President of Outskirts Press

Entrepreneur of the Year Criteria #5

According to Gregory K. Ericksen in his book Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Insights From the Winner’s Circle, the fifth criteria the judges use to help them determine a winner is “originality.”

A lot of factors can contribute to originality. Have you pioneered a new approach or created a new technology? Are your business practices or products/services original? Are you constantly working on improvement and innovation?

As far as Outskirts Press is concerned, examples of all of the above are encapsulated by our Version 4.0 website, which will be launching sometime this month (with any luck). I’ve discussed Version 4 in previous posts (and will again in future posts, too), so I won’t here.

ceo, self publishing

Entrepreneur of the Year Criteria #4

According to Gregory K. Ericksen in his book Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Insights From the Winner’s Circle, the fourth criteria the judges use to help them determine a winner involves the culture, values, and incentives surrounding the work force, the company, and the community.

An example of this involves our EVVY Book Awards. Every Diamond and Pearl book we publish is eligible to be nominated for an official Outskirts Press EVVY Award Nomination. Those nominees are subsequently submitted to the annual Colorado Independent Publishers Association EVVY Awards. Recently we won 16 different awards, the most among all participating publishers.

The Outskirts Press production team members for each first, second, and third place award also won compensatory bonuses for their valued contributions in producing EVVY-award-winning books for their authors. One of our internal goals at Outskirts Press is to help our authors publish award-winning books. So by creating a bonus structure for our production department that recognizes when that goal is met, our authors are happier and our cover designers, book formatters, and author representatives are happier, too. Win-win.

Another example is our $10,000 donation to the Colorado Humanities last December and our sponsorship of their Colorado Book Awards and Student Literary Awards.

Later this week, on May 6th, the winners of the Colorado Humanities Student Literary Awards will be announced in Denver. I will be attending the event and revealing the full-color anthology, published by Outskirts Press. The anthology is titled 2010 Student Literary Awards Anthology: Winning Art, Poems and Letters by Colorado Students.

Handing out awards to young and aspiring writers is very fulfilling. And seeing their faces light up when they discover they are published authors is extraordinary. I love it. Another win-win. And that is culture, values, and incentives in a nutshell.

ceo

Entrepreneur of the Year Criteria #3

According to Gregory K. Ericksen in his book Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Insights From the Winner’s Circle, the third criteria the judges use to help them determine a winner is the management team the leader has put together.

The management team of a company can include executives and board of directors members, but ultimately, I think this criteria probably examines all the people of an organization. Has the entrepreneur successfully pulled together talented people who are committed to the company’s long-term goals?

It helps if the executives and members of the board bring different talents and experiences to the table, so the overall advantages experienced by the company are wider and therefore the benefits offered to the customer are more valuable.

ceo

Entrepreneur of the Year Criteria #2

According to Gregory K. Ericksen in his book Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Insights From the Winner’s Circle, the second criteria the judges use to help them determine a winner is the financial performance of the company.

In this regard, there are two categories of entrepreneurs, and two ways entrepreneurs get money for companies. Some entrepreneurs start companies that are good at earning money from customers. These leaders spend the bulk of their time managing and growing a company that makes money.

Other entrepreneurs are good at soliciting money from investors. These leaders spend the bulk of their time convincing larger companies into giving them money.

The majority of the articles in magazines like Entrepreneur are aimed at CEOs who fall in the latter category. Often, the revenue figures that are publicized about companies do not reveal the amount of money those companies earned but rather, the amount of money those companies were given.

I’ve always felt that if you are a leader who falls into the first category, you don’t have to worry about being good at the second. Run a company that earns money and a funny thing starts happening — bigger companies with money start banging on your door asking if they can give you more.

ceo

Entrepreneur of the Year Criteria #1

According to Gregory K. Ericksen in his book Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Insights From the Winner’s Circle, the first criteria the judges use to help them determine a winner is “leadership” and he devotes a chapter discussing what defines a good leader. For example, does the leader have a vision and are they passionate about what they do? Do they take risks, even in the face of uncertainty?

Ultimately, does the entrepreneur turn business vision into business reality? As the CEO of Outskirts Press, this is perhaps where I spend the majority of my time — turning a vision into a reality. This can be something small, like the conception of a new option that has to turn into a finalized service or product that meets our authors needs. Or it can be something larger like the conception of a new book that has to be written, re-written, edited, produced, distributed, and marketed.

Self-publishing is in the middle of a revolution, and that means constant change. One vision is having a company that is nimble enough to adapt to market conditions, competition, and author needs faster than the other guys. Turning that vision into a reality is the challenge.

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Six Keys to Entrepreneur of the Year Success

I mentioned previously that I am a semi-finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards. The next stage is a reception where I meet some of the judges. This is as close to an “interview” as a entrepreneur gets; so like anyone applying for a new position, a new job, or sending out a new book proposal, the first step is to conduct some research and prepare yourself.

Gregory K. Ericksen has written a book about the E&Y EOY awards titled Insights from the Winner’s Circle and he identifies six key criteria the judges use to gauge a leader’s performance. Even if you’re not up for an award, these are valuable focus points for any leader or entrepreneur and I will discuss them each in the following blog postings.

They are:

1. Leadership
2. Financial performance
3. Management team
4. Culture, value, and Incentives
5. Originality
6. Degree of Difficulty

branding, ceo

Entrepreneur of the Year Semi-Finalist

I found out last week that I am a regional semi-finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. I met with two folks from Ernst & Young along with one of the sponsors at the E&Y offices in downtown Denver last Monday for a one hour formal interview. I was asked to bring some marketing materials, some financial statements, and anything else I wanted to “show off” that best represented Outskirts Press. So, of course, I brought along some of our books.

