Browsing in quirky little bookstores is a pleasant way to pass the time. If this describes you, be sure to check out 10 of the Coolest Niche Bookstores From Around the World in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. And for a insightful look at the history of memoirs, don’t miss The New Yorker article But Enough About Me.
- This column will change your life. “Hofstadter’s law, conceived by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, goes like this: any task you’re planning to complete will always take longer than expected – even when Hofstadter’s law is taken into account. Even if you know a project will overrun, and build that knowledge into your planning, it’ll simply overrun your new estimated finish time, too, Hofstadter says. We chronically underestimate the time things take.”
- eBooks Gone in 5 Years? “The future of what we do, once we start to put books into this connected/network world is totally open, and that’s a very exciting thing for people who love books and who love the web.”
- Quick Tips for Better Interview Video. “Moving from audio only to video and audio recording is not a small transition. Frame composition, lighting, and background are only a few of the considerations now affecting oral history recording that previously- when only recording audio- were of less importance. With that in mind, there are five basic principles for capturing better video.”
- 10 of the Coolest Niche Bookstores From Around the World. “We all know about the plight of independent and specialty bookstores, so we won’t lament it again here. Suffice it to say, fellow book and bookstore lovers, that all is not lost!…Click through to see some of the coolest niche and specialty bookstores in the world, and since no list like this can ever be really complete, be sure to pitch in with your own favorites in the comments.”
- The Ultimate Guide to Publishing Your eBook on Amazon’s Kindle Platform. “The opportunities to grow and expand your business or ideas through publishing an eBook are limitless. With a insightful, compelling eBook, your words can instill valuable wisdom, actions, stories and ideas that can build trust and relationships with your audience. If you follow the seven steps below, you’ll never have to read another article on publishing to Amazon’s Kindle platform ever again.”
- How to Create a Timeline: The Power of Re-working Your Life’s Story, 1 of 2. “A timeline or lifeline exercise is a grid that allows you to have a bird’s eye view of your life, and to see the positive and negative shifts along the way on a single trajectory…Putting your timeline on paper is an opportunity to record vital information about your life and past. There are several benefits to completing this exercise.”
- But Enough About Me. “…memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention…The greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the roles of both author and publisher.”
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Tagged better, Bookselling, bookstores, E-book, eBook, history, Hofstadter's law, How to, Kindle platform, life story, memoir, New Yorker, niche bookstores, planning, publishing, The New Yorker, timeline, Tips, video interviews
In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin. It’s by Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, a favorite of mine. His wise words are worth reflecting on. And if you get high on grammar and enjoy a good chuckle, then you’ll want to check out The 9 Best Funny and Helpful Blogs About Grammar.
- 7 Things You’re Doing Wrong on LinkedIn. “Today, LinkedIn is the No. 1 social media platform for professionals. Estimates of professional participation in LinkedIn are as high as 83%…social media expert Alexandra Gibson…told me that she sees too many professionals making a lot of mistakes. Here are the seven she sees most often.”
- What multitasking does to our brains. “We all know this and have heard it hundreds of times. To work efficiently we have to single task. No multitasking.And yet, we let it slip…Why the heck is it so hard to focus on just one thing then? To understand what actually goes on in our brains and see if it all makes sense, I went ahead and found some stunning research and answers to these questions.”
- Why Stories Sell: Transportation Leads to Persuasion. “Research suggests that trying to persuade people by telling them stories does indeed work (Green & Brock, 2000). The question is why? Because if we know why, we can make the stories we tell more persuasive.”
- Epilogue: Book-Lovers on the Future of Print. “Epilogue is a lyrical student documentary about the future of books by Hannah Ryu Chung, featuring a number of interviews with independent bookstore owners, magazine art directors, printers, bookbinders, letterpress artists, and other champions of bibliophilia.”
- Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin. “I have no objections to reading books, learning languages, or writing to friends. It’s the idea that downtime must be put to efficient use that I disagree with. While I used to agree with it completely, these days I take a completely different approach.Life is for living, not productivity.”
- The 9 Best Funny and Helpful Blogs About Grammar. “There are numerous blogs about grammar available if you poke around. They can be instructive, amusing, helpful, or hysterically funny. I prefer the latter, since I find a little laughter makes learning a whole lot easier.Here then are blogs for your entertainment, education, and enjoyment, all on the subject of grammar.”
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Tagged 7 Things, best, clients, documentary, E-book, eBook, Ebooks, Epilogue, future, grammar, grammar blogs, How to, layout, Leo Babauta, link roundup, LinkedIn, Marketing, Monday, multitasking, persuasion, productivity, research, slowing down, social media, stories, Tips, Zen Habits
In this Monday’s Link Roundup, take a look at Your Problem Isn’t Motivation. It’ll kick-start your new year. For something completely different watch the engaging and sobering 5 minute video Life in 4,748 Self-Portraits.
