Category: Uncategorized

Using WordPress tools allows bloggers to alter the look and features of their blog. I am now adding pages to this blog that are often referred to as “About the Author Page,” “Book Page,” and “Activities Page.” The present “Home Page” that you are looking at now is going to become a greeting and navigation page to link you to other sections of the blog. One page that I have that is slightly different that in the usual blog is that I have a “Contact Page” which describes my  business consulting activities that I do for individuals and corporations.

Adding these pages and content to them is reasonably straightforward, and WordPress offers on-line help should you run into problems. If you have a blog and you are puzzled how to add pages to it, on your home page when you scroll down you will find a “tools symbol.” Clicking on this will open a window on the left hand side of the screen. Among the options are “add a page.” Clicking on this will allow you to compose a new heading on the screen which looks like a regular blog-post screen, but it will post your headline as the title of your new page. It will provide you a place to add content, Pay Pal purchase buttons (which you have to initially set up with PayPal), videos and/or photos and one or more “contact me” slots for whatever goods, services or activities you might be offering. These may be removed, changed, or edited as needed.

Anything that you have been able to add as blog features that you have used on your Home Page and variations on that, you will also be able to incorporate into your new page or pages.  If you want more features, you can upgrade your blog to a higher level at any stage. You do not have to start all over again. If you decide to reformat your Home Page you have the option of creating a static page where the content will remain relatively unchanged which describes what your blog is all about and has links to your other subsidiary pages. If you elect to use this options do not be distraught if it appears that all of your previous posts have disappeared. They have not. They are just in a holding state ready for you to re-post on your new page dedicated to your new blog entries.

The division of blogs into pages allows the reader to quickly access the sections of the blog that he is most interest in without having to claw through everything else to discover your most recent delightful or useful post. If you want to see a blog that is too generalized I have a ready example in one of my own, http://www.hoveyhunts.com. While it tells about everything I do, most people prefer separate ones for my activities, which I do for my knife blog http://www.hoveysknivesofchinablog.co.

Create Your Own Job Security: Plan To Start Your Own Business at Midlife, which is the reason for the present blog, is coming along nicely. I am now adding the final bit of text, it has been favorably commented upon by guest readers and this week I should be completing the cover. I am taking pre-publication orders for the book which you may submit by using the PayPal button below.

I am accepting advance orders for my new business book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife,  which may be made by using the PayPal button below. I also have a Bonus Offer that includes a Free e-mailing of the Table of Contents, Preface and a Book Chapter, Love Your Work and Live Longer. There is also a Super Bonus for the first 25 to respond which is a Free 15-minute telephone consultation.  To receive either reply below and describe what you would like to receive or discuss. I will arrange a time and date for the consultation.

Create Your Own Job Security

Generally available for special promotion price of $10.99.

$10.99

When considering starting a new business it is an intellectually easy exercise to look at what businesses are popular at the moment and think, “I could do one like that.” Perhaps you could, but what history amply demonstrates is that a businesses’ viability may be very brief indeed because of rapid societal change. Examples of businesses that are no long with us include Video Rental, Photo Development and picture magazines, like Look.

If you went back to my childhood in the early 1940s to 2012 when I recorded the audio CD, “My Home Town,” only one store on the town square is still at the same location doing the same business as it did when I was growing up. Big box stores and online sales have largely killed the small town retail trade that I described in the CD. The single remaining store is a family-owned drug store that is one of the few that has not been driven out of business from competition from chain-drugstore companies and even places like WalMart that is seeking to become the go-to place for everything a small-town resident might want – food, drugs, beer, wine, auto repair, health care, glasses, barber shop, etc. all under one roof. Although they have not figured out a way to offer services quite yet, Amazon.com is expanding their offerings to include home delivery of nearly everything, including groceries, in some markets.

Faced with competition with these modern retail giants, it is no wonder that the mom-and-pop stores that were often run by Jewish merchants in the small-town rural South have vanished. Unless you are specialized and can offer your goods to a regional and national audience, your chances of surviving in the retail trade in small town rural Georgia are slim.  Eating establishments are being started and failing at a very rapid rate, in competition with the franchised chain eateries, and even those are having trouble in a community with a population base of around 6,000. The Dairy Lane, a privately owned soft-serve ice cream shop and bar-b-que place that was started while I was in grammar school is still going strong serving its signature pork dishes and Brunswick stew, while many other competitors have tried their hands at commercial food service and vanished.

