I recently read a great article by Dean Wesley Smith on how not to shoot yourself in the foot as a self-published writer, and one of the points he made was on the difference between an author and a writer. In his words, “Authors are people who have written and are always looking backward at what they wrote. Writers are people who write and look forward at what they are writing and what they want to write next.”

I saw a similarity between his definitions of author/writer, and my definitions of entrepreneur and business owner. Let me share.

By the way, I’m not talking about hobbyist business owners here. You know the type. They talk about “owning a business” but they don’t do much business planning or effective marketing. It’s a hobby for them. They are another category that doesn’t fit in this post.

Let’s start with the business owner. They do solid business planning. They have a marketing plan in place, and they follow it. They offer a good product or service and people are happy to talk about and refer them. They are like the author who wrote a good book and is out there promoting it.

What about the entrepreneur? They are always thinking ahead. They generally have the big ideas and a vision for how to implement them. They may fail, and even fail often, but they pick themselves up and try again. When they finally make it big, they have some history behind them and lots of ideas to share. They are like the writers who like and promote their past books but are always thinking about and writing the next book.

Is one better than the other? Not really. Business owners can be very successful. They are frequently solid members of their community, the people you can rely on for anything from money for a local cause to volunteering to organize a small business conference.

Entrepreneurs tend to be more volatile. I’m not saying they aren’t good people, but they are living more in the future than the business owner. When they succeed, they usually do it in a bigger way. (Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs anyone?) They are idea people with big visions and the determination and creativity to make their vision reality. They may not be comfortable people to be around, but they make for a fun ride.

What’s the purpose of this post? To have you look at yourself. Which are you? How would other people describe you? Is that who you want to be? Are you a business owner secretly dreaming of being an entrepreneur? What’s stopping you? Are you an entrepreneur who longs for a bit more stability? What keeps you on that roller coaster?

Dean Wesley Smith made his opinion of author vs writer pretty clear. I don’t think it’s as obvious with business owner vs entrepreneur, but I’ve known enough people who were one while wanting to be the other that I think it’s a question worth asking yourself.

Me, I’m a writer and a business owner and pretty darned content with both.

How about you?

In my last post, I talked about how Amazon gets the customer service experience. Today I want to talk about how Amazon makes it easy to load books from sites other than Amazon.

I admit I was surprised when I discovered the “Send to Kindle” application. It’s very easy. You download a small file to your computer, and then when you have a non-Amazon book, you can right-click on it and “Send to Kindle.” Looks kind of like this.

Shameless excuse to use a screen grab

Pretty easy, right? You can also archive the book in your Kindle cloud and send it to other devices. Books sent this way even sync location between multiple devices, and you can book mark and annotate just like a “real” Kindle book.

Some sites, like Baen Books, offer an automatic Send to Kindle feature, using the fact that every Kindle device (and most apps) have a unique email address. You input that address at Baen Books, and, presto. Book appears on your Kindle. It’s almost as easy as buying direct from Amazon.

Looks easy, right?

If Amazon is truly interested in locking people into their walled garden, why do they make it easy to get books from other sources? I think it’s because they want customers to use Kindles. The more you use a Kindle, the more books you will buy from Amazon. Kind of goes without saying. But not everyone publishes books through Amazon, and I assume Jeff and company would rather that you read on your Kindle rather than buy another device and risk losing business to a rival like Sony or Barnes and Noble.

Again, let’s look at me. I have a Nook, and I have a Kindle. Amazon has made me feel more welcome, and they provide a better reader experience. I can buy books from Barnes and Noble, strip the DRM and read them on my Kindle. But why would I? It’s easier to buy the same book from Amazon. Even if it cost a bit more, it would be worth it to me to buy the Kindle version. If there’s a book I can’t get from Amazon, I can still easily get it to my Kindle. So I win. Amazon wins. I’m sorry to say that Barnes and Noble lost this round. I’m still using my Nook Color as a tablet, but I’ve completely stopped using it as an e-reader, and they aren’t getting any more money from me.

The lesson from here? You can’t possibly sell everything your customer wants. If you frustrate them, and a competitor makes it easy for them to get what they want, they will buy from a competitor. If however, you sell what you are good at and don’t make it frustrating to buy everything else, your customer will continue to buy from you.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

With the Department of Justice bringing its lawsuit against Apple and five of the big publishers, there’s been a lot of talk in the media about ebooks, their future, and especially, Amazon.

Since the alleged collusion by the publishers and Apple was intended to be a strike against Amazon, it’s not surprising that there’s been a lot of Amazon trash-talk on the Internet. And, a fair bit of Amazon support, but many in the publishing industry, including authors, agents and publishers, seem to think that Amazon is a real problem and has been involved in anti-competitive practices. To hear them tell it, the sky is falling.

