I decided to try to publish my first book in 2014. That book, Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide their Teams to Exceptional Results (Career Press, 2015), has done quite well, including:

• hitting the Top 20 bestseller list in three categories - Leadership, Management, and Teams - in the Amazon Kindle store in 2020
• gone on to be a Top 10 all-time bestseller for its publisher, 
• been released in English, Chinese, and Korean versions, and ...

Enter: The Agent (Jan. 22, 2014)

"Sideways" is one of my all-time favorite movies. The scene where Paul Giamatti's character goes beserk and sloppily chugs the spit bucket of red wine at the tasting room of a winery is a classic.

Do you remember what caused him to go beserk? It was talking to his literary agent.

Today, I communicated with a literary agent for the first time. No wine bucke...

The Agent Responds (June 3, 2014)

I have checked my email inbox approximately 600 times in the 26 hours since I sent the proposal to Miles. Is my inbox working? Am I going to be crushed or elated when he does respond? Mercifully, the waiting game ended at 1:41pm today with his reply calling this "a very strong proposal" and asking for a conference call to go over feedback. The three of us find a time to conference call on Thursday afternoo...

What to Expect When You're Expecting a Book (February 9, 2015)

I got a nice email from the editor at the publishing house who is going to be working on the manuscript. I'll call her Emma. In addition to a nice "hello" she also shared a document that describes the process that the manuscript will go through. I found it to be a nice overview of the different steps that I will share here.

&...