The Boss of You

The early reviews keep rolling in… Today’s addi­tion to the good-vibes folder comes cour­tesy of Book­list, the Amer­i­can Library Association’s book review jour­nal.
The Boss of You: Every­thing a Woman Needs to Know to Start, Run, and Main­tain Her Own Busi­ness.
Mears, Emira (Author) and Bacon, Lau­ren (Author)
May 2008. 256 p. Seal, paper­back, $15.95. (9781580052368). 658.1.
Web design […]

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Every author we know tried to con­sole us dur­ing the final slog of the edit­ing process by promis­ing us that when we held our first real live copy we’d fall back in love. They told us that the emo­tional surge we’d feel the moment we tore open that box of author copies would help […]

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Oh my, but there were a lot of puns to choose from to title this post… “BUST-ing with pride,” any­one? OK, but seri­ously, we’re very, very excited that The Boss of You has received a thumbs-up from BUST, one of our most favoritest mag­a­zines ever. (There are two cov­ers to the left because it’s […]

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One com­mon busi­ness ques­tion we help our smaller (and larger) online retail­ers with in our day jobs as web­site design­ers, is fig­ur­ing out how to price online ship­ping. As any­one who’s bought some­thing off eBay (and not paid atten­tion to the ship­ping costs), or who has tried to mail a care pack­age loaded down with good­ies to a friend on the other coast knows, ship­ping is not cheap. And when the cost of ship­ping is com­ing out of your bot­tom line — read: your pay­cheque — you really want to make sure you’re cov­er­ing your costs. That said, ship­ping is never a flat rate and mere dis­tance doesn’t always help tell the story of the final cost. There are sev­eral fac­tors that will impact ship­ping rates, things like speed, weight, size and dis­tance and unless you only sell one thing on your web­site it near impos­si­ble to fig­ure out what to charge as a stan­dard ship­ping rate.

So, in with all this uncer­tainty what do we rec­om­mend to our clients? In short: split the difference.

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For the Face­book­ers among you, we now have a Face­book page for The Boss of You, where we will be post­ing events, pho­tos, dis­cus­sion top­ics, and so on. We’d be delighted if you would stop by and say hello.

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Lately it seems like our lit­tle web­site is grow­ing big­ger by the day. The lat­est addi­tion is a sam­ple chap­ter: You can now down­load a PDF ver­sion of the Table of Con­tents, Intro­duc­tion and first chap­ter, all totally free! The first chap­ter, “Define Your Vision,” guides you through three key exer­cises: Defin­ing your busi­ness goals, […]

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One of the things we talk about a lot in The Boss of You is the impor­tance of cre­at­ing your own def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess. Everyone’s def­i­n­i­tion is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. I’ve been on the look­out for per­sonal def­i­n­i­tions of suc­cess since we started the book, and I think I’m going to start post­ing them as […]

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I par­tic­i­pated yes­ter­day in an “Entre­pre­neur­ship 101″ panel dis­cus­sion for Arts Co-op stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia, and one of the ques­tions we fielded was about net­work­ing. Per­son­ally, I’ve always dis­liked the word “net­work­ing,” partly because it’s one of those verbs that’s been awk­wardly adapted from a noun (“impact­ing” being my least-favourite example […]

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I came across an arti­cle yes­ter­day that sets up a totally rea­son­able, small-is-beautiful model for mak­ing a liv­ing as an artist (what­ever your medium): all you have to do is develop a fan base that includes 1,000 true fans.
This is a com­pletely rea­son­able approach to take for those artists who a) are com­fort­able inter­act­ing with […]

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Emira and I are both a lit­tle, shall we say, to-do-list-centric. We both rely heav­ily on our to-do lists to get through our days, because a typ­i­cal day for us requires us to wear many hats, and frankly if we tried to keep all that stuff in our heads we would prob­a­bly go a little […]

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