How To Redeem A Promo Code In iBookStore

Recently, Apple allowed authors with books published on their iBookStore to use promo codes. A stable and very popular feature for iOS developers who published their apps in AppStore, promo codes were unavailable for iBookStore until now. I confess I was a bit confused on how to use these promo codes, since there is no iBooks app on Mac OS. Usually, I was using my iTunes on the Mac to redeem the promo codes for apps in AppStore, but without a similar thing for ibooks, I just had to scratch my head a bit.

Fortunately, it proved to be a much simpler process than I thought. In fact, it has only 2 simple steps. Here we go:

Step 1: Find The Redeem Button

For that, you should open the iBooks app (on your iPhone or iPad). If you’re on the “Library” mode, browsing the ebooks you already bought, touch the “Store” button and make sure you’re on the Apple store and not on your local device. Once you get there, touch the first tab button in the navigation tab bar on the bottom of the screen. It is the one called “Featured”. Now scroll all the way down to the bottom, and voila: the “Redeem” button magically appears.

Step 2: Enter Your Promo Code

Now, after touching the “Redeem” button, you’ll be taken to a new screen, pretty much similar with the one below:

After you entered your promo code, you will (hopefully) get a message saying that your item is downloading. What iBooks does is that it automatically matches the product with your promo code, looks it up in the store and starts downloading it. In a few seconds, if you have a good internet connection, your book will be available in the Library. Here’s how your iPhone screen should look like after the entire process finished:

That’s it.

5 Simple Ways To Manage Stress

You may have noticed that I didn’t write as much as usual here. There’s a good reason for this: I’m moving out. I left behind my house in the suburbs, rented a small apartment downtown and I’m one step closer to a full digital nomad lifestyle. The causes and effects of this move have much deeper implications that I can cover in only one blog post. I think I may talk about some of them in the upcoming weeks. For now, it’s enough to tell that life is rapidly settling in a new shape for me.

The process of moving out wasn’t without complications. And, since it’s, well, a process still unfolding, I can safely tell that it’s still filled with complications. From the moment I decided to look after a new place until this very moment, things rapidly changed their peaceful course to a roller coaster one. And, during this process, guess what I experienced the most (a part the normal joy, exhilaration, excitement and deep transformations created by a life changing experience)? Yeap, stress

As usual, when I stumble upon some unusual situation, I try to extract as much meaning and learning as I can. And here are 5 things I learned about how one should manage stress in the last 2 weeks.

1. Never Take A Decision On An Empty Stomach

I bet you were waiting for something smart and, possibly, hard to understand as the first tip. Sorry to disappoint you, but this proved to be one of the best rules of coping with stress that I learned in the last 2 weeks. And there are serious reasons for that.

From a physiological point of view, unless you’re feasting for a while now, and your metabolism is already adapted, hunger will adversely affect your brain. You won’t be able to send the correct information to your brain nor to get the correct answer. Your biology will literally be changed and our biology is directly affecting the way we process information.

From a psychological point of view, when you experience a major shortage in your mental ecosystem (like a fundamental need still unfulfilled) you’ll instantly try to compensate. You will be pressured to take the best short term decision, so you can get back to your meal. In other words, you’ll trade the long term benefits of your decision for a short term improvement in your satisfaction balance.

2. Never Take A Decision When You Didn’t Have Enough Sleep

That’s pretty much the same as above, but with a few important differences. Sleep deprivation can act as a double edge sword. On one side, it can give sudden insights, intuitions or it can make you a better problem solver, but on the other side, it can really fog your conscious field. The better problem solving abilities are created because of the shift in perspective you get when you’re lucid for more time, but at the same time, your biology can’t really cope with these prolonged intervals of sleep imbalance.

Won’t get into body chemistry details here (do a search for serotonin, if you’re really into it) but it’s enough to let you know that you should definitely postpone any important decision for a time when you’ll have the minimum hours of sleep under your belt.

Not to mention that the mere ability to negotiate and postpone important decisions for a better moment will be in itself an important stress relief.

3. Establish Clear Exit Points

Stressful situations may spiral for ever if you don’t establish clear exit points. There are only 24 hours in the day, and you can’t possibly finish every thing that you want to in order to bring back order into your life. Chaos will have this tendency to feed itself with the very raw energy you spend to beat it, if you don’t apply short corrections. So, instead of playing the hero that stays up all night packing furniture, just create some mental milestones and, as you reach each and every one of them, get them out of your mind.

If you don’t establish clear exit points, the result will be that you will soon be out of fuel. In your desperate attempt to get out of the stressful situation, you will sink more and more, simply because you didn’t establish when exactly you’re “out”.

This happens more often than you think, and I’m not talking only about stress spikes, but also about more peaceful periods of our life. How do you decide when to relax and when to work? How do you put these mental stops between doing stuff and analyzing what you did?

4. One Thing At A Time

Set short term goals that have to be met in order to move further. During stressful situations, because we’re still acting on the flight or fight impulse, we want to solve everything in one move. In my experience this isn’t happening. Never. Instead, we can improve several parts of the situations and gradually approach the rest of it.

It really goes hand in hand with number 3, when you have to establish clear exit points, but here it’s more on the “break it down in edible chunks” side. Regardless of the size of the stressful situation, it can always be broken down in smaller pieces. Do this process as often as you can and focus only on the next milestone, not on the whole process.

If I’m not doing this I’m almost always paralyzed by the size of the task that I have to solve and the end result is that I can’t move on. On the other side, when I’m breaking it into small chunks, I move forward.

5. Be Flexible

It’s crucial to look around and take advantage of any opportunity that may arise. Especially when we’re stressed we tend to turn inside and completely ignore the outside world, as a mechanism of protection. Instead of doing this, try to keep your eyes open, things may not be as ugly as they seem, as long as you’re ready to act upon your opportunities.

For instance, as I was getting ready to move all my stuff in the new apartment, I completely ignored what would have happen to the house. My focus was only ahead, ignoring what was behind. But as I stepped back for a while, I remembered that somebody, a few months ago, asked if the house was for rent. It wasn’t, at that time. But it could be, now. Called the guy, set up a meeting and in less than 12 hours we reached to a deal.

So, every time you’re getting too trapped in your own battle, do this effort of stepping out of your own skin and look at yourself from the outside. It’s not an easy process, I agree, but it’s one that pays back big time.

***

So what are your tricks on fighting stress?

Taming Monkey Number 8 – First Update

As you may already know, I’m, on a special kind of challenge this year. I ditched my new years resolution and replaced them with monthly challenges in which I intend to “tame an inner monkey”. Basically, an inner monkey it’s an underdeveloped part of myself, or a promise I never lived up to. You can read the introductory post here.

This month monkey is “straightening my finances”. And this is the first update.

