Successfully start your own profitable business   Starting your own business is an American Dream. But raising money requires a polished business plan that sells financial backers on your idea. The Perfect Business Plan Made Simple approaches the business plan as a sales document that will persuade bankers and venture capitalists to invest in your new or growing enterprise. Featuring examples and detailed sample plans, this updated edition addresses legal concerns and special issues unique to internet-based businesses. Detailed writing instructions, overviews of the funding process, and explanations of why certain arguments are crucial make this guide invaluable to both novices and experienced entrepreneurs. Important topics include:   • your business’s mission and strategy • the written plan and the role of presentations • the target audience principle • making financial projections • how to make and present a marketing plan • special considerations for service businesses • contingencies–what you’ll do if things go wrong • legal and ownership issues • dot-com businesses • a self-test to see if you’re cut out to be an entrepreneur Look for these Made Simple Books: Accounting Made Simple Arithmetic Made Simple Astronomy Made Simple Biology Made Simple Bookkeeping Made Simple Business Letters Made Simple Chemistry Made Simple Computer Science Made Simple Earth Science Made Simple English Made Simple French Made Simple German Made Simple Inglés Hecho Fácil Investing Made Simple Italian Made Simple Keyboarding Made Simple Latin Made Simple Learning English Made Simple Mathematics Made Simple Philosophy Made Simple Physics Made Simple Psychology Made Simple Sign Language Made Simple Spanish Made Simple Spelling Made Simple Statistics Made Simple Your Small Business Made Simple From the Trade Paperback edition.

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A wickedly funny memoir with echoes of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, Beautiful People (originally published in hardcover as Nasty ) is now a BBC comedy hit series from the producer of Ab Fab and The Office . Proclaimed "the most brilliant, brash thing in type" by Liz Smith, Simon Doonan's saucy prose has established him as an emerging star among literary humorists. In this break-through memoir, reminiscent of both Sedaris and Burroughs, he revisits the landscape of his youth, and displays the irresistible charm that earned him his dedicated audience. Long before he became a celebrity in his own right--as the author of best-selling books, as the style arbiter of VH1 and America's Top Model , and the marketing genius behind Barney's New York--Simon Doonan was a "scabby knee'd troll" in Reading, England. In Beautiful People , Doonan returns to the working-class neighborhood of his youth, and chronicles the misadventures of the Doonan clan in all their wacky glory. Readers meet his mother Betty, whose gravity-defying, peroxide hairdo signified her natural glamour; his father Terry, an amateur vintner who turned parsnips into the legendary Chateau Doonan; his grandfather D.C., a hard-drinking betting man who plotted to win his fortune by turning Simon into a jockey; and his demented grandma Narg and schizophrenic Uncle Ken, both of whom lived upstairs. Fearing he would fall victim to the insanity that runs in his family, or, worse, the banality of suburban life, Doonan decamps with his flamboyant best-friend Biddie to London, where they hope to find the Beautiful People, that elusive clan who luxuriate on floor pillows and amuse each other with bon mots. Throughout the memoir--in essays about family holidays, the tart who lived next door, his first job--Doonan continues his bumbling pursuit of the fabulous life, only to learn, in the end, that perhaps the Beautiful People were the ones he left behind.

Price: $11.99 USD

With African Americans writing and buying books in record numbers, the time is ripe for a comprehensive publishing guide tailored expressly to the needs of this vibrant, creative community. The African American Writers Handbook meets this challenge perfectly. Written by veteran journalist and published author Robert Fleming, this book gives writers the heart, the determination, and above all the crucial information to publish successfully in this highly competitive field. Knowing the inner workings of the publishing industry provides any writer, novice or veteran, with a much needed advantage in the quest to get into print. Inside you'll find - A complete, step-by-step guide to every aspect of the publishing process, from the germination of a winning idea to the nuts and bolts of book production - Tips on submitting proposals, query letters, and preparing manuscripts for submission - Advice on negotiating contracts that extend careers - How to use on-line resources for research and profit - Interviews with top editors, agents, publishing executives, and bookstore owners - Updated information on copyrights, subsidiary rights, sales and marketing - The trials and triumphs of self-publishing - The art of promoting your work and yourself to a wider audience - An insider's look at the economic realities of the book business - And much more! Here, too, are scores of inspiring interviews and capsule biographies of leading African American writers both past and present. How did Richard Wright become America's first bestselling black writer? How did Zora Neale Hurston break through the artistic boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance long after her death? What was Toni Cade Bambara doing before she sold her first book? Why should Ann Petry, William Gardner Smith, Nella Larson, and William Melvin Kelley be revered wherever African American literature is read? Blending practical information and fascinating anecdotes with a mini literary history of African American writing, this upbeat, savvy, essential guide is a publishing primer with soul. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture * The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek Bestseller * Finalist for the Goldman Sachs/FT Business Book of the Year Award What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that questionin all its shades of meaningcan unlock the most intractable riddles of business and arguably of human culture itself. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing. But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's a big- picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology and the enormous impact it's starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest. BACKCOVER: The Search is a superb story, well written and feverishly researched. Whether you are a student, techie, business executive, budding visionary or just enjoy pop culture, this is a book not to be missed. USA Today John Battelle is Silicon Valley's Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider.The result is a highly readable account of Google's astonishing rise. The Economist It's a fascinating story, and Mr. Battelle tells it well. The Wall Street Journal A surprisingly gripping story The Search yields impressive results, pairing a reportorial eye for detail with an evangelical zeal to help readers understand the import of the search revolution. Wired News Battellemanages to keep things compelling, adding his own trenchant analysis about what Google's rapid evolution and powerful technology might mean for the company and our society as whole. The Associated Press A compelling glimpse of the search industry's early years. BusinessWeek Deeply researched and nimbly reported. Publishers Weekly Indispensable. London Review of Books John Battelle has written a brilliant business book, but he's also done something more: he's used the amazing saga of Google to explore what it means to search. All searchers should read it. Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute; former editor of Time ; former CEO of CNN Nobody, and I mean nobody, has thought longer, harder, or smarter about Google and the search business than John Battelle. If you want to understand the rise of the search economy and culture, you need to read this book. John Heilemann, author of Pride Before the Fall

