Book Review: Taking the Mystery out of Business

Before I do the review of this book, I want to mention that I am the guest today on the blog for Creatures & Crooks Books. The owner, Lelia Taylor, is known for being a cat-lover, so she has started a series of guest blogs about cats. Sometimes she’ll let a dog in, just for variety, but primarily the focus is on our feline friends.  If you have time and the inclination, come on over and meet our indestructible cat.

Now, back to the regularly scheduled program:

Taking The Mystery Out of Business
9 Fundamentals for Professional Success
Linda Faulkner
NorLights Press
Nov 2010

Here is the back jacket blurb:

Taking the Mystery Out of Business: is a fresh, practical guide to the business world.  Author Linda Faulkner lays out the fundamentals, providing examples and tips so newcomers to the business world can easily gain an understanding of the challenges they face.  Experienced professionals will benefit from a refresher on basic strategies and how to stay ahead of the competition.

While the book is aimed for those who are full-time business people, there are things a writer can learn to deal with the business side of publishing. As we all know, we have been asked more and more of late to focus on marketing and promoting as part of our responsibilities as writers, and most of us are ill-equipped to do that well.

Some of the topics that I found most helpful were having the right mental attitude, relationships, organization, and time management. These are areas that I constantly need to be working on, and her advice was most helpful. One of the main things that popped for me when I read the chapter on mental attitude is that I need to stop saying with every breath how bad I am at marketing. Negative thinking has such a powerful sway over how we interact with people. I knew that on so many other levels, but had not applied it directly to marketing. So, from now on, my mantra is going to be “I am so good at marketing, I amaze myself.”

Okay, maybe that’s a little over the top, but whatever I come up with it will have a positive spin.

I highly recommend this book for all writers. Linda has the background and expertise  to be totally credible, and the book is written in a comfortable, easy to understand style.

I hope you will come back tomorrow and meet Linda when she is a guest here on It’s Not All Gravy. I’m sure she will be happy to answer questions, so bring ’em on.

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FTC disclaimer: The book was sent to me from the publisher with the hope that I would review it and host Linda on my blog. Since I love guests here, the second request was easy to fill. But I only reviewed the book because I liked it, not because they asked me to. Other than getting some great marketing advice, I have not benefited in any other way from this arrangment.