Revenue Sources

First of all, as a digital nomad living off the grid, my revenue sources are very eclectic. In the beginning, this is a little bit difficult to understand from someone coming from a job-oriented culture, where there’s only one clear source of income. And since 99% of the people I know are coming from this culture, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that pretty much everybody finds my way of generating money hard to understand.

That’s why I intend to make a little breakdown of all this.

Ebooks

I wrote 6 ebooks so far, for almost all of them there are previews at my downloads page. Main topics are productivity and self improvement, obviously. I also wrote a bit about how to create and maintain an online business. Pretty much I transform parts of my experience in something that other people may benefit from, and package it in an ebook.

I currently sell the ebooks on Amazon, Kindle and iBookStore.

Affiliate Programs

I promote a few products that I either currently use or used in the past with some good results. Basically, every time somebody buys one of these products via my recommendation I get a commission. Not rocket science. You can see a small list of those items on my recommended products page.

iOS apps

I created and currently maintain iAdd for iPhone and iPad. It has its own website at iAdd.co. It’s the iOS implementation of the productivity ebook I wrote (and currently sell on its own domain too: Natural Productivity: Assess, Decide, Do).

Partnerships

Until recently I was involved in two businesses as an adviser / partner. These are just regular business partnerships where I invest part of my assets (currently I’m not investing any money, just time, skills and expertise) and get a share of the profit, if any. One of the possible evolutions of these partnerships is that, after I validate the market, the product and the team, I recommend the business for a capital injection.

Consulting

I do a bit of business consulting, and that includes blogging, online business marketing and alike. Much of these was done in the form of being part of some entrepreneurs / investors events in Romania.

Live Events

Every now and then I do motivational events, like teambuildings or retreats. These are happening on a “let’s see if this will happen” basis, I’m not promoting them directly.

Where I Am And Where I’m Going

As you can see, this is a pretty hectic list. Could seriously use some strengthening and that’s exactly what I started to do. So, here’s what I did so far.

Leaving WPSumo behind

I decided to step out of the WPSumo ship. Although I was able to generate more than 5000 USD in cash in the first two months, although the market (WordPress publishing) and the product (premium WordPress framework) were both validated, there was something that wasn’t: the team. I won’t dive into details because I still think there’s huge potential for this. I was on the verge to even bring in some working capital, but now I’m happy this didn’t happen. The risk was too high.

More Consulting

I will take on a few more clients on a regular basis from now on. With fall being just around the corner and a few meetings already planned in my agenda I think this will turn out well. My intention is to not only increase cash flow, but to create a regular working routine outside my home.

Online Courses

I was playing with this idea for a long time. I even had a dry test in using one of the many existing platform for online course delivery. I intend to create at least a workable demo of one of my courses (still don’t know the topic as of now) by the end of the month. At least I will have an idea if this is working or not. That’s one of those promises I made to myself but never really lived up to it.

A Fiction Ebook?

In a recent discussion with a friend, it came out that in my teenage years I was kinda of a prolific writer. I guess 80% of it was gibberish, just teenage poetry or prose (“nobody understands me” kind of crap) but some of the pieces I wrote back then were pretty good. I decided to spice up my portfolio of ebooks with a fiction one. It will be a challenge to translate it in English, that’s for sure, so I’m sure it won’t be done this month.

Status

I think I’m ok for now. I already feel this monkey is starting to get human, so to speak. As usual, there will be another update at the end of the month. Or even sooner, if there will be enough material for it.

WPSumo Promo Code – July 2011 Edition

I know many of you were waiting for the usual Mariner Promo Code fiesta here, but alas, all good things come to an end. The Mariner promotion, allegedly one of the longest promotions on the internet, with more than 2 and a half years running, is currently on hold.

So, long live our newest promotion, the one related to the ultimate WordPress framework, WPSumo. As you may already know, I am a partner in this project. That means that I know pretty much everything about it. So, without further ado, let’s see the code:

wpsumorocks

This promo code will give you an instant 30$ off of the Developer License. The one that lets you use WPSumo on unlimited domains, that is. In order to use it, you just have to click on this link:

WPSumo Developer License

and then scroll down to the field where it says “enter coupon code” (obviously). Enter the promo code and then click “Proceed To Checkoout”. You’ll be taken to PayPal where you can finish the transaction. The total amount should be 99 USD.

Why You Should Do This?

So, let’s pretend you’ve never been on my blog before and just stumbled upon this post by doing a search for “premium wordpress frameworks” (which is very likely to happen, by the way). What can you actually do with this WPSumo? Well, you can do a lot. I strongly advise you to have a look at this article

12 Reasons To Switch To WPSumo

and then come back here. Because, from now on, I will publish an extra reason in each monthly promotion about WPSumo we’re going to have.

How To Create A Work With Me Page

Have you noticed my latest Work With Me page? Kinda neat, isn’t it? I’m not talking about the content here, but about the look and feel. Well, believe it or not, I did it in under 5 minutes. And I also created a nice screencast in which I’m taking you through this process, step by step. Yes, I did that in under 5 minutes and you can watch the proof right now:

Just remember, the promo code is

wpsumorocks

It will shave an instant 30$ from your purchase, thus leaving the Developer License at only $99. All you have to do is to click the link below:

WPSumo Developer License

Enjoy

How Not To Multitask

Computer multitasking is a myth. No processor can do stuff in a true “independent” way. What happens inside that silicon core is that there are a lot of small execution threads which are managed from a central point (in order to prevent them from colliding or accidentally use the same resource). But because everything happens so fast, from the outside, everything looks like magic. So, multitasking is in fact more like a single ball juggler than like a true, parallel and independent execution entity.

Knowing this, you will find much easier to accept the fact that the human brain is not designed to function in a “multitasking” mode. There was a time when I took great pride in doing 4 or 5 things at the same time. “Look, I’m multitasking’. Writing an email while talking to a client on the phone and browsing that contract I had to sign in the next 2 minutes. Yeap, I was really proud of me. Only I didn’t really have something to be proud of.

The Downside Of Multitasking

Squeezing a bunch of stuff in the same tiny timeframe will drastically affect the quality of it. You can bet that the email will have at least a few spelling errors (if not some serious semantic problems) and that the client on the phone will have some difficulties understanding what you’re talking about and, which is worse, that you may sign a very bad contract if you don’t take the time to really assess it.

The pressure of ”getting it done“ is so high, though, that we keep pushing and pushing, and try to squeeze more and more in that small timeframe.

But maybe the most annoying consequence of human multitasking is that our brain capacity to really focus on one topic at a time is almost completely destroyed. If you keep pushing it, you won’t be able to focus on something more complicated than writing an email. Or a few emails at a same time, to be more precise. The pressure of adding something new to the mix will make it impossible to stay more on the same page, so to speak.

Bottom line: in a few years you will be able to execute only very simple and short tasks. You may be multitasking but your tasks complexity will be at a kindergarten level. Believe me, I’ve been there.