- Books That Are Never Done Being Written.“An e-book…is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”
- Your Problem Isn’t Motivation.”Motivation is in the mind; follow-through is in the practice. Motivation is conceptual; follow-through is practical. In fact, the solution to a motivation problem is the exact opposite of the solution to a follow through problem. The mind is essential to motivation. But with follow through, it’s the mind that gets in the way.” [Thanks to Ronda McLean of Insight Life Stories for suggesting this item.]
- New Videos From Archipel Steal the Show. “The digital preservation-related video show, that is. The set of newly released videos from the Belgian project “Archipel” are the latest digital preservation videos to hit the scene. The Archipel project is a recent collaboration by organizations in Belgium, to study digitization and digital preservation of cultural heritage materials.”
- Four Steps to (Quickly) Share Your Business Story. [Video]“Communications coach Carmine Gallo shares tips on how to craft your business story — covering all the essential elements — so you can tell it it in 60 seconds. He shares the four critical questions you must answer to get your message across to prospects.”
- A Secret, A Kiss: ‘The Moment’ Your Life Changed. “The six-word memoir conceit grew into a popular series of books, but the editors knew it was tough to share a meaningful story in so few words. So Smith Magazine prompted its community to write about the moments that changed their lives — the moments of clarity, the things that happened to them, the things they made happen.”
- Life in 4,748 Self-Portraits.[Video] “It started simply enough in 1999. Jeff Harris, a photographer based in Toronto, took his first self-portrait, something he has since repeated every day. His visual diary now amounts to 4,748 photos and they tell a very personal story.”
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Tagged book design, business story, digital preservation, E-book, elevator pitch, How to, Jeff Harris, memoir, motivation, pagination, publishing, self-portraits, Smith Magazine, Tips, Writing
For this Monday’s Link Roundup I’ve found some great tech articles for you. Two that particularly interest me are Kindle’s Personal Document Service and 5 cloud storage services compared. Kindle offers some intriguing possibilities for personal historians. And if you use a cloud service as I do, then do yourself a favor and compare services. You may want to switch.
- We’re Crazy About Books and Confused About eBooks. “…you don’t have to read books to be crazy about them. Published authors command attention and respect even from the people who don’t have to budget how much they’ll spend at their local bookstore … A book is a social object, to riff on Hugh McLeod’s conversation. Not only that, it’s a fetish item or physical souvenir. We gift books. We hold onto books after we’ve read them because we largely can’t make a case to let them go.”
- What Hoops Will You Jump Through for Your Clients? “… we usually do our best to meet client requests–even that means jumping through some hoops to keep the client satisfied. However, some customer requests are just plain unreasonable. This post describes some “hoops” that aren’t worth jumping through–even to make a client happy.
- Kindle’s Personal Document Service. “It’s looking like a Kindle Christmas in my family…Why? It’s all about Kindle’s new Personal Document Service. Designed to make it easy for Kindle owners to send personal documents to their reader, it also allows them to authorize others to send documents too. This means I can “publish” family stories by simply emailing the document to my family’s Kindle addresses.”
- Free For All: From CreativePro.com. “This month’s mixed assortment of free resources includes 2012 calendar templates; a vector kit of pre-press and markup symbols; 13 typefaces; 60 photos of paper; and one way to sign and send a document without a fax machine.”
- Unlikely Book Club.[video] “Steve Hartman reports on the book club that’s inspiring people in other states and countries. It all began with an unlikely friendship between two men, one a lawyer and the other homeless.”
- 5 cloud storage services compared. “… personal cloud services have been slowly easing their way into almost everyone’s computing plans.That’s not you you say? You don’t use a cloud service? Really? Do you use Dropbox to store files? Do you get your e-mail at Gmail? Are you experimenting with Apple’s iCloud? Doing work with Google Apps, Office 365, or Zoho Docs? Congratulations, you’re a cloud user.”
- Protect Your Legacy for up to 100 Years. “The SanDisk Memory Vault is the first product from SanDisk engineered to preserve your most important photos, videos, documents, and scanned files for generations to come. The company claims the device has been tested to support data retention for up to 100 years.”
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Tagged book club, clients, cloud storage, CloudComputing, Dropbox, E-book, free, free resources, Google Apps, How to, iCloud, Kindle, legacy, Marketing, Personal Document Service, protection, SanDisk, satisfaction, Tips, Zoho Docs
