Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero » Books

Awaken Your Holidays

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:25:09 +0000

To celebrate the holidays, instead of doing a silly video or the myriad of other Christmas themes, I thought I’d honor the timeless tradition of regifting and give you something other people gave me.

Back in early 2011, I took a trip to South Korea and during that time period, I knew that blogging and the usual stuff was out of the question. For 10 days, 10 authors took my place and wrote some incredible material. I’ve packaged up those posts as a totally free, no-strings-attached eBook for you to enjoy over the holidays. Without further ado, Awaken Your Superhero:

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:

Attend virtually!

I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

Unsolicited Review: Scrivener

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:02:49 +0000

Way back when I was writing Marketing White Belt, I wanted a better writing tool. Evernote was and is a wonderful tool for writing shorter content (like this blog post) but for managing very large documents, it can get unwieldy, even with folders and groups and notebooks. I started looking around for a better writing tool, and reviewed a whole bunch before stumbling across Scrivener from Literature and Latte Software.

Scrivener has a few things going for it that are deal-makers for me, the things that made me shell out $45 for it.

1. Export to Kindle and Nook. Formatting eBooks for sale on Amazon is a royal pain in the ass. Ask Chel Wolverton if you don’t believe me, she had to do the manual formatting for Marketing White Belt and was about ready to find whoever developed the .mobi spec and eviscerate them with a salt shaker. Scrivener supports these formats and will export to them very nicely, making it super easy to actually create an eBook for sale.

2. Outlines, notecards, and research modules. Each of these modules helps greatly for laying out the structure of a book. One of my less endearing traits is that I tend to jump around on various topics frequently, which can be really bad news for a book you’re trying to write if coherence is important. By having neatly organized “containers” for all the different parts of a book at my fingertips, I can jump around and write in different sections as I feel inspired.

3. Here’s the biggest deal closer for me: project targets. I absolutely love, adore, and worship this part of Scrivener because it keeps me on track. It’s quite simple: I dial up how many words I’m aiming to write for an eBook (I aim for about 10,000 words), dial in a due date as a goal to finish, and what days of the week I plan to write. For example, I aim to have Marketing Blue Belt written by the end of the year. I set the deadline as December 31, set 10,000 words as my target, and look what the program does:

That’s right: it gives me my overall target, progress towards that target, but most important: how much do I need to write today, in this session of writing, in order to make meaningful progress towards my goal and hit my deadline?

You can, of course, do the math yourself, but there’s something wonderfully inspiring and motivating about watching the little progress bar grow every time you tap out a word on your keyboard. I can push myself to write just a little bit more, just a few more sentences, just a few more thoughts and see my progress towards my goal.

Scrivener retails for $45. It’s not cheap by any means, though you can take a 21 day trial of it and see if it works for you. If you’ve ever thought, “I want to write a book/eBook/publication”, this might just be the tool that helps you towards that goal. Julien Smith says you’re bound to become a writer anyway, so if you plan to pursue it seriously, this might be a good piece of software for you to have.

I’ll issue the same caveat for Scrivener that I issue for all tools: the tool helps, but ultimately the hard work is up to you. Owning a nice DSLR won’t automatically make you a better photographer, and owning Scrivener won’t automatically make you a better writer.

If you’re interested, you can buy it here. (affiliate link) It’s available for Mac now in retail and in beta for Windows.

Full disclosure: this review was not prompted by anyone at Literature and Latte Software. I receive financial benefit via the affiliate links in the post.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:

Attend virtually!

I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

Talking book marketing with Steve Garfield

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:22:38 +0000

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I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Steve Garfield on his show, SGTV, recently. We talked about PodCamp, the book, and how I did the marketing for it, as well as a few other topics.

Steve’s a great interviewer for a couple of reasons. He does his homework, which is wonderful – there’s nothing better than talking to someone who knows what it is you’ve done and why they’re talking to you. He’s also a rarity (unfortunately) in interviewers in that he’s not constantly interrupting you to interject his own opinions.

Here’s the segment. In total, it’s about 20 minutes long.

Part 1

Part 2

Thanks again to Steve Garfield for the great talk. You can find him at SteveGarfield.com and @stevegarfield on Twitter.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
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Watch me speak:

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I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

Anatomy of a book launch

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:15:16 +0000

On Monday, June 13, I launched my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for Digital Marketers, with a series of campaigns. I thought I’d share what was done and what the net effects were.