Local oral histories are lost within three generations. To provide both residents and potential newcomers with a feeling of how Sandersville, Georgia, grew from the time it was founded to the present, one morning at 2:00 AM, I took a walk around the town square and recorded what I remembered, and had been told, from my childhood. The town had a large and well-respected medical center on one side of the square and a funeral home on the other side. A person could be born on the square, do business there all his life and when his time came be prepared at the funeral parlor and laid to rest in the graveyard, right off the square. Even in the 1950s were still residents who had lived in Washington County  all of their lives and never left the county.

Wars had a tremendous impact on the rural community what was largely started by veterans, widows and dependent children who receiving land grants in recognition of their service during the Revolutionary War. The Civil War saw the town largely burned by  Gen. W.T. Sherman’s troops and many nearby plantations destroyed. Many residents served during World War I and even more during World War II. These wars and societal realignments after them resulted in population relocations with blacks relocating to better jobs in the North. Although largely insulated from the Vietnam protest movement, school desegregation greatly impacted the community as a new more-nearly equitable balance between the races was sought in the majority black county.

These challenges were met and the county prospered with rising employment with the local kaolin, China clay, mining industry as trainloads of the clay were mined, processed and shipped out of the county  every day. The clay is used in the paper industry to give glossy coatings, to make ceramics, as filler material in rubber and plastics and minor amounts in the cosmetic and drug industries.

These are some of the things that I talked about during my auditory stroll around the town square. You can order copies of  “My Home Town” using the Pay Pal button below. I would encourage anyone who has reached what the French term as, “a certain age,” to do something like this to preserve their family’s and community’s history for future generations.

My Home Town Auditory CD

A 30-minute auditory CD relating the history of Sandersville, Georgia, from its founding until 2012.

$9.00

Drawing from illustrator Alex Ehlers as a piece of art going with a story about an imagined hunt with his Grandpa when he was nine years old.

When I was a kid in rural Sandersville, Georgia, during the period from 1941 until 1958, I was what might be called a “free-range-kid.” Through my infancy and toddler years I had a nurse as well as an older sister who looked after me. I was white and my nurse was black as were the cook and yard man who help keep my Grandmother’s household going.

I was read to from the English classics as there was a grandmother and an aunt in the house who were both school teachers. I did, as boys are want to do, got into a little mild trouble from time to time. Some of the things were innocent, like pulling flowers from the yard and presenting them to my grandmother, instead of letting them grow where she had carefully planted them. The worst thing I did as a three-year-old boy was to go across the street to Adam’s Hardware store and buy a small can of yellow paint and proceed to repaint the white telephone box off the back porch a bright highway-stripe yellow. I was obviously inspired because workers had just completed stripping the old paint off the house and putting a fresh coat of white paint on it days before. That episode cost me a turpentine bath and scrub in the family tub, which I still vividly remember.

That house which sat off the edge of the town square had already been moved once to allow for the construction of the new Post Office during the depression years. It had witnessed the town’s burning by General W. T. Sherman’s troops in 1864, and his officers had been billeted in the home. Two lasting memories of that visit was a room stained with grease from confiscated cured hams that were hung on the walls and a black marble-topped table that Sherman, in a violent outburst, broke with the hilt of his sword.

After my Grandmother’s death that house was sold and the proceeds and furniture divided between my father and two aunts. This resulted in the family buying another house located half way between town and the combination Grammar and High School.  Not only was this house available it allowed my sister and I to walk a quarter-mile to school each day.  This we did in all weather. Only during the worst of thunderstorms were we ever driven to school. The only incident that I ever recall happening was when another kid riding his bike ran into us while he was distractedly looking at one of his buddies on the other side of the road. He was so intent on their racing that he just plowed into us.

Outside play during recess was mostly unsupervised. Once a year each class would be given a size-appropriate cardboard box of play equipment which would sometimes include balls and bats for outdoor play and  puzzles, coloring books and crayons for use on rainy days. Outside of the usual elbow and knee scrapes and being stung by a red wasp, I do not remember any particularly adverse events during my Grammar School days.

