical l960s, although they do feature heavily in it. It’s also the tale of reaching for the stars and achieving every teenage boy’s ambition. It’s an adventure that took me on an exciting journey from the back streets of Liverpool in l959 to the heart of the Beatles empire in London in l967.