Behind the Book: Selling on eBay
I started in 2003 when eBay was still a digital garage sale, and made twenty-five thousand dollars in a year clearing out my own closets. That eBay is gone, so the 2015 book needed rewriting.
Category: Business
Lessons from decades of professional experience, including 20 years in IT leadership and a second career ghostwriting 54 business books. These articles cover leadership, operations, and the strategic thinking that drives business success.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Street-Smart Management Wisdom
Nobody warned me that becoming a manager would feel like being handed the keys to a spaceship and told to fly it while already in orbit. I first became one in 1981.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Ethical Workplace
There was a time when the hardest ethical question in an office was whether you could reheat fish in the microwave. The principles did not change. The situations got strange.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Gig Economy
This started as a money problem. The turning point was treating income generation as a science experiment instead of following it like a religion.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Networking Without the BS
A system went down on a Friday night and I discovered that twenty years in the industry had produced nobody I could call. I sat in an empty office surrounded by broken computers and worked out what was missing.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Build a Profitable Consulting Practice
I went into consulting with twenty years of corporate experience and no idea how to run a business. The technical work came naturally and the business side nearly destroyed me. Every mistake in this book is one I made.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Enshittification of America
A Fortune 50 executive explained how his company had improved customer service by replacing people with chatbots built to frustrate callers into giving up. He said it like a routine process improvement.
BusinessFifteen Minutes in the Middle of an Interview
Halfway through an interview session I stop and ask a question that has nothing to do with the chapter: are we still meeting the goal? That break is the difference between a ghostwriter and a manuscript vendor.
BusinessThe Most Common Way a Book Dies
Books die three ways, and none of them involves the draft. The client goes silent. The finished manuscript never comes out. The book publishes and nothing happens. All three were decided in the first conversation.
BusinessThe IT Director Who Wrote 113+ Books
For 33 years I worked in enterprise technology, twenty of them running IT at Trader Joe's. Then I wrote 113+ books. Nobody predicts that line, and the pivot is the story. A crooked career is the book.
BusinessWhat a Book Production Schedule Tells You Before You Sign
An agency posted its production schedule: sixteen weeks, contract to finished book, broken out week by week. It answers three questions the sales call never gets to, and every one of them matters more than the total.
BusinessThe Coach and the Cover
A coach hired me to write the book he could hand people who asked what his coaching was about. The goal shaped the writing, then the cover, then the promotion. A book with a job gets done well.