After my father’s death when I was 10, my mother took a sales job which caused her to be gone during the week and sometimes for weeks while she installed business schools in rural towns throughout the Southeast. The company, Perry Business Schools, would sign up sufficient participants in smallish towns, bring in instructors and teach practical business courses like typing, filing, accounting and office management to high-school graduates. In that analog society there was a large number of available jobs in the general secretarial field as each paper document had to be written, mailed and filed. An unmarried aunt moved in with us, but she also worked during the day.

As latch-key kids we were able to do our homework, whatever other tasks we needed to do, like mow or rake the lawn and gather pecans. The last were a particular asset to me because I could sell them downtown and easy get enough money to pay for my 35-cent movie tickets, 5-cent cokes and 10-cent bags of popcorn. This also bought no small number of comic books at a tiny store tucked in between two other buildings up from one of the town’s two movie houses. The oldest, an Art-Deco building known as the Pastime, still showed movies up to a few months ago.

Saturday afternoons after the lawn was mowed was mine. I was free to go downtown my myself, go to two double-features at the movie houses, buy whatever I wanted with the money I had and put any excess in my account at the local bank. Occasionally I would treat myself to a banana split at one of the town’s three drug stores on the square.

In the meantime, my mother remarried. My stepfather and I got along well, but he also worked. During High School I was involved in extracurricular including being on the same Debate Team with the present Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal. He an I had been playmates during a summer that I spent with my mother’s sister on their large farm near Tennille, Georgia.  Letting kids spend time with their rural relatives was not an unusual event at that time. In some communities the extra help that an active teen could give his older relatives at harvest time was vital to the family’s economic success. In fact, school was let out for a week in September during cotton-picking season.

I never had a chance to hunt with my dad, but did with my stepdad. While in High School I would sometimes take a .22 Rifle and squirrel hunt on some swampy land we owned that was within the city limits of town. To have a 10-year-old walking through town with a gun, sack and maybe a dog was so commonplace, as not to cause a comment. I can’t say that everyone in town knew me, but many did. I would not recommend that any kid anywhere try that today. The times that I did something similar was in Lake Placid, New York and in Seward, Nebraska.  In New York I had the gun in a leather-fringed case and in Nebraska I was carrying my blunderbuss while in costume for the event prior to giving a performance. You can see my performance in Seward at: https://youtu.be/x6kNXvHyJ7w.

We boys often carried pocket knives to school and in High School during hunting season those of us who were fortunately enough to have use of a car often had a gun and hunting stuff in the vehicle. Such activities today would very likely bring instant expulsion, even though there was never any intent to do harm to anyone.

Changing Times

During the decades while I was in the military and working in Alaska, parenting styles changed to the point where the free-range-kid that I largely was, became children who must be under constant supervision of a responsible adult. This resulted in the rise of helicopter parenting which came to be seen as the norm, at least in white suburban society.  Children were to be constantly exposed to different enriching events at a dizzying pace. Somewhere along the way this method of parenting became the norm to the degree that it was codified into laws. A parent could be charged with child neglect if he dared to let his children walk to school, go to town and generally allowed to do things on his own.

Added to this is the constant distraction of phones, smartphones and screen events on almost everything and the constant bombardment of externally stimuli from every direction. In this environment children react, but do not have the opportunity to do practical real-world problem solving, invent their own games, do their own play and have their mini-adventures as we did. It is entirely possible with millions of participants that some of these adventures will end in death. All life ends in death, some sooner than later. That too, is part of growing up in the real world.

Every parent who gives his teen a set of car keys has the hidden dread that this may be the last time they see their children alive. They can but hope that they have taught their children well and that those lessons have been well learned. Nonetheless, limits are set, a time to return home is agreed on,  the risks are accepted and the children are released on the nation’s highways. The parent remains legally responsible for their minor children’s activities.