How Not To Multitask

After a few years of being a multitasking manager, I eventually had to find a way to reverse the effects of my own choice. Namely, to regain my ability to perform complex tasks, with a high execution quality and in a reasonable amount of time. And, most important, NOT all at the same time.

Introducing the brain juggler: a few simple rules for doing stuff in a consistent way, without losing your focus and still keep the results within the required time constraints. Or, in other words, how to intelligently switch from one thing to another.

1. Spot The Small Chunks

Isolate the tiniest time unit for your tasks and order them by that, not by the topic or project. In other words, try to group them by how long do you think they’ll take: 2 minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour. And then start doing them from the shortest time interval to the longest.

My long time GTD readers will spot a similarity here: it’s the 2 minutes rule from the Getting Things Done ”bible“. Well, it is, to some extent, but it’s more than that. If you force your brain to do tasks of the same length for a certain period, it will warm up. Like a muscle.

So, don’t apply this only to the ”2 minutes“ tasks, do the same for the ”10 minutes“ tasks or the ”half an hour“ tasks. And the trick here is to keep a steady pace of the same length. It’s like cardio for the brain. Or intervals.

2. Balance Right And Left Hemispheres

As a true brain juggler, you don’t want to be ruled by only one of your brain hemispheres. In reality, this is happening most often than not, I have to admit this. Because you may have a specific job that requires exclusively big parts of your left or right hemisphere.

But this doesn’t need to be the rule. Even if you’re an accountant and your job involves your analytic hemisphere heavily, you can still find a way to make use of the other, more creative half. For instance, when you call your clients, try to invent a different salutation each time you get them on the phone.

I won’t say that if you don’t use one of your hemispheres it will shrink and become useless, because I don’t really know that. All I know is that switching them constantly helped me a lot. It’s a little awkward at the beginning but in time you’ll get better at it.

3. Log Constantly

That means you should find the time to log what you did, or at least important parts of it. When I started to work on my iAdd app, I didn’t do any type of logging. Until one day I realized I wrote the same code three times! And that’s because I always rushed to implement the next feature, without taking the time to log what I already did.

Of course, you can’t log every little thing you do. But each big project you start or finish may have some sort of a ”login“ or ”logut“ routine, spaces where you should take the time to write down what you actually did.

Logging will create a very necessary loop, a cut in the time / space continuum you’re working in. A separation of the beginning and the end. In multitasking, you don’t have such separations, you kinda live on the same level. No beginning and no ends. And that’s what makes you so confused at the end of the day: did I actually finish what I had to do?

4. Surround Yourself With Intelligent Walls

This is about the fine art of avoiding interruptions. It’s the road from how to say no (and, conversely, to what to say yes) up to what kind of tasks do you really want to take on, all that while building an invisible line of intelligent walls which will stop the flood of your daily tasks.

Yes, most of the time we’re forced to do more in less time because the task hose is bigger and bigger. Well, shrink that valve. Make it smaller. You won’t die if you won’t do any single thing that is thrown at you. On the contrary.

There may be situations when we do have to do whatever it takes to get the job done. But those are exceptional times. They don’t have to be the rule. If they are, then you’re living in a permanent crisis and you really have to talk to somebody about that.

5. Assess And Improve

Do a weekly review, for starters. Try to assess not only the number of projects you finished, but also your overall activity and mood. Were you joyful or stressed? Were you happy about what you did or not very much so?

If logging will create a loop for identifying your beginning and ends, assessing will create the basis of your processes improvement (you will, of course, assess by using the very same logs you produced).

The more you assess, the more you read your own logs, the better you’ll become. You will be able to evaluate the time required by your tasks more accurately, you will be able to juggle left and right hemisphere more often and you will definitely become way better at creating those intelligent walls between you and the harsh world outside. Which exists, of course, only to enslave us in endless tasks and projects.

***

When I was a kid and we were going to the circus, I wasn’t impress by the animals. As a matter of fact, I always thought it’s sad to make them do stupid tricks for our amusement. But I was very much impressed with the jugglers.

And if I look at myself 30 years after, very little has changed. I’m still impressed with jugglers, especially if they do the tricks with their brains, and not with their hands.

Taming Monkey Number Five: Solved

It’s time for my monthly monkey review. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please read the introductory post here. To make a long story short, I decided to ditch completely my new years resolutions and replace them with a year long challenge: taming a “monkey” each month. If you don’t know what a “monkey” is, well, basically, it’s an underdeveloped part of myself, something that I promised I will do but never really got to it. Get the whole scoop about “your inner monkeys” here.

iAdd Desktop Version

The fifth monkey, the one assigned to the month that just ended, was the desktop version of iAdd. I promised myself a year ago that I will do this and I went a long way towards it. At this moment, iAdd desktop has an interface, some pieces of functionality and a clear roadmap. I didn’t finish it, though. But, as the title of the post implies, I “solved” it.

As I advance in this challenge, I learn a lot, month by month. And I realized last month that sometimes, in order to tame a monkey, I don’t necessary have to finish it. Sometimes just making peace with it, accepting as it is and doing the best I can, will do the trick. That was the case with iAdd Desktop. I couldn’t finish it, but I’m ok with it. I guess I’ll finish it in a few weeks from now. Either way, it’s in my system. It’s out of the “one day I will do this” realm. And that means it’s not a monkey anymore.

Pretty simple, huh? Well, not so fast. The strange pipeline disorder I noticed last month continued this month. And it got even stronger. Meaning that strange drives seemed to appear in my life out of nowhere and took me on surprising paths. I take that my clogged pipes are starting to clean up. Big time.

And one of the things that I learned the most during this pipe cleaning, was about the promises I make to myself.

What To Promise To Yourself

In short, not much. The more I advance in this year long challenge, I realize that we do have a very complicated relationship with our own promises. And the less complicated we keep this relationship, the better our life gets.

That’s why I decided to step down from some of the ventures I embraced. Like the board of Venture Connect, for instance. Venture Connect is very high class networking event in which investors are meeting potential entrepreneurs. I was one of the first members in this board and massively contributed to the first two editions. It’s a nice place to be, no doubt about it, I get to hang out with successful entrepreneurs, with investors and I also get in touch with many startups. But fact is, I can do this anytime. I can hang out with fellow entrepreneurs whenever I feel like. If this is what I really want. I can also get in touch with promising startups whenever I want to.

To make a long story short, being on board of Venture Connect became a void promise. Something that I did just because it sounded good and looked like a nice pastime. But at some point this pastime hijacked my real focus and I felt sidetracked. And I had to make a choice. Many people from my circle of friends or close business partners were surprised by that move and thought I was upset about something from within Venture Connect. Nope, I wasn’t. It just wasn’t me anymore, it was just a nice image projection. Look fellows, I’m in so many boards. Famous, visible and popular boards. Ain’t me cool, or what?

