This giveaway is a little different than the ones I’ve had recently: there will be three winners and each winner will get to choose one book they’d like to snag out of the following titles:

I’ve reviewed Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business and Do the Web Write: Writing and Marketing Your Website already (click links to see reviews). I’ll be reviewing Start & Run an Internet Research Business, Writing for the Web (4th Edition) and Marketing in the New Media (2nd Edition) in the coming weeks. So far I’ve found the books easy to read and full of practical advice, so if you’re trying to set up a home business or market a business online you’ll find some help here.

Giveaway Details

Eligibility

1. Open to residents of the United States and Canada. Shipping courtesy of Self Counsel Press.

The Book

The winners will each receive their choice of one of the following five books from Self-Counsel Press:

• Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business (Dan Furman),
• Do the Web Write: Writing and Marketing Your Website (Dan Furman),
• Start & Run an Internet Research Business (Gerhard W. Kautz),
• Marketing in the New Media 2nd Edition (Holly Berkley), or
• Writing for the Web 4th Edition (Crawford Kilian).

Deadlines

There will be three winners (one per drawing) so there are several closing dates (ALL entries count for ALL draws):

I will pick a winner on July 28, 2009, another on August 4, 2009 and one on August 11, 2009.

The winner will be announced and e-mailed the day of the drawings (unless I’m swamped, but I’ll try not to be). If the winner doesn’t reply to the e-mail notification within 72 hours, a new winner will be drawn.

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Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business by Dan Furman takes you through what you need physically and mentally to run a home-based business. The tone is conversational and straightforward. Dan Furman has been there, done that, and made the mistakes to prove it. Not only did he learn from his mistakes and now runs a successful home business, but he has also made it easy for you to learn from his mistakes in this book (that way you can find new and creative mistakes to make ).

This is the kind of book I needed but didn’t know to look for. I am in the process of starting up a freelance business, but have had no idea exactly how to go about it or what to consider. The whole process is just so big that it’s hard to know where to begin and what to avoid. Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business gives an overview of how to determine whether you are prepared to run a home-based business and what steps to take first.

The book covers businesses that sell services that are local (for example plumbers) and those that can sell globally (like things that can be shipped or transferred digitally). The book is divided into three sections: Mind, Body, and Soul. The Mind section covers how to go from initial brilliant idea to assessing the value of the idea to actually getting off your keister and starting a business (One of the chapters towards the end of this section is called “You do realize you’re the one who makes work appear, right?”). This section also talks about the boundaries that mindset imposes on us and how to overcome a limiting mindset.

The Body section focuses on the physical requirements for starting a business: money, space, software, documents, advertising, etc. The advice is straightforward and useful. I found the advertising section particularly useful as I really had no idea what to consider or rule out for a business just starting out. Now I have a number of ideas based on the reasoning and advice of this section. I also found the section on forms interesting as Furman gives an example of how changing the wording on his quote form increased his closing rate from 50% to 75%. It’s a common sense change but I rarely see it on quote forms I’ve been given by service providers (more on forms further down when I discuss the accompanying CD). Other interesting information included a compelling argument for having a separate phone line for home-based businesses as well as voice mail (something home-based business owners often think they can do without).

The Soul section covers topics like pricing, dealing with difficult customers, being a good boss to yourself, dealing with competitors, customer service and making time to work on the business itself.

A lot of what Furman says is common sense, but the thing about common sense is that you have to understand how something works in order to have common sense about it. Otherwise you’re just guessing and a lot of people guess wrong (that’s why so many people make the same beginner mistakes no matter which skill they’re learning). This book not only goes over what to do, but it also goes over why the beginner mistakes are mistakes by explaining why a particular approach doesn’t work.

This book comes with a CD of forms to get you started including forms on focusing the idea of your business, coming up with a start-up budget, a guide to writing a press release and instructions for writing a marketing proposal (there are a few other odds and ends on the CD as well). These files are actually quite useful (and I say this having taken a course on business writing and on branding small businesses), but they are not reproduced in the printed book so access to the CD is vital to benefit from these forms. This is where the publisher made a strategic blunder.

The files on the CD are in .doc (Microsoft Word) and PDF (Adobe Reader) format which is great because it makes them accessible to almost anyone–or at least it should. For reasons that escape me these files are sequestered in a proprietary program interface that must be installed on your computer (strike one) and ONLY runs on Windows (strike two). Got a Mac? No document access for you (no, you can NOT just pull them off the CD using a Mac–strike three). Now, the publisher does disclose that the CD is PC only. The issue is that there is no justification for excluding Mac users (or any other non-Windows operating system).

The proprietary interface which requires installation on my PC (which, take note, I hate because the last thing I need is another useless program installed on my PC) appears to have the sole purpose of requiring you to accept an agreement to not redistribute the files and give you a pretty browser interface to find the file you want. That’s it. That’s the sole reason–as far as I can see–to prevent Mac users from accessing otherwise platform-agnostic files. It’s not a good reason. All the program does is unpack the files so that you can copy them to your hard drive … at which point they can be read on any computer (so the proprietary program is also pointless in its purpose of keeping the files only on the original hard drive).

The good news, if you’re a Mac user, is that the unpacked files can be read on a Mac IF you can find a friend with a PC willing to install the program to unpack them on their computer. The bad news is that likely violates the agreement that publisher wants you to agree to (though technically the agreement is to only have one copy of the files so if you delete them from the PC …). Do with that information what you will.

CD issues aside, I really like Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business and found it surprisingly useful. In fact, I’ve recommended it to several of my peers who are also contemplating a home-based business.

You can buy this and other Self-Counsel Press titles from Self-Counsel Press (US and Canada) and Amazon (US, Canada and UK). If you want a chance to win a copy (or one of several other books recently released by Self-Counsel Press that I will be reviewing in the coming weeks), come back soon to enter a giveaway from the publisher (I hope to post the giveaway tomorrow, but I’ve come down with some kind of virus so I don’t know if I’ll be up to blogging tomorrow).