Choose Your Own (Negotiation) Adventure

Jack has been freelancing for six months.  He’s done his fair share of work on spec and picked up jobs that friends and acquaintances didn’t want.  He’s had some good experiences and some that made him long for the days he worked at Borders endlessly stocking Twilight novels.

Last week Jack got an email from an educational book publisher asking if he’d be interested in … Read More

Good Advice #1

Sometimes you don’t want to understand why things happen or how you can become a better person through active listening.  Sometimes you just want someone to help you figure out how to fix a problem.

I can do that.… Read More

Better Than Winning

As is probably apparent, I love negotiating.  Love it.  I love a deal; I love figuring out what someone’s thing is; I love it when someone feels like they won and I got everything I wanted.

But I know not everyone is like me, which is part of the reason I like teaching.  Even if you hate negotiating with the passion of a thousand suns, … Read More

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Ceiling Negotiations

Regardless of where you come down on this whole debt ceiling business, if you want to hone your negotiation skills, it is the thing to pay attention to.  Because watching people screw things up beyond all recognition is a fantastic way of learning.

Here are the major lessons I hope you take away from this debacle.… Read More

The Warrior’s Way

Let’s say you’re having an argument online with a friend about Star Trek.

 … Read More

Let’s Be Friends

R2-D2 and C-3PO are best friends.  They grew up together, went to the same college and for the past few weeks, they’ve been working on a story together.  A friend of a friend of C-3PO’s is an editor and, based on R2 and 3PO’s happy hour accentuated pitch, has agreed to take a look at it.  Unfortunately, the story isn’t done; it’s still in pre-first … Read More

Four Secrets to Succeed in Publishing

I had a great time at Stumptown Comics Fest this year!  There were tons of cool people, a bunch of great comics and I tricked George Rohac into doing a panel with me.

On the off chance you aren’t familiar with Mr. Rohac, George is the Operations Director at Oni Press & one of the hardest working men in comics.  George has the comics … Read More

Keeping Clients Accountable. Like a Ninja.

You have a client named…Splinter.

Splinter has a new job for you about once every two or three months.  The work tends to be interesting, but not overly taxing, and Splinter generally agrees to a higher hourly rate than many of your other clients.

Splinter is also consistently late.  He’s late to conference calls, passing on specs and worst of all, he’s generally 10-15 days … Read More