The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you'll need later.

You don't become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to become indispensable is to be different. That's because if you're the same, so are plenty of other people.

I'll confess that I don't watch the Olympics, but you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.

How was your day? If your answer was "fine," then I don't think you were leading.

The joy of art is particularly sweet, though, because it carries with it the threat of rejection, of failure, and of missed connections. It's precisely the high-wire act of "this might not work" that makes original art worth doing.

Marketing is a contest for people's attention.