Utah recently passed a law that allows parents to permit their children to do unsupervised activities such as to walk to school or to go to nearby playgrounds, libraries, etc., without direct parental supervision. That both positive and negative events will happen to these children is a consequence of living. From my own experiences I can say that the results of a free-range childhood as had by me and my same-age rural residents has helped us become inventive, creative and more positively responsive to life than many children appear to be today. In many ways, what many of today’s over-supervised children gain in exposure is lost in the ability to be personally creative, solve practical problems, develop empathy and have multi-cultural experiences.

My suggestion is to take some risks and let your children have the opportunity to be kids.

These thoughts were prompted by my working on my forthcoming book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan To Start Your Own Business in Midlife, which will be available in August. To secure an early autographed copy of the book with free shipping you may use the PayPal button below.

Create Your Own Job Security

Generally available for special promotion price of $10.99.

$10.99

The author attending an International business conference in Zhengzhou, China

Guerrilla Marketing to expand your company’s reach to national and international markets can be done at little costs and potentially large payouts, considering that you are already at the event.  In the example shown, I was an invited speaker to a Development  Summit for Third-World Nations held in Zhengzhou, China, to present a paper “Finding the Creatives in Your Corporation or Country.”   I will write a follow-up blog on “Finding the Creatives.” While in China I:

• Established Myself as an International Speaker on Business Topics
• Delivered a Power Point Lecture on my Topic
• Held Private Showings in Bars and Hotel Rooms
• Distributed a Booklet on my Subject Material
• Interacted with Hundreds of Officials from Developing Nations
• Was the most Photographed Individual at the Event
• Spoke with Exhibitors at a Major Trade Show
• Had a Chance to Demonstrate a Prototype Product in a Work Situation
• Saw Museum Exhibits Which Provided R&D Information About my Products
• Witnessed Cooking for a International Audience in a Hotel Kitchen
• Attended Lectures on World Trade in Third-World Markets
• Was Exposed to Smart Technology in the Internet of Things
• Was Invited to Present at Another  Business Meeting in Vienna
• Produced Three YouTube Videos

Guerrilla Marketing can be defined as a person taking advantage of a situation to present his product or services at a location where he is not a sponsor or paid exhibitor. I do this at whatever events that I attend; although, there is a fine line between what is considered a normal interchange between attendees and unauthorized selling and promotions.

One generally prohibited practice is “suitcasing” were a person who is not an exhibitor sells products out of a suitcase. Exhibitors have paid serious money to attend the event and feel that they are put upon if they most also compete against everyone else who has a product to shill to the same audience.

Preparing to attend the event I not only prepared my Power Point presentation, I also took my cooking smock, produced a booklet, Ideas for New Businesses, for distribution at the conference and packed a camera, tripod and voice recorder for making videos. I did not know what videos I would make, but besides the one featured below that discusses international cooking and has a demonstration of my prototype knife, I also filmed,  “The Terrors of  Chinese White Spirits,” and “Welcome to Modern China”  that you may also view on YouTube.

I was the most distinctive person at the conference dressed in my smock and toup. My appearance elicited a lot of questions along the line of, “What do you do?” My response allowed me to explain what I did and offer to distribute my booklet and cards to anyone who might be interested. I also invited some who had not seen my presentation to have a private viewing in my hotel room which led to follow up discussions. This resulted in my being invited to present at another event in Vienna where I delivered a paper, “The 10,000 Year-Old Man Speaks” (on climate change).

The result was an interchange of cards with creative individuals from all over the world, publicity about my topic, contacts with government ministers, distribution of my booklets and income derived from these contacts. An indirect result was my founding a new company, “Hovey’s Knives of China,” to make custom kitchen knives from modern steels in Central Georgia that are derived from bronze and stone knives from ancient China.

 Some of the 20 designs of kitchen cutlery available from Hovey’s Knives of China. 

Direct results of my Guerrilla Marketing in China were:

• Founding a New Company “Hovey’s Knives of China
• Obtaining a Speaking Opportunity in Vienna
• Raising World-Wide Attention to Me and My Products
• Increasing my Personal Reputation
• Orders for Books and Products
• Produced Three YouTube Videos to Publicize my Company and Products
• Ultimately Resulted in Me Writing a New Book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife. 