Now, if at some point I will feel that my contribution to Venture Connect can really make a difference, I will most likely go back. But it simply wasn’t fair to stay there just because that made me look important, nice and famous. Whenever I hit a spot like “being famous”, “looking good” or “do it for the image”, I always put out the line of Rhet Buttler from the end of Gone With The Wind: “Frankly, darling, I don’t give a shit.” And I mean it.

The same goes with relationships. Too many times we project ourselves in some of our relationships and we keep our projections running long after the relationship is not representative anymore for us. But we’re comfortable and we feel somehow nice and validated. Fact is we’re not really validated. We just think we are. But we made this internal promise to stick with it because, years ago maybe, it looked like a good option. Things are changing, life is changing, we are changing. Every once in a while we have to reevaluate our promises and see for which of them we’re still holding true.

Full Thrust Ahead

That being said, I am incredibly happy to witness a real change in my lifestyle. And not only in what I do, but in the way I feel about what I do. What follows is just a short glimpse of the things I did during May. And, most important, of the things I thoroughly enjoyed during May.

Became A Regular Contributor To  Stepcase Lifehack

I think I applied to it a few months ago, Maybe 9 or 10. And, out of nowhere, I get this email that I’ve been accepted. 10 months after, basically. Now, for all of you Law Of Attraction fans, I know that smile. And I know what you’re thinking: “it came to you when you were prepared to receive it.”. As much as I agree with that, I will still add my own interpretation: “it came to me when I could finally see it, and my visual field wasn’t obfuscated by all those jumping monkeys”. Which is pretty much the same thing, rephrased. I know that. Anyway, go have a look at the articles already published: 7 Not So Obvious Ways To Maximize Your Productivity (which instantly got into the popular area at lifehacker) and The Number One Problem Facing A Digital Nomad (No Pun Intended).

Launched The WordPress Framework WPSumo

That’s by far one of the most important things I did so far this year. WPSumo is an incredible piece of work, and I mean this. My blog is based now on WPSumo, and what you see is just a quick customization. I won’t get into details here because that would mean to write more than 10.000 words on this topic alone. Instead, I will send you directly to WPSumo site.. And I will also let you know about something very, very special. It’s a promotion launch, where you can get an incredible deal. (For those of you who are reading this just a little bit later, apologies, the launch promotion was limited in time).

Got On Board Of WeGetThere

This is one of those startups I was talking about in the above paragraph. I love the idea, I knew the people behind, so I decided to get involved. We’re still in the very early stages with it, but I am confident. If you don’t want to go the WeGetThere home page, let me tell you that this is a revolutionary travel crowdfunding service. Got your interest? Good.

Got Two Speaking Gigs

Both in the online industry in Romania. At the first one, in Brasov, I was mentor for the teams involved in a local seed funding contest, and at the second one, in Sibiu, I was talking about how you can use technology to accelerate your business. It was in fact a speech about how to build reputation.

I guess I have to mention this here too, I also got a one day long gig for a teambuilding in Sinaia. I don’t sell these services directly (speaking, custom workshops) but I think I will start doing this. The last teambuilding in Sinaia was a very controlled and measurable experience. I’m talking about me and my skills, not about the attendees, which, by the way, seemed to had a lot of fun. So, prepare to see a “Work With Me” link on the navigation menu on this blog soon.

June Monkey

Now, that the May monkey is behind, it’s time to pick the June monkey. As a matter of fact, I already picked it (we’re on the 4th of June today, aren’t we?). It’s about running. I’m not competing for a marathon or something. I just want to incorporate more running into my life.

At various times in my life, running was a central piece of my daily activity. Even when I was a teenager, I remember I used to run miles and miles each day around the nearby lake in my home town. Didn’t followed any performance metrics or been driven by some ambition to win a competition. But running gave me a daily pace for my ideas, for my activities. It was like putting in order my stuff. I kinda miss this, to be honest.

I always had this longing for more running. Last time when I did this in an organized way, for many months, was when I was a student. I guess that’s 15 years ago. There were a few other unfinished projects related to running, during this time, but, as you may’ve already guessed, none of them really did it.

So, in order to have a little bit of a measurable goal, I intend to run for at least 15 days out of the 30 in June.

Already ran in one, 14 more to go.

Mariner Promo Code – May 2011

If you’re like the vast majority of people, perhaps you’re celebrating Labor Day right now. By resting, that is, not by working, like other people. I won’t give names, but you know who they are

Well, good for you, because after you’ll get back home for this well deserved holiday, there will be something nice waiting for you. A promo code for Mariner Software, which will give you an instant 20% discount to any software you wanna buy from these guys. Oh, and this promo code is totally exclusive here, you won’t find it anywhere else on the net.

I’m running this promotion for more than 2 years now. And literally, thousands of people already took advantage of it. Let me give you the code first and then you will have a little explanation on how to use it:

solar

In order to use it, you should go to Mariner eStore first. Start shopping around. Once you’re happy, enter the code above into the designated field of the shopping cart. Click “Apply” and voila, your shopping cart should be discounted now.

Just in case you didn’t get the code from the first time, here it is again:

solar

Yes, it’s that simple. I know I could have written a much longer post detailing all the benefits, using some smart text anchors and a lot of vivid (if not downright upsetting) imagery with software boxes and so on. But I didn’t. Because I know my readers. If they want something, they will simply know that and will choose accordingly.

Happy shopping!

How To Self-Publish On Amazon, Kindle And iBookStore

For the last 14 months I’ve been learning how to become a self-published author. And by that, I mean not only PDF ebooks available on the blog, but also printed books on Amazon, Kindle versions and, of course, for the latest hype in town, ePub-based ebooks in Apple iBookStore. What follows is a (very) distilled story of my own experiences. But as distilled as it is, prepare for a few thousands words article (I suggest putting aside at least 20 minutes to read it from the top to the bottom).

Digital versus Printed

This used to be a very hot topic a few years ago. Traditionally, the printed books industry was very hard to penetrate. The most common approach was to use a publishing house (or, to be more precise, to be used by a publishing house). It was also the most difficult one. But it worked.

During the last few years, things have changed dramatically. Now you can use online tools to make your book available in printed format and you can do this at a very affordable price. Just keep in mind the following differences between digital and printed:

• printed books are slower to reach the market. It can take weeks or months until they become available to major book resellers
• digital books have a huge variety of formats (ePub being one of the most populars) but they can also have a high rate of piracy
• in both cases, if you are a self-published author, you will need a (very) strong presence online to promote your books. Because nobody else will do it for you. Getting them “in the system” is just the first step.

Now, let’s get practical.

Self-Publish With CreateSpace

If you don’t know what CreateSpace.com is, it’s time to find out that this is Amazon’s self-publishing company. The site offers a variety of tools to make your content available on Amazon’s online selling platform (which happens to be the largest in the world, by my knowledge). You can publish a variety of content, from multi-media DVDs to songs and, of course, books.