Price: $12.99 USD

Who needs expensive, old-fashioned office software? Now, you can do everything online, free, with Google Docs! Experts Steve and Nancy Holzner offer simple, step-by-step instructions and great insider tips for making the most of Google’s powerful online word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. You’ll get started fast... learn how to create and format professional-quality documents of all kinds... collaborate with colleagues to build better proposals and presentations... use advanced tools like revision history, templates, and charts... discover Google Docs’ latest features and shortcuts... and a whole lot more! No matter what kind of documents you create, this book can help you do the job better, faster, and more efficiently... and you’ll never pay for office software again!   You’ll Learn How To             •           Get your free Google account and set up iGoogle for instant access to your documents             •           Upload and use the documents you’ve already created with Microsoft Office             •           Use Google Spreadsheet to create charts to display spreadsheet data             •           Master Google Docs’ easy, powerful document-editing and formatting tools             •           Insert images into your documents and presentations             •           Share documents securely with your colleagues             •           Back up your documents offline and edit them when you don’t have an Internet connection   Steven Holzner, former contributing editor at PC Magazine, is author of 108 computer books that have sold more than 2.5 million copies. His most recent Pearson book is Facebook Marketing. Nancy Holzner writes and edits technology books from her home in central New York state. Her recent publications include books on Intuit QuickBase and Zoho. Nancy has also worked as a medievalist, a high school teacher, and a corporate trainer.   CATEGORY:  Productivity Suites COVERS: Google Docs USER LEVEL: Beginning-Intermediate

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So you have something to sell or you work for a business using salesforce.com, but you’re not quite sure how to maximize your profits with it? Never fear! Salesforce.com for Dummies shows you the quick-and-easy way to start selling your product or service online without the confusion or fuss. With an emphasis on customer relationship management, this hands-on guide helps you manage accounts, market your products, and improve service. Whether you’re a salesperson, channel manager, marketing mogul, customer rep, or executive, you’ll find secrets here for making your job easier, your day more productive, and your business more successful. This second edition has been revised to include Salesforce.com’s latest product and feature offerings as of the Summer 2006 release, giving you the tools you need to::; Build a product catalog; Manage price books; Calculating and customizing forecasts; Drive demand up with campaigns; Stimulate sales effectiveness with documents; Deliver excellent service; Analyze data with reports; Verify your company profile; Add users to salesforce; Customize your page and search layout; Extend your usage of Salesforce beyond CRM. This guide makes suggestions on how to dive more productivity and improve communication with standard templates from the Dummies Web site. With this book you’ll get up to speed fast and manage your business information more effectively with Salesforce.com today!

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This is the eBook version of the printed book. Who Stole My Customer?? offers unique and powerful insights into the world of acquiring and retaining customers. Most importantly it provides new approaches to keeping existing customers from defection. A must-read in today's challenging business environment. –Dieter Huckenstein, President, Hotel Operations, Hilton Hotels Corporation Harvey Thompson probably knows more about how companies should work with customers than anyone else in the world. In an age when computers and mass communications makes it difficult to keep or attract new customers, Thompson's insights on what managers must do to keep them makes this one of the most important business books published this year. Clearly must reading for all levels of management. –James W. Cortada, IBM Institute for Business Value Harvey Thompson has done it again with this well-written book that offers valuable insights about the roots of sustained corporate greatness. He captures a lifetime of building winning formulas and puts them into a simple and practical context for executives at any level looking to take their business to the next level in the 21st century. –Mark R. Richards, President, Structures Division, Valmont Industries, Inc. One of the leading causes of the rapid turnover of marketing and sales executives isn't the economy, it's the ignored cancer of customer attrition. Who Stole My Customer?? takes on this challenge head-on and tackles it from a pragmatic perspective with actions you can take today. –Louis Columbus, Senior Analyst, AMR Research I think Harvey Thompson really understands how customers feel about products and services-for better or worse! His central point is well taken-take care of them now or lose them to competitors who are more in tune with your customers' needs and wants. This book helps us remember that we must build our offerings from the 'outside in' to build customer loyalty and minimize defection. Thank you, Mr. Thompson!" –Bill Ghormley, Executive Consultant, The Forum Corporation, and Past President, The Marketing Science Institute A start-to-finish program for addressing your #1 challenge: customer retention Who's stealing your customers? Why is it happening? How can you stop it? These are the toughest questions facing virtually every enterprise. Who Stole My Customer?? is your complete guide to planning and implementing customer loyalty processes that really work-because they're built around what your customers really want. Harvey Thompson helps you view your business and its processes through your customer's eyes … and you might be shocked at what you see. You'll systematically discover the real drivers of customer loyalty in your business, so you can focus your customer relationship investments for maximum value. Drawing on his unsurpassed experience at IBM and other world-class enterprises,