If you are going to attempt to do Guerrilla Marketing at the next trade event that you attend make sure you:

• Carefully Review the Event’s Rules to See What You Can Do
• Have a Clear Concept of Exactly What You are Marketing at the Event
• Pre-package the Necessary Materials
• Have an Easy Way of Immediately Capturing Information from Attendees
• Are Distinctive in Appearance
• Speak to As Many People As Possible
• Adequately Explain how Your Product or Service can Help their Company Improve Profits or Accomplish Social Objectives

Ideas for New Business is a booklet that is designed to prompt the generation of new business ideas from the reader’s past experiences, those of his co-workers and his environment. Once conceived these ideas may be recorded in the booklet’s rear pages. This slim volume is designed to be stuck into a computer bag and used on long airline trips to generate and record business ideas into short, medium and long-term categories. Because these are written ink on paper in a privately-owned booklet they do not belong to the employee’s company, but are truly his own that may be further developed until the time when he may want to launch is own business. This booklet may be obtained from Amazon.com or ordered from my website at http://www.hoveysmith.com or even read free by Amazon Prime members.

Create our Own Job Security: Plan to Launch Your Own Business at Midlife encourages you to develop multiple business concepts throughout your life.  Some businesses may  provide immediate income. Others where extra training is necessary are in continual development. The ultimate objective is to have a business that can be launched on short notice when you may face losing your job in mid-life by being replaced by younger workers, robots or the entire business goes into receivership.  The 17 chapters of the 200-page book expand on the concepts introduced in Ideas for New Businesses.  It also has much new material on selecting the appropriate business to fit your interests, abilities, needs and goals to  provide an enriched life doing work that you love to do.  The book will be available in August, and advanced autographed copies with free shipping may be obtained by using the PayPal button below.

Create Your Own Job Security

Generally available for special promotion price of $10.99.

$10.99

Being passionately interested in something is the first step towards writing a non-fiction book. 

“One word at the time,” is an accurate answer to the question, “How do you write a book?”, but one that is not of much use to a would-be author. While books are only words and one must follow another, it is quite one thing to come up with a statement, “I am,”  and it is quite another to follow those two words with some 39,998 others to complete a 200 page 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 softcover book.

The most significant thing in book writing is that the author has enough passion about the topic to complete a task that will likely take three months or longer to finish. Some people take years to write their book while others can do it in weeks, depending on the length of the book and the topic. I am considered an average writer who is expected to complete the text and gather the photography for a 200-page book within three months of signing a contract.

Three months is a realistic goal for a non-fiction work if the author has previously made an outline of the book’s contents, named its chapters, produced a working title and started gathering the photos or artwork . All of this and likely the preface and two sample chapters were necessary for him to secure a contract and get an advance for his book. For a commercial author who writes for trade publishers, the concept of the book is fairly well firmed up before he collects his advance and goes into his “book-production-mode” and starts pounding out copy.

One of the author’s books that was accepted and published by a commercial publisher. In this case the publisher was  Stackpole, a well-established publisher of outdoor books. This title is still in print and available from Amazon.com and other sources. 

These publisher-imposed deadlines do not apply to those who will self-publish their works, but for most people deadlines and goals need to be set. This is a job. Instead of having a quota of products to put out in a given shift, the author has a number of pages that he needs to get out each day. Just two pages of copy every day will finish a 200-page book in 100 days – the math is simple enough. It is the doing of it that is difficult. Some people are sufficiently self-motivated pound out copy to this schedule, while others need someone pushing the project to get it done.  After you have done five books, or so, you will have discovered what production method works best for you.

A Time To Write

Repetitive, regular work is what produces books. I use the early morning hours to do my original work. Typically my writing day when in “book production mode” is to get up at 2:00 AM, write until 5:00 AM, have breakfast, take a nap, resume writing, have lunch and then do whatever household tasks that need doing. In the early evening I relax by perhaps watching a movie on my TV after supper. I go to bed at about 9:00 PM and get up again at 2:00 a.m. to restart the process. My schedule is  allowable because I no longer have a wife and children, and I am only responsible  for my own activities and those of my canine companions.

Time is the one thing that we cannot buy and likely never will have quite enough of to do what we want to do each day. Many tasks are put off from one day to the next, and this condition gets even worse when you are over 65.  As a person ages the work flow becomes more like, “It takes twice as long to do half as much.” Even so at 76, I am still pounding out copy every day.