I don’t think Amazon is a white knight or is acting in anything other than enlightened self-interest, but I just recently bought a Kindle, and I begin to see why they have such a huge ebook market share.

Because they make it easy, and they know how to make their customers feel important.

I’m going to cover both of those in a two-part series, based on my experiences as a new Kindle owner. There’s a lot to be learned from what Amazon is doing, so pay attention.

Let’s start with making a customer feel valued.

I thought about getting my Kindle at Best Buy so I could have it faster, but I’ve got a one-month free trial of Amazon Prime, so I figured I could wait two days for my Kindle and shop from the comfort of my own office. In hindsight, I’m glad I did because it gave me the full experience.

Minutes after I placed my order, I had a welcome email introducing me to lots of things I could look at while I waited for my Kindle to ship. Were they aimed at making me buy stuff? Sure, but the email was classy and made me feel like it was exciting to join the club. Barnes and Noble did, I think, send me a similar email when I registered my Nook.

Less than 12 hours later, my Kindle account was completely set up with my Personal Documents email address, and my Kindle listed in Send to Kindle (more about that in my next post), so I was able to immediately start loading my Kindle with books.

The packaging was easy to open. Within seconds, I had my new Kindle out, turned on and I was setting up WiFi. Within minutes, I had a bunch of books on my new reader.

In addition, I had a classy welcome letter from Jeff Bezos. It was personalized with my name and signed by Jeff. It welcomed me and hoped I would find reading on my Kindle completely seamless and easy.

That letter cost nothing to produce and send, but it was classy. Short and welcoming, with a couple of quick tips. Barnes and Noble sent me nothing like it. The letter was one of those small touches companies forget.

First lesson. Let your customers know you care. They’ll keep coming back.

Next post? Making it easy, just like Jeff said in the letter. Kindle is the master of that, including making it easy to get content from rival stores. Bet you want to hear about that, and why it’s strong for Amazon, right? Tune in on Friday.

Remember my recent post on dealing with fear? Well, I’ve got a confession to make. I’ve been dealing with a decent amount of fear myself recently.

Over the weekend, all the reading and coaching I’ve done finally came together, and I had a breakthrough. I realized that I’ve been worried about the future and all the bad stuff that might happen. Which has been missing half the picture.

Look at it this way. Have you ever done a SWOT analysis for your business? It’s where you look at 4 areas:

1. Strengths
2. Weaknesses
3. Opportunities
4. Threats

Those last two are the important ones here. In your business, you need to be aware of outside threats and opportunities that can affect your business. If you are aware of them, you can take action to avoid the threats and take advantage of the opportunities.

Well, it works in your personal life as well. It’s easy to be paralyzed by fear of what the future might bring. We tend to look at the bad stuff that might happen, like:

1. What if I lose my job?
2. What if I don’t land that big client?
3. What if I get [fill in the blank illness] just like my mom/dad did?
4. What if my child grows up to be a drug addict?

Sound familiar? I bet you’ve had similar fears, right? And you’ve spent a lot of time worrying about them or planning for how you’ll avert the disasters.

Well, what about the opportunities?

1. What if I get that raise?
2. What if my spouse lands that great job and we get to move to Hawaii?
3. What if my child graduates from college and becomes rich and famous?
4. What if my book becomes a best seller?

Do you spend as much time anticipating and planning for the opportunities as you do the threats? My guess is that you probably don’t. Remember, fear is a very powerful emotion in the brain, and if you are experiencing fear, it tends to drown out everything else.

So what can you do about it? Well, just like in your business, give equal time to evaluating opportunities as you do threats. In fact, I’d advise you to spend more time thinking about opportunities. According to Your Brain and Business, anticipation of a future positive event is more powerful to your brain than past events. If you train your brain to be aware of opportunities, you’re more likely to see them when they come knocking.

For myself, I’ve developed a new daily mantra, “I will be aware of both threats and opportunities in my future.” I’m retraining my brain to be aware of both. It’s a lot more fun than spending all that time worrying about and fearing the future.

What about you? In the comments to my last post, @seowashdc mentioned she’s been using Buddhism as a way to get a handle on her nameless fears. That’s excellent. Anyone else want to share strategies that work?

I recently read a fantastic book called Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders. It’s not an easy read, being very technical, but it has excellent insights on why we do some of what we do, from a brain standpoint, and on how we can be more effective in business by working with our brain instead of against it.

The section on fear was particularly interesting. It makes sense that fear distracts us, but I didn’t realize that the part of the brain that deals with emotion puts fear at the head of the list. If fear is present, it drowns out almost everything else.

Another fascinating fact was that the brain has a bias toward future positive events. That’s right. Your anticipation of the future is more powerful than what happened in the past, whether positive or negative.

Those two facts work together in an interesting way. If you are fearful of the future, the fear is going to be processed first by the brain, and the anticipation of your fearful future is going to be perceived strongly. Since few of our fears involve obvious physical danger, like running from a tiger, we don’t always handle our fears in an appropriate manner.