Signing up is free and there are no upfront costs. When you sign up, you can chose what type of product do you want (a book or a mp3 or a downloadable video) and then the type of setup do you want (expert, if you’ve been there before, or guided, if you’re just starting up). Feel free to start with the guided setup, just to get s glimpse of what you can do around. Here’s how the dashboard of the guided tour looks like (the red dots means those steps aren’t yet completed, click on the image for full view).

And here’s how it looks after you completed all the steps.

The Book Setup

Once you added the title of your book, it’s time to add the rest of the metadata (author name, contributors, subtitle, volume, etc). After that, you go through the physical setup: what type of interior do you want for your book (black and white or color – of course, the color interior will mean you’ll pay more for each copy). An important step is what they call “Trim Size” or the actual physical size of the book. I recommend using an industry standard size. If you created your book with a standard word processor, you can mach the “Page Setup” sizes of the word processor with the sizes you can have in CreateSpace. In my experience, it’s better to go with a standard size, at least for your first titles.

The next step is to add your ISBN. Very shortly, an ISBN is a unique identifier for your book, which is now an international standard. ISBN used to be a tough rock for many self-published authors and, in some respect, it still is. Luckily, CreateSpace can give you an ISBN for free if you don’t have one. If you want to buy your own, you can go to Bowker if you’re in US, or you can get one for free, provided that you will send copies of your books to the national library of your country. This is the case in Romania and New Zealand, for instance.

What’s the big deal with these ISBN numbers and why is important to have your own? Because if you have your own ISBN number you will be listed as the publisher of your book too, not only the author. So, if you want to make a business out of publishing books, you should consider getting your own chunks of ISBN numbers. Other than that there is no other major impact of ISBN. If you use CreateSpace assigned ISBN, the only difference is that CreateSpace will be listed as your publisher.

Once the ISBN thing solved, you can add a cover for your book. Now it can get tricky. You can either use their online cover creator, or you can get smart and do your own. Either way, CreateSpace will provide a few templates, based on the format of your book. This is where the “Trim Size” thing become important, your cover will obviously have to match the size of your book and if the book is non-standard, well, there will be problems. A printed book cover is not just a plain PSD file with fixed margins, you have to leave some tolerances and be sure to have enough space from the margins for your title or images. Once again, start exercising with the templates offered by CreateSpace.

A very important step after you did all of the above is to upload your book. CreateSpace allows PDF file formats. That’s relatively convenient, since many word processors can save your content in PDF too, but it can become tricky if you have embedded fonts. You must be sure that you will embed your fonts in the final PDF uploaded to CreateSpace.

The Review Step

Once you uploaded all the necessary data for your book (including the actual book file and the cover) you gotta review it. This is the place where you can start spending some money, Because you will have to order a proof copy for your book. If you don’t live in US, this could add a lot of time to the entire process. You do have several shipping options, but the fastest one will be actually more expensive than the book. I usually choose the medium one, which is only a couple of weeks and around 10 USD.

Be aware that you get in the mail (in the snail mail, that is) is the actual book that will be shipped to your readers. Do not try to overlook this step. Once the whole publishing machinery is started, it’s becoming very intertial and any change to your book may take weeks or months until it is propagated. Not to mention that you will still have “wrong” items on the market.

So, make the necessary changes and restart the whole proofing process.

The Selling Process

Once you are ok with the proof copy, you can move to the selling process. In this step you’re adding a description for your book (the one that will be seen on Amazon book page) a BISAC description (a standardized, category based descriptor used by libraries), search keywords, publication date and so on.

Once you’re satisfied with it, you can go to the next step, which is the price of your book. The interesting part comes immediately after that, in a zone called “distribution channels”. With CreateSpace you have 3 options:

1. sell it through CreateSpace store (which is like your own ecommerce site) by giving the direct link to your potential clients.
2. sell it through Amazon (and making it available to Amazon searches and ranking system)
3. sell it with the Expanded Distribution Channel (which comprises, among others, libraries and academic institutions or other online book sellers)

The royalty you can get for each channel will decrease proportionally, meaning the highest royalty will be on CreateSpace and the lowest on the Expanded Distribution Channels. But there is more than that. The royalty calculation is a little bit more complex and it involves the enrollment in a so-called “pro-plan” (where you have to pay upfront and only once a fixed price for each book you want to enroll) and the number of pages of your book. The “pro-plan” is an interesting option, because it doesn’t only guarantees bigger royalties but it will also gives you lower prices when you order your own copies.

And Now We Wait

After you completed all the steps, your book will be published shortly. And by shortly I mean hours or, at worst, days. But, as I already told you, getting your book out is only the first step. Now it’s time to start your marketing campaign (if you ever thought of something like this) and start creating some buzz around your titles.

Self-Publish On Kindle

Another interesting option for self-published authors is Kindle. Until a year ago, Kindle was just a device. But in the last 6 months, Amazon made a very interesting move with this. Namely, they created Kindle apps. These apps are book readers connected to the Kindle repository, just like the actual device, only they “live” in other operating systems. So now you can have access to your Kindle books not only from your device, but also from your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android or whatever device you may think of. That makes Kindle a very interesting option for self-published authors.

The Easiest Thing

Compared with CreateSpace, Kindle publishing is a breeze. Just a word of caution: if you previously published your book on CreateSpace they do offer a conversion service. Namely, they will take your printed book and convert it into a Kindle ready file. But at 69 USD I consider it pretty much a robbery. Read on and see why is that.

In order to start publishing on Kindle you gotta sign up at kdp.amazon.com. You may use the same username and password you usually use with Amazon, or you can create a new one, just for that. Here’s what you see when you log in (this is my real dashboard, with all the titles I published so far, click for full image)

After adding your title, you have a two steps wizard. In the first step you add your book metadata and files, while in the second you manage your publishing rights, add the price and choose your royalty level. More on that in a second.

When you add your book files, you can also add a separate file for the cover, just like at CreateSpace. But you can also choose to protect your book content via DRM (digital rights management). I’m not a big fan of DRM, so I didn’t went for it. The file format accepted by Kindle is PRC, and you can use a variety of tools to convert your book to it. But it also accepts ePub file formats and that’s quite a relief. Because the latest version of Pages for Mac is transparently creating ePubs from any document you want (as long as it is a WordProcessing based document). If you’re on Windows, I recommend checking out the Kindle formatting guide.

In the second step of the wizard, you establish the price and your royalty level. Also, you state what your distribution rights are (worldwide, or differentiated for countries / territories). I always chose “worldwide” because it was my own content, but your mileage may vary.

For the royalty, you have two plans, a 35% royalty and a 70% royalty. The 35% applies to titles under 2.99 USD, while the second plan applies to titles priced between 2.99 and 9.99 USD. You can also have the option to choose the price for Amazon UK and DE separately or based on the US Amazon price (I usually let it do it automatically).