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This is the eBook version of the printed book. Women now drive some 80% of all buying decisions. By 2010, they'll account for half of America's private wealth: $13 trillion dollars. A few remarkable companies have learned how to refocus on women -- and, in so doing, have achieved truly stunning results. In The Power of the Purse, top journalist Fara Warner takes you behind the scenes at those companies, revealing how they did it -- and how you can, too. Unlike previous books on marketing to women, this one doesn't settle for generalities: it offers in-depth, start-to-finish case studies. Discover how McDonald's turned around its business by recognizing women as full-fledged consumers, not just 'Moms.' Learn how Kodak's digital camera business soared from fourth to first by recognizing women's importance as family 'memory makers'. See how P G built Swiffer into a cultural revolution, and how the diamond industry did the same for right-hand rings. Watch Bratz topple Barbie, Torrid create its enormously successful plus-size stores for teenagers, and Avon connect with a radically new generation of women. From Nike to Home Depot, each story is unique -- but in every case, these companies put women at the center of their strategies, and listened intently to what real women consumers were telling them. It's not about 'painting your products pink': it's about transforming the way you think about women. Do that, and you'll create products that sell better to everyone.

Price: $34.99 USD

The missing link to determining a company’s real value. Most people at the M&A table know how to carry out financial and legal due diligence. Only the accomplished investors come prepared with an in-depth understanding of the complete due diligence process. Operations Due Diligence is a game-changing guide for investors who need a fully accurate determination on the sustainability of a business. Written by a hands-on operations executive who has successfully implemented process improvement programs at large and small businesses, this practical guidebook sets itself apart by providing a step-by-step strategy for analyzing the toughest area of a business to assess: its operations. Unlike financial and legal due diligence, there were no principles such as law and accounting to guide operations due diligence—until now. This turnkey approach, based on a pragmatic series of almost 400 questions, helps you accurately assess the infrastructures of a business’s customer satisfaction, production, information management, sales and marketing, organization, and personnel, as well as its finances and legal operations. For managers and business owners looking to improve the sustainability of their business, this guided inquiry serves as a thorough operations checklist to next-level performance. Whether you are an investor trying to capture a new opportunity with minimal risk or an executive struggling to improve your business, Operations Due Diligence gives you a distinct advantage by: Going a step further than most books and illustrating how to analyze your discoveries; Using historic examples to make the lessons both understandable and memorable; Clearly explaining how and why each sector is an important indicator of the long-term sustainability of a business; Conveniently locating infrastructure summary questions at the end of chapters for quick reference; Providing a document checklist so nothing gets overlooked at the negotiating table. The highest-valued companies and their investors know that producing the best products and services isn’t enough. Survival depends on continually improving infrastructure through Operations Due Diligence.

Price: $75.00 USD

3G, HSPA and FDD versus TDD Networking, Second Edition is the only book that contrasts the network capacity gains that may be achieved with the advent of adaptive antenna arrays and HSDPA-style adaptive modulation techniques in the context of FDD and TDD CDMA cellular networks.  In the five years since the first edition of this book was published the wireless landscape has evolved further. The new book addresses the recent developments in the field of HSDPA-style wireless networking, focusing particularly on the issues and challenges of FDD versus TDD networking. These solutions are particularly powerful in shadow-faded scenarios, when the antenna array elements experience correlated, rather than independent fading. Furthermore, the flexible up-link/down-link time-slot allocation of TDD is beneficial for supporting the Wireless Internet, but results in erratic interference fluctuations, which is efficiently combated by the antenna arrays and adaptive modulation. Additionally, whilst the adaptive modulation aided system simply drops the instantaneous transmission rate during instances of high interference, conventional networks would drop the call.:; Builds on successful previous edition to include recent developments in the field of HSDPA-style wireless networking; Provides an all-encompassing self-contained overview of the subject for a wide range of readers of all levels.; Treats the topics of both physical-layer and network-layer aspects of wireless systems using a cross-layer optimization approach. ; One of the first books to contrast in detail both FDD and TDD networking. The material is presented clearly and logically allowing the uninitiated reader to commence reading it at fundamental non-mathematical conceptual level at the beginning of the book, while advanced readers can turn directly to the required chapter describing solutions to a number of wireless FDD or TDD networking problems. This book will inspire researchers, practicing engineers, operators, marketing engineers and advanced postgraduates.

Price: $210.00 USD