Obviously, first I had to write and publish the book. I went with the Kindle and Nook platforms because very little was required in terms of technical overhead. ePub and Mobi formats are little more than XHTML documents. Michelle Wolverton, my editor, did the compilation in just a weekend of my writing and transformed it into eBook format ready to go. I loaded it up, set pricing and royalties, and the platform was ready to go.

First rule of any kind of product launch: have a plan B. I set up redirects on my short URL, cspenn.com, for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the site, etc. so that I could move stuff around as quickly as possible. More on this in a bit. I created a dedicated landing page and copy for the book launch, along with a special edition of my newsletter.

I’ve long believed that marketing techniques work better together, in synergy, than just by one channel along or channel-by-channel sequentially. A very long time ago in Internet years, I was part of a campaign launched by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff called Bum Rush the Charts, which was an experiment to game the iTunes algorithm and put a Black Lab song (Mine Again) as far up the charts as possible. The lessons from that experiment informed a lot of this book launch. Amazon uses a similar algorithm as iTunes to determine its charts, so I would replicate Bum Rush’s mechanics for the launch.

To that end, I set up a timed launch of:

The blog post
Email newsletter
Social outreach

The blog post and newsletter were fairly simple to schedule and time. I created the landing page for the book several weeks in advance of the launch to ensure it got indexed by search engines, even if there was no book to buy quite yet.

I chose the time using Blue Sky Factory’s BlueView subscriber data, which gives me an idea of where my subscribers, my existing base, are located. That data got exported into BatchGeo.com, which I used to map out the subscribers for a visualization. While many are American, a significant number are also in Western Europe (especially the UK), so I picked noon Eastern time as it would be 9 AM pacific, lunch on the east coast, and 5 PM in the UK.

The materials were ready, the time was set.

What was going to be interesting was the social outreach. Using TweetAdder and some custom software I wrote myself, I took all of my followers on Twitter and scored them all using Klout, which took a bit of doing since there are 34,000 of them. Of those 34,000, I set up two data sets – the “friends and family” list of folks I’d reach out to who would gladly support the launch, and then the folks that Klout thought were influential. Different sets of people got different shortened URLs to track at least some level of action.

I pulled the top 140 by score after weeding out obvious wastes of time (as much as I’d like to think @barackobama would retweet me, the chances of it were near zero, so out he went), and created a separate landing page explaining what I was doing. The morning of the launch, I sent them all direct messages asking for their assistance.

Here’s the funny part: no one over a Klout score of 80 responded. There are just as many robots and PR folks running the top end of the Klout spectrum as there are at the bottom in the 0-20 bracket. Who responded? Folks with scores in the 65-75 range, real humans who were around, interested, and happy to help. As an aside, if you’re targeting “influencers”, you may want to skip the 80+ bracket.

How many folks out of those 140 responded? About 37, and they were very kind.

The launch kicked off on Monday exactly as timed, and the first set of tweets all hit the airwaves within a 5 minute bracket. As I suspected, the immediate onslaught of traffic destroyed my website immediately, dropping it like a hot potato. Remember earlier I mentioned plan B? Plan B was to change the 301 redirects I had given out to people to go directly to Amazon, thus averting a predicted problem. I was able to redirect the massive onslaught of traffic in less than 10 seconds and not lose any potential sales.

How did the launch go? Tweetreach calculated the effective reach of the campaign at close to 750,000 views/impressions/eyeballs, which was nice for the top of the funnel. The newsletter hit its usual metrics of about 10% open, 2% click, with a lot of action in the first few minutes.

But the real results? I cracked the top 10 of all marketing books on Amazon, hitting both the bestseller and hot new releases lists within 4 hours, beating out all but a few competitors like Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, and David Meerman Scott. At the end of the day, it’s all about sales, or the outreach meant nothing. Happily, everything clicked:

Bestseller on Amazon!

The stats at their peak.

That’s not bad for a book that’s completely self published with no support from a publisher or marketing agency at all, and it continues to sell well a week after the launch.

To summarize: marketing channels work better when you put them together. Email, social, blog, everything. Algorithms can be gamed to some degree. Have a backup plan.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the book launch for your support. It meant a lot and it clearly moved the needle.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:

Attend virtually!

I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:57:24 +0000

Have you had people ask you how to get started in digital marketing?

Are you working with social media practitioners who lack a firm grounding in the basics of marketing?

I’m pleased to announce my first book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, is available right now in the Amazon store and at Barnes & Noble. Longtime readers of the blog will remember a short series by the same name. The book is an enhanced, edited version of that series plus new material, exercises for each of the concepts, and more.