We are all different human animals and have different family responsibilities. Nonetheless, carve out some regular time each day for writing. At first this will seem to be real drudgery, but you will come to look forward to working each day and making page by page and chapter by chapter progress towards completing your book.

Maybe you feel that you have only one book in you – one that that you are passionate about that you feel MUST be written or you have failed yourself and mankind. You don’t have the confidence that you can do this by yourself  and that you need help to finish the book and make it a financial success.   You have a missionaries’ zeal, but do not have the skills. These skills can be learned in formal situations like college;  by selling copy to the newspaper, magazine and book market; or through working with a variety of consultants or companies who will guide you through the production process or even ghost write your book. You can subscribe to magazines like Writers Digest. The same organization that publishes the magazine has a very robust on-line presence with tip-laded articles, many books and annually publishes The Writers Market, which list magazines, their editors and gives addresses and requirements for sending in manuscripts.

My previous 15 books have had modest success, but I wanted to do more with Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business in Midlife.  I had worked with Steve and Bill Harrison’s writing-consulting company, Bradley Communications, years before and decided to enroll into two programs that they offer, Quantum Leap and The National Publicity Summit that they hold in New York City. These programs are not inexpensive and with travel, meals, etc. could cost $10,000.

Steve Harrison’s National Publicity Summit allows authors to go to New York and pitch their books or projects directly to 100 or more members of the national media over a three-day period. 

Quantum Leap is a year-long program that assist authors in all aspects of writing their books, outside of doing it for them. They offer periodic consultations on selecting a title, designing a compelling cover, opinions on the best way to present and sell the book, how to define an audience and selecting the best method of getting it published. Even more significantly, this program explains how to capitalize on the book after it is published by getting paid speaking engagements and landing consulting contracts based on your book. It is with these related activities where the author makes significant amounts of money, over and above, what he might get from royalties.

The most effective parts of the Quantum Leap program is the ability to continuously consult with your assigned book coach and consult on an as-needed basis with specialists who give specific guidance in every aspect of book writing and promotion. There are also special seminars for Quantum Leapers in Philadelphia several times a year where you can get face-to-face input on your projects as well as meet with members of the publishing media, journalists, radio and TV producers. There is also a private Face Book Page where you can “Focus Group” your concepts with your fellow writers and get their input about your activities.

Once you have your book concept firmly developed or your book published, you can attend their National Publicity Summit in New York City where you will, in something like speed dating, be brought into contact with over 100 members of the national media who want your content for their print, radio, on-line or TV outlets. Among those who attended a past summit was Harrison Ford, of Star Wars fame.  A number of attendees have been to the summit more than once to launch new products or new aspects of their book, consulting or cause-marketing career. To receive information about Harrison’s Bradley Communications activities you can go to their website: http://www.steveharrison.com where you can sign up for a number of free seminars which are teasers for his for-pay offerings, but do contain much useful content.

I am using various of Harrison’s activities to launch two books in 15 months. One is the Create Your Own Job Security that I have already mentioned and the other is Never To Old To Hunt for the outdoor market that I also serve. I do not recommended that a  writer dissipate himself between so many different fields and activities. Nonetheless, this is the creature that I am. I am driven to be a very creative individual, and blog readers will hear more about this in the future, including my being invited to China to speak on Finding the Creatives in Your Corporation or Country, paid for by the People’s Government.

Harrison offers periodic free telephone and video seminars on many related topics that often feature guests who made their reputations doing whatever programs that they are promoting. One, for example, might explain how to start your own radio show, which I did. This show was Hovey’s Outdoor Adventures and can still be heard on WebTalkRadio.net. Because of my diversity of interests and content, I was never able to obtain sponsors and dropped the show after trying to capitalize on it for a year. This activity was replaced by my doing YouTube videos, and I have over 675 of them up at the moment. My doing radio, TV and international speaking are direct consequences of my being an author and writing books.

A Place to Write

It is extremely convenient to have a place to work where you are alone, can spread out your documents around you and have a second computer handy to go on line to check facts, get quotes, look at potential photos, etc. Or you can use your smart phone for this function. In my case I use a new office built on what  was the site of the external kitchen of Whitehall, my  1790s plantation house.  This room allows me to have a 1,000-book library, a location free from the distractions of what is happening in the house and not having to share the phone with other family members.

