Microbusiness Entrepreneur » Bookshelf

My Top 6 Small Business Books

KevPartner — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:49:11 +0000

You wouldn’t expect to be able to sit in a car and drive it without learning first, would you? It’s the same with your small business. You need to go into business with a certain level of education covering how to plan, run and market it otherwise you might make expensive mistakes right from the beginning.

These 6 books are my bang up to date best small business books for all:

1) Purple CowPurple Cow by Seth Godin: essential to help you find a product or service to market. This book will help you understand why blending in with the crowd is the fast path to obscurity and failure

2) Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson: published in 2010, this is the book on running a business in the 21st Century. It chimes with much of what I say in Microbusinessentrepreneur.co.uk. It is the anti-Business Link. Again, it will challenge you and you won’t agree with everything but it will radically alter your received perception of how business should be run

3) Free by Chris Anderson: if you’re developing a product, especially if it’s electronic, this is required reading. If you don’t understand the new economy, where Free is the default price, then you won’t know how to make money from it. This is the paradox that the book describes – it also gives you practical ideas of how to profit from a “free” economy.

4) Crush It! By Gary Vaynerchuk: brash loud and occasionally obnoxious, Vaynerchuk is a hugely successful internet entrepreneur. I like the messages in this book and, although I probably wouldn’t go to the extremes he promotes, there’s a lot to learn from his techniques.

5) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Hold onto your trousers if you’re British as this is very American in a sugar coated, God fearing way (especially the audio version) but it is good. This was the first personal development product I ever bought and has probably been the most effective. Do you get miserable on a cloudy day? This book is for you.

6) The Power of LESS by Leo Babauta. Chimes a bit with Rework but this book is about how to be more effective in both your personal and professional life by doing LESS. If you feel busy all the time and going nowhere fast, read this.

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The Non-Designers' Design Book

KevPartner — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:53:12 +0000

This is quite simply the best design book I’ve ever seen. Somehow, Robin manages (with some humour) to tread the difficult line between theory and practice.

The book is aimed at designing for print so it’ll help you put together professional and compelling letterheads, business cards, flyers, posters, brochures etc. However the principles she teaches are just as valid when it comes to web design and, in my view, you’d be better advised to read and understand this book that to buy here website design book which is, inevitably, dated.

The book covers what Williams considers the four basic design principles: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity (make an acronym out of that if you dare!) of which the one that will make the most immediate difference to your work is Alignment. I confess I feel ashamed of using centred alignment as much as I did…

The second third of the book includes specific advice on a range of paper projects with the final third covering typography which is, incidentally, much more interesting than I expected. I now understand how seriffed typefaces differ and why they have the names they have. And, most importantly of course, when to use each.

This book is a triumph and an essential for anyone with a design aspect to their work but not already formally trained. In fact, the worst piece of design in the entire book is the front cover: don’t let it put you off!

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Review: Free – The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

KevPartner — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:21:04 +0000

If you’re thinking of setting up an internet-based business (either an information business or a subscription business), you must read this book.

Chris Anderson is the author of The Long Tail, a book that looked at how the low cost of carrying inventory for product-based businesses means that you can derive income from products that only sell in low volumes. The classic example of this is Amazon which makes much of its money from the most obscure books in its list: it can afford to do this (whereas Borders, for example, can’t) because the marginal cost of stocking these books, CDs and DVDs is so low. In other words, once you have a huge warehouse and a sophisticated online catalogue, adding one more book costs almost nothing so you can afford to add just about every book and make money from many, many books being sold in small quantities.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price, takes this one step further. Anderson argues that the default price of digital goods should be zero. Why? Because however much owners of content might try to resist, the market is moving in that direction in any case: free is a fact of life whether you like it or not. Think about Facebook, MySpace, Google, Twitter: all free and all used by billions.

The issue, then, is how to make money from free and the meat of this book goes into that. There are a number of models you can adopt but I’m not going to list them here because I believe so strongly that this is a book you cannot afford to be without if you’re intending to make money from the internet. Even if you’re intending to sell physical products online this would be a useful read so that you can understand the mindset of internet users.

Read this book and I guarantee you’ll see the internet differently. Counter-intuitively, the Free model opens up huge opportunities in the ever-changing landscape of ecommerce.