And that’s it. Publishing your book may take a few days after you completed the two-steps wizard. In my experience, the shortest waiting time was 2 days while the longer was 5 days (but it included a week-end too). Once the ebook is published you can test it on your Kindle by partially downloading it (Amazon allows this for many of its titles).

One last word: the formatting of a Kindle ebook is very different than the formatting of a printed book. So expect your Kindle ebook to look strangely different than the printed version. Also, keep in mind that Kindle automatically converts your color illustrations to black and white.

Self Publish With iBookStore

Backed up by Apple legendary hype, iBooks is a recent player in the self-publish area. To be honest, I came to it after a (very) long detour. As you may already know, I do write iPhone and iPad apps for a living (iAdd being one of them) and that made me quite familiar with the AppStore. So, at some point I decided that it would be interesting to publish my ebooks on the AppStore, by creating them as standalone apps. It seemed like many people were doing this. I created an app, imported the book content on it and submitted to AppStore.

Surprise! My app got rejected. The message said something about publishing my app as a book, in the iBookStore. I went back and forth a few weeks with the Apple support guys until I finally got somebody on the phone. Yes, Apple is legendary for its opacity too, it may take weeks until you get a support guy to talk to you on the phone. After I discussed with him for like half an hour, I finally understand that I have no other option than to publish my books in the iBookStore.

For hose unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, publishing a book in the iBookStore means it will be available in the app iBooks, not under the Books category in the AppStore. It’s a little bit confusing and it took me a while to understand that. Apparently, Apple has an AppStore for apps (which may include a category called Books) and another store for books, called iBookStore, which mimics the same structure of the AppStore.

Well, it all came into pieces when I read the requirements for publishing in the iBookStore. Among other common sense things you need in order to publish your book, like an Apple account, there was something new: an ITN number (or, if you’re an individual, a Social Security Number). And that is because the revenue you get from selling a book has a different taxation process than the revenue you get from selling apps. I don’t know why is that, it’s just the way it is. Apparently, royalties have also a different cross-country taxation, so if you get royalties from US into a company based in New Zealand (which is precisely my case) you can get some sort of tax credit back. Luckily, my accountant, which whom I spoke a number of times on this topic, knows much more than me about that.

To make a long story short, I applied for an ITN number for my company, Mirabilis Media (NZ) Limited and after I got it, I started the publishing process.

The Apple Uploader

Another well known tradition of Apple is that it makes things extremely difficult for its contributors (iPhone developers are well aware of that). So, after incredibly long logistic delays and lack of information, I was finally in the position of uploading my ebooks. From this point on, things were starting to get extremely smooth. Apple created a Mac app for uploading your book. It’s called iTunes Producer and it has a very simple, wizard-like interface and it makes uploading your book to the iBookStore a really pleasant experience. I’m absolutely honest about it, it’s really simple to use and a big step forward made by Apple towards a better user experience.

I won’t go through the whole process, because the metadata is pretty much the same as for CreateSpace or Kinde. One important thing that has to be mentioned, though, is that the format accepted by Apple is ePub. As I already told you, converting a Pages document to ePub is just a matter of two clicks: “Export” and choose “ePub”.

Another important thing is that you may have free ebooks in iBookStore. Important if you plan to make available some of your content for free, for whatever reason you may think of.

Oh, and the royalties you earn in Apple iBookStore are following the general AppStore rule, 30% Apple – 70% you.

After you submit your book to iBookStore you gotta wait to be reviewed. In my experience, iBookStore had the longest delay from the moment you finished all your job, until the book is live. Minimum two weeks. So it’s a little bit of a time consumer, you should take that into account when you start publishing your books. Here’s how my iBookStoe dashboard is looking right now.

My Books

Well, this is it. As I told you, this process started 14 months ago, when I first published my books on Amazon. It wasn’t a continuous process (I’m not that slow in learning ) but rather one based on the opportunities. Basically, when a distribution channel looked both affordable for me and mature enough, I went for it.I started with CreateSpace but when Kindle and iBookStore became affordable and worthwhile, I started to use them too.

Now, here’s how my self-publishing portfolio is looking like:

Brilliantly Better

Amazon | Web | Kindle | iBookStore

100 Ways To Live A Better Life

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore

Korean version

100 Ways To Screw Up Your Life

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore

Korean version

The Productivity Trap

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore

The 7 Ages Of An Online Business

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore (free)

Natural Productivity – Assess, Decide, Do

Amazon | Web | Kindle | iBookStore

If you clicked through the links you may have noticed that there are very significant price differences between the same editions of the same book, based on the publishing channel (Kindle, Amazon, iBookStore) but also based on the territory too (in UK prices are slightly higher). Wonder why?

It’s a little bit more complicated and it will not fit in just one blog post. What I can tell you though, is that it’s partially because of some limitations in the distribution channels (Kindle doesn’t allow a difference wider than 30% between a printed title and its Kindle version) but also because of some personal marketing strategies.

Now, if you have any more questions about this article, feel free to ask them in the comments, I’d be happy to answer.

7 Things To Do When The Shit Hits The Fan

I know you’ve been through this, we’ve all been. Minding your own business, peacefully, things going on smoothly and then, out of nothing, something incredibly bad happens. The shit hits the fan. Of course, I’m not talking about the physical phenomenon (nor do I advise you to try to replicate that exact setup). I’m talking about “unpredictable” crisis. Situations that turns really bad without any perceivable warning. We’ll see later on that the “unpredictable” factor is not so unpredictable.

Well, since I’ve been through something that may qualify as a shit storm during the last week, I thought it would be useful to share some of my experiences, as well as some of the ways in which I eventually coped with the disaster.

The Story

One of things I really enjoy doing is writing iPhone apps. And lately, writing iPad apps. During the last 3 months I developed an iPad version of one of my iPhone apps, iAdd. I will skip the details about what iAdd does, just follow the link if you want to know more. I will just let you know that iAdd is a universal app, which means you download it only once but it will work on both your iPhone and your iPad (with a different interface, of course).

It was a really slow and daunting process. I think I changed the workflow at least 5 or 6 times. Writing a few days., then realizing it’s not going to work and starting over. Writing user interfaces is kinda difficult, you know. To make a long story short, after countless hours of getting my fingers dirty in the hidden intricacies of Objective C and iPad user interface elements, I finally came up with something I liked.

In this process, the iPhone app had to be touched a few times. A few navigation patterns had to be modified. And  adding a little bit of this here and taking out a little bit of that from there. Fact is that after 100 days of development, the initial app, the one that was currently on sale on AppStore, was completely modified.

Feeling under the pressure of making it happen, without proper testing and with an incredible feeling of faith that everything is going to be just fine, I finally submitted the app. Version 1.3, which was supposed to be most glorious one to date. I really like the iPad interface I came up with, seriously.

