Welcome to www.msunderestimated.com

Finishing a Masterpiece and Getting it on the Shelves (how to get a book published) Writing a book is a monumental task in itself. The process is long, drawn out and grueling. Even if you thoroughly enjoy writing and writing on the same subject for an extended period of time, you will no doubt be exhausted by the writing of a book. Getting that book published, however, will take even more time and effort than producing the thing in the first place. Are you thinking about writing a book? Have you already written one and now are just wondering how to get a book published? If you are, read on. Here are a few tips on how to get from the starting line to triumphantly crossing the finish line. Writing that Book When starting out writing your book, before you are ready to consider how to get a book published, you may already feel daunted. To write a successful book you need to start out with some original thought. You probably have plenty of originality, but you may have trouble getting your ideas into a coherent flow of information that will be digestible by the general public. The first step is to create a book skeleton. You need to organize your thoughts into a progression of chapters. If your book will be non-fiction, start with a table of contents. Write chapter headings and sub-headings. You will automatically know that you’ll need an introductory chapter, but you should probably leave the content of your introduction for the last step. Organize your chapters so that they build upon one another. The more headings that you can brainstorm to begin with, the easier it will be to fill in your book with a series of short articles that flow into one another. If your writing will be fiction, you will need more of a storyboard. You will need to create cause and effect as well as character sketches. To make your story coherent your characters will need events to react to. Their reactions should become predictable as your readers get into the story. You may need to create some situations for your characters just for the purpose of introducing their traits to the reader. These are very general guidelines about how to begin constructing your book. The actual process will be much more involved as you move closer to finding out how to get a book published. Even after you are finished with the bulk of the content, your goal is still a ways off into the future. Getting to Print The next step in how to get a book published is finding a publisher. There are resources at your local library that will let you know who will be the best candidate for publishing the kind of writing that you do. After a series of queries and correspondence with the potential publishers you may get an invitation to send your manuscript. Then the work begins. A publisher is very experienced in finding books that are marketable. He knows what it will take to get your book to sell. Don’t be offended when his editors tears your writing apart. If they are doing that, you can enjoy the fact that you are on the road to a published book. Expect to enter into a close relationship of compromise and change with the editor as you rework and rework what you have already so painstakingly written. When you are finished you will have a readable and clean and correct manuscript ready for print. The road to getting a book published is a long one, but well worth the effort. Trust yourself, and trust the publisher to create a beautiful masterpiece. Don’t be discouraged if several publishers are not interested in your book. You may have to just keep the first few for yourself, and then again, they may eventually get accepted. Good luck and enjoy the process.

Positive Reasons Why Employee Turnover Can Be a Good Thing Employee turnover is the bane of many an organization. If you pick up any business paper, you will find headline after headline screaming about how much turnover is costing companies and how to keep your employees happy and on board to avoid the headaches and hassles of high turnover. The tide, however, is starting to turn. More and more business experts are stepping up and saying turnover doesn’t have to be the end of the world. In fact, in some cases, turnover can be the best thing that ever happened to your company. While some turnover is as bad as traditional wisdom assumes it is, other instances of turnover can be a real positive for your business. How can turnover possibly be a good thing? It all comes down to who is leaving the company, and why. Every office has its workers that are a drag on the business for one reason or another. Maybe the employee is dissatisfied with their job because they have been working it for too long and are overqualified, but they don’t have any room for advancement. Maybe an employee thinks that all of the decisions you are making about the business are the wrong ones and are constantly critical. Maybe the employee just has a personality conflict with the other people in the company and you and other works simply don’t like them very much. When these kinds of employees leave your company, it can be a shot of life into the business. Suddenly, everyone feels hopeful and re-energized because the negative energy in the air is gone. Negative vibes in the office can have a very damaging effect on the staff, and by extension, your business. When the person causing the bad feeling heads for the highway, they take with them all of the problems they created. Not only does the departure of an employee who was causing trouble in the office boost morale for the employees who are left behind because the bad feelings are gone, but it also boosts morale because it creates a job opening within company. If the person who left was a superior to many people in the office, there is now an instant opportunity for advancement. Your workers will step up with their games as they vie for the position, creating new business opportunities for you and generally keeping the spirit high in the office. If you decide to promote from within whenever possible after a turnover, your employees will work harder with the knowledge that they have a chance of moving up. These turnover positives hold true whether the employee in question quit the job or was fired. Who they were in the company and why they left are often much more important in determining whether the turnover was positive or negative. While losing an employee who is bringing everyone else down is a positive thing for your business, losing an employee who was an integral part of the corporation is another. Of course, there are costs involved in a turnover – you have to re-train an employee, and if you hire from outside of the company, you have the costs of advertising the job and the cost of the time spent interviewing candidates. If you are losing employee after employee, and the employees you are losing are the ones who were holding things together at the office, then you need to consider things you can do to reverse the turnover trend. Despite the potential negative side, turnover doesn’t have to be a bad thing for your company. If you manage it properly and if you are dropping employees who have been bringing your business down, turnover could be just the thing to turn your fortunes around.

