The Boss of You

The early reviews keep rolling in… Today’s addition to the good-vibes folder comes courtesy of Booklist, the American Library Association’s book review journal.
The Boss of You: Everything a Woman Needs to Know to Start, Run, and Maintain Her Own Business.
Mears, Emira (Author) and Bacon, Lauren (Author)
May 2008. 256 p. Seal, paperback, $15.95. (9781580052368). 658.1.
Web design […]

[Read more →]

Every author we know tried to console us during the final slog of the editing process by promising us that when we held our first real live copy we’d fall back in love. They told us that the emotional surge we’d feel the moment we tore open that box of author copies would help […]

[Read more →]

Oh my, but there were a lot of puns to choose from to title this post… “BUST-ing with pride,” anyone? OK, but seriously, we’re very, very excited that The Boss of You has received a thumbs-up from BUST, one of our most favoritest magazines ever. (There are two covers to the left because it’s […]

[Read more →]

One common business question we help our smaller (and larger) online retailers with in our day jobs as website designers, is figuring out how to price online shipping. As anyone who’s bought something off eBay (and not paid attention to the shipping costs), or who has tried to mail a care package loaded down with goodies to a friend on the other coast knows, shipping is not cheap. And when the cost of shipping is coming out of your bottom line — read: your paycheque — you really want to make sure you’re covering your costs. That said, shipping is never a flat rate and mere distance doesn’t always help tell the story of the final cost. There are several factors that will impact shipping rates, things like speed, weight, size and distance and unless you only sell one thing on your website it near impossible to figure out what to charge as a standard shipping rate.

So, in with all this uncertainty what do we recommend to our clients? In short: split the difference.

[Read more →]

For the Facebookers among you, we now have a Facebook page for The Boss of You, where we will be posting events, photos, discussion topics, and so on. We’d be delighted if you would stop by and say hello.

[Read more →]

Lately it seems like our little website is growing bigger by the day. The latest addition is a sample chapter: You can now download a PDF version of the Table of Contents, Introduction and first chapter, all totally free! The first chapter, “Define Your Vision,” guides you through three key exercises: Defining your business goals, […]

[Read more →]

One of the things we talk about a lot in The Boss of You is the importance of creating your own definition of success. Everyone’s definition is a little different. I’ve been on the lookout for personal definitions of success since we started the book, and I think I’m going to start posting them as […]

[Read more →]

I participated yesterday in an “Entrepreneurship 101” panel discussion for Arts Co-op students at the University of British Columbia, and one of the questions we fielded was about networking. Personally, I’ve always disliked the word “networking,” partly because it’s one of those verbs that’s been awkwardly adapted from a noun (“impacting” being my least-favourite example […]

[Read more →]

I came across an article yesterday that sets up a totally reasonable, small-is-beautiful model for making a living as an artist (whatever your medium): all you have to do is develop a fan base that includes 1,000 true fans.
This is a completely reasonable approach to take for those artists who a) are comfortable interacting with […]

[Read more →]

Emira and I are both a little, shall we say, to-do-list-centric. We both rely heavily on our to-do lists to get through our days, because a typical day for us requires us to wear many hats, and frankly if we tried to keep all that stuff in our heads we would probably go a little […]

[Read more →]