My motivation for writing the book was noticing that a lot of people have found themselves in digital marketing roles with little or no marketing background at all. Believe me, I know – I speak from long, difficult experience. I came into Marketing via technology and had to teach myself everything from the ground up. I lived in the Portable MBA series for a while, took classes, etc. until I understood marketing as well as I understood technology. Much of what I found in standard university marketing classes (apologies to the schools I’ve attended) was unhelpful past a certain point, but there were a ton of basics that were and are relevant even in the digital age.

That’s what the book is. It’s not long – about 60 pages. It’s not a substitute for an MBA (though it’s a heck of a lot cheaper). It’s not magic fairy dust that will instantly change the world just by purchasing a copy and not reading it (believe me, if it was, I’d price it much, much higher). It’s a summation of the basics that I’ve learned, use, practice, and find valuable in my day to day work as both a practitioner and a teacher, stuff like Marketing Mix, SWOT, ROI, and more.

Many people in marketing roles today – social media practitioners, digital marketers, etc. – are coming into their roles without the basics. They’re coming in from equally valuable backgrounds in technology, PR, advertising, etc. and being thrown to the sharks, expected to sink or swim. This book is for you, a digital life preserver. (note that your Kindle/iPad/device does not in fact float, so don’t use it as a real lifesaver)

One warning about it: its value significantly diminishes if you don’t do the exercises in it. The exercises are simple, nothing requiring acrobatics or anything, but if you just passively read the book and don’t do them, you won’t get practice using the tools. It’s the difference between buying a hammer at the hardware store and then putting it in your basement versus buying the hammer and building something with it. You’ll be much better off if you actually use it. The same is true of the book.

I hope you enjoy the book, but more important, I hope the book provides value to you and makes you a better marketer in the digital age. Grab a copy here from Amazon for the Kindle Platform or for B&N and the Nook. If you find value in it, please tell a friend or colleague about it, or just buy them a copy and gift it. Thank you for reading!

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:

Attend virtually!

I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

4 books for fresh thinking

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:22:10 +0000

Julien wrote a great blog post the other day about putting better stuff in your brain, stuff that will feed your brain and take it in new directions. Here are a few suggestions for things you can add to your virtual or real bookshelf, should you be so inclined.

Full disclosure: everything’s an affiliate link, probably to Amazon. Fair warning.

New Thinking

The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander. This very hard to find classic is a life lessons book disguised as a book about architecture. A great deal of it talks about qualities of building (web pages, marketing materials, houses, careers, whatever) in ways that put words to things you’ve been wanting to express all your life but never quite found. Alexandar’s book is wonderfully refreshing and helps you to develop a language of patterns for anything you’re doing in creative work.

Awakening

Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trunpga. Trungpa’s Shambhala will wake you up. It will literally deliver a swift kick to your head and also explain why some things that should make you happy instead sometimes evoke sadness. It’s not depression – it’s an inherent quality of beauty, an understanding that what you’re looking at isn’t going to last. Very worthwhile. If you read, study, and master this book, you will make huge strides towards freeing yourself of many of your self-imposed limitations.

Strategy

The Art of War. Sun Tzu’s military classic has been translated and retranslated more times than you can count, and most of the translations are based on the old 1910 Lionel Giles translation. While workable, Giles didn’t necessarily capture the flavor of Chinese idioms or the language as well. Wee Chow Hou’s translation does a great job of this. Even if you’ve read other translations, get this one.

Fresh Eyes

The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman. This is THE book I recommend to anyone who’s just gotten a digital camera. While it’s easy to get started with basic photography ideas like the Rule of Thirds, Freeman’s book takes you to another level. He teaches you how to SEE, how to look for photographic opportunities, recognize patterns, use built-in human tendencies for eye movement, and see life through your lens in new and different ways. Freeman’s book is a game changer, not just for a photographer, but for anyone who has to do any kind of visual work – web design, WordPress themes, marketing collateral, whatever.

Notice something else here? None of these books are sales or marketing books. There’s a reason for that. If you’re looking for brain changing, game changing books, chances are the thinking you’re looking for isn’t going to come from the sales and marketing section of your bookstore. You have to dig into much more primal stuff in order to get to those breakthroughs – art, photography, architecture, war, belief. Marketing books can interpret some of these primal things and transform them into actionable materials, but you first have to have a well to drawn on, and no marketing book I’ve ever read can provide that.

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Mitch Joel is New Media's Alton Brown

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:25:16 +0000

Mitch Joel is New Media’s Alton Brown

I’ve been reading Six Pixels of Separation, the book by friend Mitch Joel. It’s a terrific read, well worth the $14 or so I spent on the Kindle version, but I’m amused by many of the comments and criticisms of the book, especially that it’s not a how-to book.