Copyright infringement insurance coverage Do You Need Copyright Infringement Insurance Coverage? People are creating more content now than ever: eBooks, blogs, web journals, MySpace Pages, Podcasts. Every where, in abundance, you’ll find people sharing their ideas and opinions, and creating entertainment for everyone. However, with all the resources available to us, how can we be sure that we’re not violating copyright law? Should we have copyright infringement insurance coverage? Copyright infringement is the act of using someone else’s copyrighted material – in any form – in our own use without proper allowances. In order to be allowed to use the material, all we may need to do is ask and give the owner royalties, attribution, or some combination thereof. But, occasionally, it’s easy to forget that we need to ask before we use something without rights. You’re allowed to use copyrighted works in a number of forms – educational and instructional uses, parody, commentary, and news are all forms where you don’t need to ask for use – it’s considered fair use under the copyright law. However, even if you’re using the item of copyright in one of these forms, it would still be wise to inform the owner of your intent before using it. Of course, you should contact a copyright lawyer before using anyone else’s work(s), but to keep yourself safe, copyright infringement insurance coverage may be a good bet for you and your colleagues. Should you have copyright infringement insurance coverage? Although this is a new concept, it is one we should look at closely as creators. A well-known adage “there is no completely original idea” comes into play in our current age – while it’s entirely possible for us to have a thought, and act upon the thought – there may be, somewhere, someone who has created close to the same material as we have, without our knowing. Did we create it first? Did they? Would they be able to sue you for copyright infringement? These are the things to ponder as we create our media – should we have copyright infringement insurance coverage? What is copyright infringement insurance coverage? This coverage would be insurance for covering the cost to settle lawsuits brought in regards to copyright infringement – it would be a small amount of coverage. For example, you would only need around $5,000 to cover the court and attorney fees associated with a case, if a suit were brought against a person. Theoretically, you would only pay under $25 per year and would cover up to the five thousand dollar settlement should a case be brought against you. How would you use copyright infringement insurance coverage? Hopefully, you’d never have to use your copyright infringement insurance coverage. But, it would be there in case a charge was ever brought to you on copyright infringement With so many of us – bloggers, columnists, podcasters – creating our own content, it’s in our best interest to consider something such as this. We may not always get the rights we need in order to use a work, either whole or in part. As you can see, it can be critical to have copyright infringement insurance coverage as a blogger, podcaster, columnist, or other content creator. It’s imperative that we know our rights to use something (or to NOT use something) and what we can do to protect yourself. Copyright infringement can carry a serious penalty, and insurance coverage is a good way to insure that you’re protected from hefty fines. Talk to you current insurance provider and copyright lawyer to find out what you need to do, and what you need to know, to get proper insurance for your needs.