The review process took about 4-5 days. I finally received the email stating that my app “is in review” and then, about 10 hours later, the email stating that my app is live on the AppStore. I think it was 3:30 AM last Friday. I felt a fantastic relief that my app was finally live and went to sleep as usual. Only half an hour later, I heard another email (I keep my iPhone close when I sleep, to hear the morning alarm, and when I get an email from certain important sources, the iPhone rings). Sleepy but relaxed, I looked at the email.

The next second, my relaxation went away. And also my sleep. It was an email from an unhappy customer, who just bought my app and who was experiencing a crash. A crash means the app is just going away when it isn supposed to. A crash is a bad thing. Scratch that. A crash is the worst thing that may happen to your app. In just a few minutes I received another email from another customer, who was experiencing a similar problem.

In just a few hours I was about to find out that my app was practically unusable.

What happened?

Well, a mix of bad luck, tiredness and just plain strange stuff. The app submitted was simply not working and it took me a few hours to find out why. Some parts were not properly tested, while others were just left away, not included in the latest build, because… Well, I don’t know why. I simply can’t explain how the app was submitted in that form, but that was the blunt reality.

In other words, the shit was on the fan already.

To make things really sad, you gotta know that you can’t fix things in the AppStore the moment you realize something is wrong. It takes days for your app to be reviewed again.

What About Now?

As I already told you, that happened last Friday, in the morning. It’s Wednesday now and for the last 4-5 days, I was under an incredible amount of pressure. As of today, the first fix of iAdd was approved and it’s live on the AppStore, iAdd version 1.3.1. But meanwhile I discovered another round of crashes which are fixed in the next version, namely 1.3.2. Which was just submitted to the AppStore, a couple of hours ago.

Hopefully, iAdd 1.3.2 will be the last version to see crashes. But, based on my recent experience, anything can happen. Seriously, I do hope there won’t be any more crashes starting from 1.3.2.

What follows is an attempt to formalize my experience in fighting an “unpredictable” situation of crisis, just like the one I just left behind.

1. Assess, Don’t Stress

It’s very easy to give in to panic when something goes wrong. Instead, I focused on what exactly happened. And what happened proved to be a little less worrying than I thought. For starters, there were a few additions that were still working, That was a good thing. Next, I already knew how to fix the crashes. Yes, I had a number of unhappy customers. And they were perfectly right.

But as I dived into the analysis process, something very interesting happened. The adrenaline rush was not directed to a “fight or flight” situation anymore. When you’re facing a crisis, your reactions are following only two patterns: fight (or try to prove that my customers were wrong, in my case) or flight (leave things as they were, cutting out the iPhone business for ever from my business stream).

Either way, we’re talking about stress. And stress, as dangerous as it may be, it does have this incredible access to energy. It can literally release (or block) tons of energy. Well, this stress energy, this adrenaline rush was transformed into working energy. In just a few hours I was able to fix the most annoying crashes and do a resubmit. And, luckily for me, it took only 3 days for Apple to approve it.

2. Decide So It Won’t Collide

Moments after I realized what went wrong, I started to plan. What needs to be done ASAP? What can I do now? What is the time frame available? After I gathered all the data, I started to play with decisions. Some of the things I knew I have to fix weren’t so visible (they weren’t producing crashes, anyway). I decided to leave them for the next version and focus on what I could do to fix the crashes.

Our ability to identify and follow up decisions during a crisis is drastically affected. But despite that, it’s vital to step back and choose. Even in a very dangerous situation we have many more options than the “fight or flight”. There is this urge to run away from the place of the crisis, hoping that a change in context will also change the facts. Unless a building is crashing on you, running away is never the best option.

Avoidance won’t work either. It takes a while to turn your face to the fan and take all the shit upfront. But it’s the only viable solution. Only if you identify the direction you can start to prepare the escape. If you don’t stay there, if you don’t face the crisis and its causes, you won’t be able to stop it. You may get away for a while if you run away, but each time you’ll get back to that place, there may be a different day, but you’ll be facing the same old shit.

3. Communicate

Nothing is happening just by itself. And there isn’t such a thing like a “black box” of our life events, something completely unaccessible. Information is there, reach to it. Each time you face a crisis, try to communicate. The moment I got the first emails from my unhappy customers, I started to answer. Acknowledging the situation, apologizing, but… at the same time trying to get as much intel as I could.

As I following up to the angry emails I realized something very interesting. Yes, the app was behaving badly. Yes, there were a lot of frustration. But at the same time I realized that… my customers were actually relaying on my app for their daily activity (iAdd is time and task planner, to put it mildly). So, my app was important. Not to mention that my immediate answers were gaining big time on the “support” size of the whole experience. People were actually appreciating the fact that I was answering instantly and that was somehow lowering their frustration. Or so they said to me .

Every crisis can reveal something about you (or the others) that you weren’t aware of. As long as you stay on track and communicate. Don’t isolate in a “I know better” pattern. If there are other persons involved in your crisis, try to understand their point of view too.

4. Rebuild Carefully

After I finished the first 3 steps, I started to write code. This time, in a completely different manner than before. The worse had already happened. So why worry now? I just sat carefully, testing each feature 3-4 times with different data, until somehow, the whole app started to get a different consistence.

The emphasis here is on “carefully” not so much on “rebuild”. You gotta rebuild anyway, but just do it very carefully. It’s very important to realize that you did as much harm as you could already. No need to augment on that. Just pay close attention to what you’re doing and things will start to straighten up.

Again, when we’re under pressure, we have this huge urge to speed up. Well, speed up, if you have to, but do it carefully. You don’t want to make another mistake and then another one and then another one. Accept the current disaster and focus on avoiding the next potential one.

5. Leverage

After I realized I’m facing a real customer crisis, I started to look around. I started to manage the process. And I’m not talking about assessing, deciding and writing code. I also started to write blog posts on the iAdd official blog, explaining what’s going on. It wasn’t only about fixing some bugs. It was also about informing other people.

After I wrote the blog posts, the number of messages decreased. People were visiting the blog, were reading the posts and apparently they were getting the answers they were looking for. They were not into bullying me, the author, they were just trying to understand what’s going on.

Using as many tools as you can get a hold of is incredibly useful in time of crisis. If a wheel on the car explodes, try to stay on track with the remaining three, don’t stop. Leveraging means reaching out to whatever you have, own or can use in order to smooth the crisis. And that stands true for any type of crisis.

6. Keep Your Fingers Crossed

I bet you didn’t see that coming. Well, neither do I. But after I did everything that was to be done, after I submitted the app, responded to customers and wrote blog posts, I realized that’s it. I did all I could do. Everything more would have been a waste of energy.

So I just sat back and tried to relax. And kept my fingers crossed. Fact is you never know if something is going to work or not. You can only hope. Keeping your fingers crossed is a way of “giving yourself in”. I did everything, now let’s see what happens.

In any crisis, there is so much you can do. Anything over that level simply won’t matter.

