Key for Writers - It's Not on Your Keyboard

The real key for this writer is patience. I get frustrated with my old PC sometimes. The mouse has been hurled at the screen of my monitor so hard, that the ring that holds the mouseball in place is totaled. If I lift the mouse up, the ball rolls away! Using a boat anchor of a computer makes one long for a better machine, if only to avoid wasting time on chores that a real computer wouldn't force you to do.
    I'd also like a keyboard that isn't missing a very important key -- the FU key. That one comes in handy when spam arrives in your inbox, your latest article was sent back for a rewrite, or you've gotten to the very end of doing something and the computer just hangs, freezes, crashes or dies. Being able to press that key and have all the crap go away would be Heaven!

The Book of the Day Club

Now that I’m a publisher, I can actually fulfill an idea I had years ago: use my knowledge of typesetting and layout to produce sellable information at a very low cost. Not only am I producing self-help material based on my research and experience, I’m getting out Literature that’s in the Public Domain! I can bang out a well-edited book, complete with cover art, in about two hours. That includes listing it on eBay!
         Current titles include THE ART OF WAR, THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY, DRACULA and A STUDY IN SCARLET, the very first Sherlock Holmes adventure. I’m already working on a list of authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville and Jane Austen to start (in no particular order), along with more by Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
         Any suggestions are welcome as to classics you’d like to see made available as finely wrought .PDF files. Yeah, I forgot – FANNY HILL is on the to-do list, too~!

The "Theory of Everything" T-Shirt slogan.

Physicists are striving to quantify the four forces of physics, a "Theory of Everything". Without boring you to tears, they want a single equation to explain gravity, electromagnetism, and a couple of subatomic forces you can look up yourself: Strong & Weak. One noted scientist explained that it would be an equation you could fit on a t-shirt.

Self-branding is about the same thing, without the clipboard and lab coat. One strives to sum up everything in a pithy, well written sentence. Or two. The trick is to understand what the strongest brands have that I don't - yet. And, no, it ain't a slogan. It's congruency.

Coming up with that slogan means you are committing to it. Choose wisely - the less congruent you are with it (and it with you), the weaker your brand will be. Contrariwise, selecting the perfect slogan in advance (cart-before-the-horse methodology) means you will grow towards each other in an organic, meaningful way. There's no guaranteeing you won't outgrow each other. Hope that it's you that's doing the outgrowing!

Already tried and rejected by me, as Vince Runza Online:

It's the customer, stupid.
I'm not for everyone, but that can be good!
Always Busy (saw this one chiseled into the facade of a building in Downtown Scranton)
Good Products, Good Service
Bootstrap entrepreneurship
It's not work if you love doing it. It's even better if you get paid for it!

Okay, it's a work in progress. Feedback? Smart-alecky responses welcome!

A customer service tale.

It's nice when you get more than you paid for. It's even better if you find an "aha" moment, and connect with someone. I was poking around eBay in the eBook category, and found a listing for 9 recipes for 1 cent. I duly made my purchase, only to find that the "eBook" was actually a list of links to the seller's Guides for recipes. I was a bit taken aback, then intrigued. This seller had just monetized his Guides. See my post below, "2007 - I'm ready".

After a bit of messaging back and forth, the seller gave me a 99 cent refund! That's 98 more penny eBooks I can buy! I also contacted eBay about the listing, wondering if it's okay to auction off your own Guide. The thought never occurred to me. I hope he PUTS THOSE GUIDES BACK UP, PRONTO! The Guides weren't any kind of violation.

It turns out the seller is a young guy in the Netherlands, who is addicted to eBay, generally buys and has a Chinese eBay store. I don't think he's Chinese - offering an eBay store in Chinese is free for a year! Plus, he's a bit NUTS! I like him a lot. Anybody who has an animated .GIF of Einstein can't be all bad!

If it turns out that auctioning off your own Guides is legitimate, I may have found a self-funding income stream. I just won't call them eBooks. That's neither here nor there, really.

The real value of this whole experience is the connection. The world really is flat.