Sunday, July 31, 2011

Daily Thoughts 7/31/2011

Jim Collins (James C. Collins), an American business consultant, author of "Built to Last" and "Good to Great". By Mangoed on Wikmedia, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0


Daily Thoughts 7/31/2011


I have been reading more of The Successful Business Plan this morning and doing the exercises.  Two of the exercises are very interesting; they are creating an ideal customer first as a consumer customer, then as a business customer.  It is interesting because it helps give you a sense of what people actually do in the publishing and book business.


Some of the publications they might read are: Publishers Weekly, LIbrary Journal, School Library Journal, The Bookseller, Slate, The New Yorker, The Huffington Post (They have written a number of articles in support of libraries), The New York Times, Slate, Editor and Publisher, and the New York Review of Books for consumers.  For companies, I would add Fast Company, Inc., Crain's New York Business, Forbes, and Teleread.


Part of the profile includes websites that they might visit:   Mashable, Locusmag, Romantic Times, Library Journal Online, LIS News, Mediabistro, Galleycat, O'Relly, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Strand Books, Tools of Change For Publishing, Book Expo America, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Meetup.  I would furthers add subsections of Linked In like (Ebooks, Ebook Readers,Digial Books, and Digital Content Publishing), Ebooks In Libraries, and Tools of Change for Publishing.  For Meetups, I might add Content Strategy New York City,  Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art,  Digital Book World New York City, and others.


This is not the first time that I have done this kind of exercise.  For a while, I sold some books on Ebay and ABE (Advanced Book Exchange) to see what it was like, I also used to pick books and comics from flea markets and garages sales when I had more time to trade a long time ago.   I still get the family discount from Rogers Time Machine in Manhattan. This is too time intensive now.  Also, I used to price sometimes for a small bookstore that no longer exists.  Several months ago, I was also working on the beginnings of an idea for a startup for about three months, but it did not work out.


I put the book Nonprofit Management 101 by Darien Rodriguez Hayman on hold.  Darien Rodriguez Hayman was the director for the Craigslist Foundation.  I saw the book listed on the Social Media For Nonprofits Conference New York which is on August 4, 2011.http://socialmedia4nonprofits.org/nyc/

I spent some time talking to a close friend today, David Grayson.  He is writing a column on The Haiku Foundation called Religio about religion and haiku which is rather interesting.  http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/forum_sm/religio/

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