If you have any familiarity with the food world, you know of Alton Brown. Part Mr. Wizard, part Monty Python troupe member, Alton Brown spends an enormous amount of time in his show Good Eats on the why of food, rather than just the how.

How is the individual recipes. How to make pancakes. How to deglaze a pan. How to fry a turkey.

Why is the rationale behind the choices you make as a cook. Why is the muffin method used for certain recipes when the end product doesn’t look like a muffin? Why is water’s molecular structure so important to cooking?

Here’s the difference between how and why: how is for beginners. How is for the line cooks who just need to crank out predictable results over and over again. How can be accomplished by relatively untalented people or even by machines. How is good and useful, but how is not the way you become better at what you do once you’re no longer a beginner.

Ask any proficient chef how large their recipe card index is and they’ll give you a blank stare at best, because they’ve transcended the need for individual recipes. Professional chefs understand concepts and the why of cooking. Professional chefs understand that the flavors of tomato and basil go together at a subconscious level, so they don’t need the individual recipe cards that specify mixing X amount of tomatoes with Y amount of shredded basil leaves plus a pinch of salt. Professional chefs understand at a subconscious level that you always, always, always salt tomatoes as early in the cooking process as possible. Why? Because tomatoes contain a natural form of glutamic acid and salt bonds to it to create a natural form of MSG which really makes a tomato’s flavor sing.

Six Pixels of Separation is not a cookbook of how. You won’t find a recipe in it for exactly how to structure a tweet or exactly how to write a good blog post. You’re not supposed to find those recipes in it, because it’s largely a book of why, not how. If you’re looking for a recipe book, there’s an entire industry of For Dummies / For Morons / For Complete Idiots / For The Stupidest People That Are Still Capable of Reading This Book books out there. (does it bother anyone else that you’re automatically a Dummy if you’re a beginner, at least according to those series titles? Labeling someone a Dummy as a beginner is a great way to ensure people don’t want to try something new.)

Once you’ve transcended the need to march in lockstep with exact recipe cards, once you understand the basic application of all the tools and you’re ready to step up to understanding why you should or should not be doing things, you’re ready for a book like Six Pixels of Separation.

Don’t misunderstand – there is still a tremendous need for very beginner focused materials out there. The constant 80% new folks rate of attendance at PodCamps testifies to the continuing opportunity for people to get involved in new media. I’m just saying that you need to set your expectations appropriately for a book like Six Pixels of Separation and be prepared to work very, very hard to execute on the strategies in it.

Full Disclosure: Mitch is a friend and I’m probably biased in my review of his book. Expect links in this post to go to one or more affiliate programs and know that I get paid a nominal fee for referring you to those resources if you make a purchase or purchase inquiry. Thanks in advance for buying everything in triplicate.

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A Thoroughly Read Review of Trust Agents

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:47:21 +0000

Had enough of Trust Agents buzz yet? I have. Let’s see if the reality matches the hype.

If you’re already a trusted community member/manager, already a thought leader of sorts, Trust Agents isn’t going to do anything new for you. There isn’t anything in the book that you haven’t already heard and practiced before. Some of it will be good reminders of things you should be doing if you’ve lapsed, but for the most part if you have the trust of your community, your tribe, then don’t expect mental fireworks. If you’ve read previous works that Trust Agents builds on, like Tribes, New Rules of Marketing and PR, Cluetrain Manifesto, The Whuffie Factor, Chris Brogan’s blog, etc. expect Trust Agents to be more or less a derivative work with a few different case studies.

If you are not a trusted member or leader of your community, Trust Agents is for you. The nearest trusted person in your community, if you’re very lucky, will buy the hardcover edition, laminate it with granite, and then beat you over the head with it until [a] you get it or [b] your forehead resembles chunky salsa. Either way, we all win.

This is the paradox, the irony of Trust Agents, and the part that I hope all the buzz and hype actually works to break:

The people who need Trust Agents the most are the least likely to read it.

The people who need to get a clue about how to manage trust, how to behave in a trustworthy fashion, how to create value instead of simply broadcasting the same crappy commercial message over and over again, probably won’t pick up the book. Ideally, all the buzz and hype will convince them it’s a must read, even if they don’t have a clue why they’ve got a copy on their desk. It’s your obligation if you work for one of these people to either make them read the book or commit homicide with it via blunt trauma.