After I summarized our history, our 5-year plan, and our most recent 3-year 850.5% revenue growth that was recognized by Inc. Magazine for their Fast 500 list, one of the Ernst & Young representatives told me that even before he knew I was a semi-finalist he had learned that a close friend of his was publishing her children’s book with Outskirts Press and enjoying the process immensely. What a nice surprise; and what a small world!

Ernst & Young are not judges of the EOY Award. That responsibility falls to another group of individuals who I will have the pleasure of meeting at a Thursday night reception at the Cherry Hills Country Club on the 29th.

branding, self publishing

Does self-publishing mix with the AWP Conference?

Last week the AWP Conference took place in Denver, Colorado. AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and their annual conference is one of the largest of its kind in the country. An estimated 5000-7500 guests and exhibitors flock to the conference each year, which is held in various venues across the country. Last year it took place in Chicago and next year it takes place in Washington D.C.

The Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado was the venue for the 2010 conference, which is just a stone’s throw from Outskirts Press, on the outskirts of Denver in Parker. I attended the conference personally and Outskirts Press donated 5,000 copies of one of my books, Self-Publishing Simplified, for the AWP Conference goodie bags.

After all, if the exhibitors are any indication, this is a great place to reach writers. For example, the publishers for Writer’s Digest and The Writer were both there in person and I was pleased to finally meet them in person, considering our 5-year sponsorship of the Writer’s Digest Writing Competition Collection and the on-going advertising we place in The Writer magazine. All wonderful people. Some of my associates and friends from CIPA and SPAN were there as well.

Since I had never been to the conference before, I went somewhat incognito, to get a sense of the conference, the seminars, the speakers, and the attendees. The idea of sponsoring, exhibiting, or speaking — or a combination thereof — at a future conference has been suggested to me several times. Attending this one in Denver provided an opportunity to see if that would make sense.

And the verdict? It will depend upon results of the tracking code we put in the pages of the 5,000 free books we supplied.

And I’ll end this post with a related suggestion – if you give away free copies of your book or service or product for the purposes of marketing, always be sure there is a mechanism in place to track the results.

blogging, branding, search engine optimization, self publishing

Self Publishing on the Apple iPad

I made a mistake with my last posting. Part of the topic of my last blog involved the Apple iPad and yet the title I chose for the blog was something about killing birds. This is what is known as “missing an opportunity.” As I have mentioned previously, blogs are wonderful for improving organic search engine optimization and one of the most important elements of a blog for SEO is the title.

But even though I was writing about a very popular and “trending” topic like the iPad, I mistakenly didn’t enter any of those valuable keyword opportunities into the title of my post. Instead, I chose a title that, to a human being means one thing, but to a computer means something entirely different — and as a result, my title, “Killing two birds with one stone” won’t attract the readers I’m trying to attract. It might attract some hunters, though.

So with today’s blog posting I have created a title better suited for the SEO I’m shooting for, based upon the popularity of the iPad. Our full-color conversion of Adventures in Publishing to ePub 1.0.5 should be done this week as should the indexing for Sell Your Book on Amazon 2nd Edition, which will allow us to also convert that for the iPad in our effort to introduce this new option for our authors.

I will also summarize my thoughts on the recent AWP conference I attended that took place in Denver last week, and the preliminary steps I’m taking as one of the E&Y EOY regional semi-finalists. And if those acronyms aren’t clear enough, they’ll be revealed in the near future… It is going to be another productive week at Outskirts Press.

self publishing

Killing two birds with one stone

I blogged previously about how long everything seems to take in the business world. Here’s another example, still related to the Second Edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon.

While we are using my book as the “guinea pig” to improve the efficiency of indexing so we can lower the price so more of our authors can add an index to their books, we are also working on adding Apple iPad editions for our authors. Ever since the new device was launched early this month, our authors have been clamoring for an option that allows their book to be available on this new digital platform. Who can blame them? The iPad is cool!

So, it stands to reason that I would use Sell Your Book on Amazon to test this new option, too, right. Right, and that’s causing even more delays. Not because of Sell Your Book on Amazon, but because I want to combine these efforts for our conversion specialists, which means giving them more than one title to test at a time. It’s true that Sell Your Book on Amazon is a good test for an ePub format conversion, with its tables and graphics and double margins, etc. And when it is “done” we will use it for a test. But in the meantime, I want to get our specialists on a color book test, also. So, that’s where Adventures in Publishing comes into play, which is my full-color children’s book about how to publish a children’s book.

That sounds easy — it’s just a matter of having them work on the Adventures in Publishing files. But, since we’re about to move this book to new formats, it makes sense to bring it up to date. A few things have changed with our full-color Pearl package since that edition of Adventures in Publishing was written and published. Specifically, the number of color paperback sizes we offer grew from 2 to 5. Additionally, the number of royalty-free illustration packages we offer grew from 15 to 24.

So, right in the middle of trying to wrap up the second edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon, I find myself forced to revise Adventures in Publishing, too, just so we can faciliate some testing for new options while the iron is still hot.

And of course, since we’re exploring other digital formats, its the time to look into making the following platforms available for our authors, too: the Sony Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the iPhone via Stanza, etc…

And all these complexities add more delay. The problem with trying to kill two birds with one stone is that sometimes you miss the bird completely…