I don’t know about you, sports fans, but Holiday Season is generally ultra-busy time for me. While the rest of society seems to be downshifting and stuffing themselves with all manner of carb- and alcohol-laden goodies –although I’ve noticed less and less of it over the past decade in multicultural Toronto – there’s a small contingent of us who are sledgehammering hard and laying pipe for the new year, watering the seeds we’ve been meticulously planting since the beginning of November (year irrelevant).

Holiday Season is a perfect time to engross yourself with work. I’ll list several types now.

For those who think my suggestions undermine family values and that the Xmas period is time for families, I contend that family time is anytime and everyday, not just over the course a super-concentrated handful of days where everyone is generally under colossal amounts of tension, at each other’s throats, and covetous of gifts, possessions, and displaying tremendous amounts of hate-on for those who’ve received the better toys.

Rather than embroil yourself in these sorts of complications and descend to the behavioral level of a troglodyte, try some of these techniques out – like, stat! — for maximum indie film performance, and also as a way to get a jump on the competition.

Because in this business, my friends, there’s a lot of it. My tips are possible means for you to break away from the New York Marathon-like logjam.

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I recently had the good fortune to crank out an inspirational email thread with CD Baby founder (now Singapore-based) Derek Sivers.

I reached out to the wildly popular self-starter and Domino Project author after hearing him interviewed on an edition of John Wall and Christopher Penn’s Marketing Over Coffee podcast. Something he said during the playback stood out for me immensely about his approachability and how this attitude underlay his ability to succeed and eventually sell his CD Bay for a cool $22M.

During the cast, Sivers described how he was always aghast to receive emails from fans where they would let him know (!) how much he was likely “so pressed for time” and at how thankful they were if he could take just a spare moment out to acknowledge that he received their note. Each time Sivers would receive one of these sorts of emails, he would remark at how odd it was knowing how much he likes to help out at various communities – both online and off. Knowing, too, how much of a public personality he is and the sheer amount of inspirational fare he produces.

You see, Sivers bills himself as a super-approachable person so it never made sense to him why people would create an aura of exclusivity around his personal brand. That expectation was an attitude people were taking in from the outside, not due to the energy Sivers was broadcasting to his audience.

So – following up on the interview’s energy – I fired off an introduction email after doing a little more background research at his excellent (and minimalist!) URL. Figuring I’d put him to the test, I wanted to see if he would put his money where his mouth is. In fact, I did him one better and recorded a personalized video.

Indeed, Derek delivered!

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Some thoughts from my current read of Mark Hughes’ BUZZMARKETING:
http://amzn.to/ky6wWo

Do you know what “buzz” marketing is? Some more thoughts from me on the concept here…

It’s 22 weeks into 2011, and you should have up to twenty-two different titles already read.

Are you reading your book-a-week? If not, why not?

If we don’t know where we’ve been, we don’t know where we’re going. It’s simple.

I used to disagree with someone about this all the time.