There are a great many little things in Trust Agents that, if you’re trustworthy, should be annoying. “How to earn trust” and “how to behave in a community” sound like they were written for 6 year olds. Your inner voice as a trusted person should be saying, “DUH!” and “Is that really all there is to this book?” and the answer is yes, because you know these lessons. You’ve internalized them, you practice them daily, and you don’t need them as reminders any more than you need reminders not to shoplift at the grocery store. For the used car salesman at your office, at your business, on your salesforce, in your community, these lessons are probably the closest thing to divine revelation that they’ll get this week. Sad, but true.

In the end, if you read this blog, if you listen to Marketing Over Coffee, if you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably already a reasonably trustworthy person and you’re not going to get much out of Trust Agents. Like I said, it’s not for you. Buy it anyway, skim it, and then force it down the throat of your pointy haired boss as fast as you can.

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Turning your Kindle/iPad into the best newsstand ever for free

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:09:57 +0000

It’s no secret that the newest crop of mobile devices like the Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad and iPhone 4, Nook, etc. make for great eBook readers. What the makers of these devices don’t tell you is that they can make insanely great newsstands, magazine stands, and blog eBook readers as well. Let’s look at how to power up your reading list with this free software.

1. Download and install Calibre. Go through the very brief setup process to identify which device you have. Plug your mobile device in and let it be recognized. For iPads, you’ll also need the free Stanza application from the iTunes store. Kindles, Sony Readers, and Nooks should be recognized automatically.

2. Fire up Calibre, and find the Fetch News panel.

3. Find all the publications you want to take with you, say, before a flight. Click Download now to add them to your queue.

That might be enough to get you started, but if you want to REALLY amp things up, click on the little arrow next to Fetch News, and choose Create Custom News Source.

4. Select Add/Update recipe, start a new recipe, give it a title, and start adding the blogs that you love most to the recipe. Now you’re making your own power newspaper of your favorite blog authors.

5. Once the new recipe is done, go back to the Fetch News tab and find your recipe under the Custom entry. Select Download now and you’ve got those blogs ready to go.

Bonus: Calibre auto-syncs with your devices, so it uploads all your newspapers and blogs via USB automatically.

6. Fire up your device and voila! Instant, free news and blogs to go.

Caveats: Calibre ONLY works via USB. No wireless here. For iPads, you’ll need to use iTunes to sync it up.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:

Attend virtually!

I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

Why marketers don't understand the Amazon Kindle (or Kindle 2)

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:01:07 +0000

I’ve read and heard a lot of buzz about Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle 2 lately. Of the folks who are not wild about the device, the main criticism is that it’s not a book. It lacks the real world charm of books – the feel of the paper, the smell of the book, etc. You’re right – the Kindle is not a book, and that’s the whole point.

A quick story. Last year, I was flying back from Tampa on a business trip and sat next to Grandma Rosenblum, a wonderful 80 year old great-grandmother. I was surprised, amidst the usual contents that an 80 year old carries, to see an Amazon Kindle in her purse, and asked her about it, since my stereotype of 80 year olds generally doesn’t include cutting edge technology. Her response? “I love my Kindle. Everyone I know at my senior center has one. We all love that you can make the letters as big as you want. One of my friends has really bad eyes but she can read again now!”

I asked her about the other features of the Kindle – blog subscriptions, newspapers, etc. and she said she didn’t read anything like that, just books and the occasional article. Except she was wrong. She did read a couple of blogs – Huffington Post was in there, as well as mainstream news sources like the New York Times. She just didn’t call the Huffington Post a blog. It was merely, to her, a series of articles.

The Kindle 2 has even more stuff. Based on initial product description, it’ll have the 3G wireless component, but it will also have document conversion and a basic web browser. Guess what, gang? That’s not an eBook reader any more. That’s a tablet computer. Granted, you may not be working in Excel or playing Warcraft on it, but with the addition of a browser and document conversion, the Kindle is now a computer that can be used for productivity above and beyond reading stuff.

What’s the takeaway here? The Kindle 2 seems to be a workable tablet computer disguised as a book reader, rather like the iPod Touch is a workable PDA disguised as a music player. If you’re a business type, I would bet you’ll get some enhanced productivity out of the new Kindle.

If you’re a marketer, all I have to say is this: you had better be cranking out eBooks, you had better be cranking them out in Kindle-supported formats, and as a bonus, if you have the absolute trust and love of your readers, you might even get them to register their Kindle document conversion email addresses to get new eBooks from you when you have them. (did you know you can email documents to Kindle for conversion?)

Full disclosure: links to the Kindle are paid links for my employer, using Amazon’s affiliate program. Purchasing a Kindle through these links earns my employer the standard Amazon commission.

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