7.  Learn

Write down what happened. Well, not necessarily in the form of 7 items list blog post, like I did, but do write it down. See where was the glitch. And then repeat it. Rewind in your mind all the phases of this unfortunate crisis. That’s how you can prevent it later on. That’s where the “unpredictable” I was talking about in the beginning of this post is turning into “obvious”.

We learn from mistakes, not from successes. We remember the dangerous and hurtful events much better than the happy events. I guess it’s wired into our survivals patterns. We do this in order to avoid a similarly dangerous situation.

Or at least that’s how you can cope better with it next time the shit hits the fan again.

iAdd version 1.3 Live In AppStore

After only 5 days of waiting, iAdd version 1.3 is live in AppStore. As I already wrote, this version features a complete redesign of the iPad version and a lot of small usability improvements, as well as numerous bug fixes. If you don’t know what iAdd is, I will briefly tell you that it’s my iOS implementation of my own Assess – Decide – Do framework. If you want to know more about the framework, feel free to visit its (brand new) homepage at Assess-Decide-Do. And if you want to know more about iAdd, the app, of course, there’s a site for that too, iAdd.

They say an image is worth a thousand words, so, as I planned to write a few thousands words blog post today, I will only share a few screenshots.

Oh, and one more thing: the book that started all is now available on Kindle. That means you can read it on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your Mac, or even on your Android powered device. In short, pretty much everywhere. And, to make things even spicier, the Kindle version is only 9.99 USD, compared with the regular price of 27 USD. Here’s a screenshot of what the ebook looks like on my iPad, using the Kindle app for iPad.

You can get the Kindle version of Natural Productivity: Assess, Decide, Do for your Kindle by clicking here.

Taming Monkey Number Three – Done

It’s the last day of March, so it’s time for the monthly report about this month monkey. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read the introductory post about taming monkeys. Which is basically my new approach to yearly resolutions.

The March monkey was supposed to be related to an outside thing, a consultancy gig. It was a project delayed far more than the initial expectations (at least my expectations) and I needed a way to speed this up. So I turned it into a monkey, which means that during the entire March that project only should have been my main focus.

But, surprise, after I came back from New Zealand, around March 1st, I had a very short discussion with my partners and they informed me about something both exhilarating and baffling. They decided to take over the project themselves, instead of having me running it. It was exhilarating because I always felt this project like a drag (lack of communication, continuous change in timelines, payment delays and so on). And it was baffling because, believe it or not, I was on the verge of proposing them the same thing. Sometimes, the Universe has strange ways to respond to your wishes.

A Pack Of Monkeys

Anyway, back to my monkeys. Shortly after this talk I realized that my March didn’t have a monkey anymore. I had to come up with one.

So, I started to redo the iAdd iPad app. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the user interface and there were also a few workflow things that I wasn’t happy about. To be honest, I was a little bit ashamed about the iPad version. It was working, but it was far from what I could deliver.

Apart from this iAdd remake, I also wanted to see how can I self-publish on iBookStore. And on Kindle store. It was one of the things I postponed for at least 6 months. So, iAdd remake, self-publish on iBookStore and on Kindle Amazon. Well, that’s almost three monkeys, right?

So, basically, because my initial monkey let me down, I pretty much came with an entire pack. And it went pretty well. As I write this, the iAdd app version 1.3 is almost ready to be uploaded to AppStore. There are tons of bugfixes and features. The most important feature being, of course, an entirely rewritten app for iPad.

And I also have one of my ebooks published on iBookStore and on Kindle (and the rest of them are either in the process of being approved, or ready to be submitted). Let’s take those monkeys one at a time.

iAdd Version 1.3

For those of you who don’t know, I code iPhone apps. iAdd is one of them and it’s also my own tool for managing time and tasks. In short here’s what’s new and important in version 1.3 (should be available in AppStore in about two weeks from now):

• completely redesigned iPad interface, using split views (like the Mail app).
• improved syncing with Dropbox
• improved interface on iPhone (easier date selection, realm tabs available on all views, improved adding workflow, sync button available on top realm controllers, reordering tasks in Assess for projects and ideas, and many, many more).

Have a look at the screenshots (click on the image to enlarge):

iAdd v 1.3 - Assess

iAdd v 1.3 - decide

iAdd v 1.3 - do

iAdd v 1.3 - Assess

iAdd v 1.3 - decide

iAdd v 1.3 - do

As of now, iAdd is on sale for 2.99 USD, usually selling for 3.99. This version really makes me wonder if I should raise the price to 4.99 once it’s going to be live. Anyway, once the version 1.3 is live, I will at least revert to the original price of 3.99. One more reason to get it now, while it’s still hot.

Self-Publishing on iBookStore And Kindle

As anything Apple, publishing on iBookStore proved to be incredibly difficult. It’s like Apple deliberately creates obstacles, just to motivate you to overcome them. For a while, this may be fun. But after being an Apple developer for more than one year now, I’m kinda bored. I think it’s time for them to make things easier for anyone using their platform. Because somebody is starting to breathe pretty close from their back, and that’s Amazon, of course.

In short, here are two screenshots of my ebook, 100 Ways To Live A Better Life, first one in iBookStore and second one in Kindle (both pictures made using an iPad).

iBookStore - 100 Ways To Live A Better Life

Kindle - 100 Ways To Live A Better Life

In iBookStore the ebook is selling for 3.99 and in Kindle for 6.89. There are also important differences based on your country. For instance, the Kindle version is cheaper on Great Britain. I won’t go into details, but apparently Kindle is controlling the price of ebooks based on their printed prices. And since I already published this book on Amazon a year ago, and it’s still on sale, they didn’t allow me to have a lower price.

Anyway, the ebook version you can get from my site is still 6.99 so if you want to buy it, getting it from iBookStore or Kindle it’s a much better alternative.

The Next Monkey: iAdd Desktop

There are only a few hours left from March. My next month monkey would be the desktop version of iAdd. I know it’s a pretty ambitious monkey but I also know I can do this. Much of the base code is already written and it will be just a matter of coding the user interface. I also know that if something sounds way simpler than you believed, it’s probably not. Anyway, we’ll see how it went next month.

Blog Silence

One of the most important aspects of this year long experiment I’m doing – taming monkeys, that is, instead of yearly resolutions – is that I’m slowly shifting from a goal oriented life to an experience oriented life. I know that “experience oriented life” sounds strange, but let me explain. In the last few years I’ve been a fool for goals. Financial, personal, diet, physical, you name it, everything was on my plate. I did a lot. I was raw vegan for 9 months, I created a company in New Zealand, I flew around the world and so on.

But I never felt so much joy and balance like I felt during the last 3 months. And I mean it. Yes, I’m not as committed as I used to be, but I still get things done. I’m not as tense as I used to be also. And I don’t write as much as I used to. But that doesn’t mean the blog is going down. As surprising as it may seem, March was one of the best months in terms of traffic in the last 15 months. Weird…

Who knows, this taming monkeys thing might actually work…