Having an office to use exclusively for writing is not possible for most people. Many writers have a room in their house which is  their “sanctum-sanctum” that is kept inviolate, as if it were holy ground.  Many writers dream of having a room like this, but most likely are working out of their bedroom or on their kitchen table.  Graduate students in major universities may all be thrown in a room with partitioned-off spaces containing a desk, chair and some shelving. This works for most people while they are pounding out their thesis or dissertation, and can also work for an author. Somewhere, somehow make a space where you can work on your book. To just be able to sit down and write your book, rather than having to regather and set up everything new for each day’s work is a considerable aid in encouraging you to be more productive.

Books have been written about this book-writing business. By all  means get and read some of them. My own book, Create Your Own Job Security, is proceeding apace. I have finished the text, am working on the cover and hope to have copies ready for sale in August. In it I consider writing as only one of very many opportunities to start businesses during a lifetime to raise immediate cash and to ultimately decide on and execute a life-long passion into a business that can insure your and your family’s future. My book differs from similar titles in that I advocate having numerous businesses to satisfy different needs and accomplish different objectives during your lifetime.

I am taking advanced orders for the book for $19.95 which includes getting an autographed edition and free shipping. You may place an order by using the Pay Pal button below.

Create Your Own Job Security

Generally available for special promotion price of $10.99.

$10.99

Being an author, one of the things that I discuss in my forthcoming book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife, is earning a living as an writer/producer/publisher of your own books. There are many aspects of this kind of business, and one that is not often discussed is the design of the back cover. This is important in book-store and on-line sales because potential buyers want to be able to quickly size-up the title to see if they wish to buy the book. Another significant thing for Book Stores is that this rear cover must have a bar code so that the book can be quickly scanned at the register.

The three elements of a soft-cover book, the front cover, spine and back cover are all printed at the same time on the same stock. They are designed to wrap around and be glued to the pages of the book. The most effective covers are designed by specialized artists who are accustomed to using various image processing programs that can incorporate written text, photos and drawn art all in the same cover. The author must supply the elements of the text which are divided into sections as can be seen below:

“If you want to be truly inspired with not only WHY to develop your own enterprise but HOW to do so, this is YOUR book.”  A quote from a respected reviewer.

                   Charles Heller, Liberty Watch Radio

 A statement that stresses the importance of the book to potential buyers.

The stress of facing chronic lay-offs and frequent short-term jobs can become a thing of the past if you create your own job security by having a continuous stream of income derived from your own businesses. Having been in this situation many times, author Wm. Hovey Smith explains how he developed numerous businesses that provided short-and-long term income, improved his health and let him make money doing work that he would do even if no one paid him.

Four or five bullet points that tells how the contents of this book will improve the reader’s life.

This book will allow you to select business opportunities that will help you:              

• Avoid the Trauma of Losing a Job
• Use Your Skills to Generate the Money You Need
• Pursue Work that you Love to Do
• Provide a More Secure Future

 Details about the book’s content.

You’ll find valuable information on how to prospect for and rank business ideas, name your business, discover E-business opportunities and learn about trademarks, copyrights and patents.

The author’s qualifications.

Wm. Hovey Smith is a decorated Engineer Officer, holds two university degrees, the author of 15 books, producer of over 675 YouTube videos, broadcaster, humorist, artist, knife-maker, outdoorsman, Professional Geologist, and international speaker on business topics. For more: createyourownjobsecurity.com.

  A head shot of the author in a pose appropriate for the book. Which do you like better? The formal shot in the jacket or the informal one with the ball cap?

9780916565107_19-95_ean Bar Code Create Your Own Job Security

This bar code has three important elements of which only two can be shown in this format. It has the ISBN number which uniquely identifies the book that is obtained from the R.R. Bowker company and the price of this edition of the book along with the scanning bars which could not be shown here.   Each different binding or presentation, say a hard cover and an E-book, will have a different bar code which is also available from Boker.

Create Your Own Job Security

Generally available for special promotion price of $10.99.

$10.99