So what can we do to diffuse the fear and help our brains to function better? First, you can divert the fear. Fears are usually nameless anxieties. When we examine them and make sense of them, we often discover that the fear is worse than the reality. For example, are you worried you might lose your job? In this economy, that’s a reasonable fear. But take an honest look at it. Is your job really in jeopardy, or are you reacting to all the news about the recession? If your job really is in trouble, what can you do now to improve your situation? Well, you could certainly start networking!

So first determine if your fear is real, and what you can do to positively address it. Then look to the future. Imagine a realistic but positive outcome. Perhaps you could visualize that you’ve networked your way to a new job. That vision of reality becomes paramount in your brain, and it will both ease the fear and direct your brain to be on the alert for ways to make that future happen.

Does it sound kind of New-Agey? Well, maybe, but it’s backed up by sound neurological science. Your brain has always been one of your most potent allies. Learn how to harness it to help you, and you’ll do much better than if you let it control the show and your future.

Read the book. There’s lots more there to give you ideas to master your fear and be more successful.

If you read ebooks, you probably know about Agency pricing. It was the deal cooked up between the Big 6 publishers and Apple to set the price of ebooks. A class action suit is being filed to challenge the deal as price fixing, and I hope agency pricing is overturned.

But in the meantime, it’s the reality in the ebook world. Apple and the publishers banded together to put the brakes on the growth of Amazon in the ebook world. Agency pricing was supposed to make Apple’s iBookstore competitive with the idea that people would buy iPads and buy books from the iBookstore.

It didn’t quite work out as intended, and there’s a lesson in here for the entrepreneur. Yes, Amazon’s ebook growth was slowed, so that part worked. But the iBookstore has never taken off. The real winner in Agency pricing has been

Barnes and Noble

Wait a minute? Barnes and Noble weren’t even involved in Agency pricing, at least not directly. True, but they had just recently entered the ebook fray with the original Nook, and they had been struggling. Their selection had been much smaller than Amazon’s, and their prices had tended to be higher. If you wanted to buy a e-reader, the Kindle was the obvious choice, for lots of reasons.

Along came Agency pricing, and Amazon could no longer undercut everyone on price. That allowed Barnes and Noble to invest R&D money in their Nook line. Last year they released the Nook Color. By some reports, it’s the best selling tablet device after the iPad. And in the middle of this year, they released the Nook Simple Touch, which rated higher than the Kindle in Consumer Reports ratings.

What’s the lesson here? As I see it, there are two.

1. If you are on top, it’s easy to be lazy

The Kindle was truly a revolutionary device. It combined some very sweet features in one package
a. E-ink screen
b. Fantastic e-book store
c. First-rate customer service
d. Comfortable form factor
e. Wireless, “buy anywhere” ability

Unless Amazon has something amazing in their back pocket this holiday season, the current generation of Kindle isn’t that exciting. Touch screens seem to be the wave of the future, and several competitors already have touch screen readers, at competitive prices, on sale. Come on, Amazon. Show us what you are made of.

2. The little guy can win when the behemoths battle

Barnes and Noble made some good moves. They let the big guys battle it out, and they quietly invested in some nice tech. Since they didn’t have to compete on price, they had an opportunity, and they took advantage of it. Borders could have done the same, but they didn’t and look what happened to them.

Keep these lessons in mind in your own business. Don’t get lazy when you are on top, and look for opportunities when you are in second or third place. In business, you only stay on top when you are constantly innovating. Start reacting to your competition, and it may be the beginning of the end.

Everyone’s been abuzz about Steve Jobs retiring as head of Apple. And everyone’s been trying to figure out what it means for the company. I’m optimistic. Why? Because I believe that Jobs is a savvy business man who has been working on his succession plan for some time.

Okay, Apple’s a big company. Sure, they need succession planning. But what about the small business owner? Well, you need it too. Even if you are a solo entrepreneur, you need to think about what happens when you are no longer able or willing to run your business.

Take me as an example. I’m a coach. If I can’t coach people, my business doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean that 1 to 1 Discovery dies or goes away. I’m busy writing, with one book coming out in the fall. That book will live on and can continue to influence people long after I’m not coaching. (Not that I’m planning on quitting anytime soon.)

What about your business? Do you have people you can train? Does it make sense to bring on a partner? How about a family member to continue the business?

Who should you talk to about succession planning? There are a lot of resources. A good business coach is one (like me!). You can talk to your CPA or a business broker. Perhaps a small business attorney. Or a consultant at a small business development center. There are lots of places to turn.

You’ve worked hard to build your business, even if it’s a one person shop. It would be a real shame to let it just end if you can’t or won’t continue.

Any of you want to share your succession plans? Or need the name of a good resource to discuss your plans with? Share in the comments.