The book is getting close to going to the printer.  I am sending a draft to “the person” who will write the forword, and my graphics artist shot me three book cover ideas.

I would love your feedback on these three covers.  Will you please tell me which of the three you love, which you love the least, and WHY?  Thank you!

Idea A: Lightbulb Head

Idea B: Triangle Head

Idea C: Elephant on Tightrope

Please leave a comment of email me (Jason@JibberJobber.com) what you think. Again, I’d love to know your favorite, least favorite, and WHY.

I finally got the pre-purchase page up for 51 Alternatives to a Real Job.

You might not have heard of this book… if you haven’t, click here to learn more.

I wrote this to inspire and give hope, especially to those who continually feel stripped of personal power in their own careers.

Learn more and/or prepurchase here.

I shared this with my LinkedIn Group on Tuesday.  If you want to get announcements earlier, join that Group. Also, I left my email signature in there so you can see what it currently is

This week I should finish editing the 51 Alternatives to a Real Job book, which include stories and tips from people doing them. It has been an overwhelming project to talk to people who are living their dream and making money outside of the cubicle world.

Is this interesting to you? I hope to get a page up to prepurchase in the next month or two. I also hope to ship the books this summer. I’m anxious to be done and get this inspiration out to people who are so frustrated in the job search.

Some of you know I call JibberJobber “Career Management 2.0″ Let me share why, and how that relates to the book.

Career Management 1.0 is the old, traditional stuff we used to do, where we could count on companies to have some loyalty.

Career Management 2.0 is where we are now, where we have taken a lot more responsibility for our careers. Networking and personal branding have A LOT to do with that.

Career Management 3.0 is where we really introduce multiple revenue streams to our portfolio, and a “job” is just one of them. It might be the largest, but it doesn’t have to be the most important. I predict this is where we are headed.

51 Alternatives to a real job is all about Career Management 3.0. If you want to naively trust your company to provide your income through retirement, go for it. If you want to be more empowered, and less submissive to forces outside of your control, then implement Career Management 3.0!

Sound interesting? Let me know.

Finally, Dick Bolles has been the name in Career Management and job search for decades. He wrote What Color Is Your Parachute, and refuses to let his publisher edit it. He does the writing and editing. I’m going to interview him on Tuesday morning and you are invited to come. If you have any questions you want me to ask, let me know. Otherwise, come and hear from a legend in this field. No charge.

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/600990794

Have a great week!

– ~!~!~!~!~ –

Jason Alba
:: http://JibberJobber.com – Organize your Job Search
:: http://ImOnLinkedInNowWhat.com – THE LinkedIn Book & DVD
:: http://JibberJobber.com/webinar – Ask The Expert and User webinars
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

I’m sitting at the airport after spending the week in Texas.  I was at an awesome conference and learned a lot.  I like going to conferences that are different than where I normally go – the different perspectives are important.

Today I got on my Southwest flight and there was an empty middle seat near the front.  I asked if it was taken and the guy got all huffy and made a lot of grunting unhappy noises and a scene as he got up and slid over.  This happens when a couple is travelling together and hoping they get a seat between them.

The jerk had put his seatbelt on, even though we were told it was a full flight, and couldn’t believe someone (me) had the nerve to ask him if I could sit in the empty seat.

You know what I love?  Since I got laid off I’ve been able to choose “who I get to sit by.”

When I had my job I didn’t have much of a choice of who I had to work with. In the past I’ve worked with people that had really bad body odor, I’ve worked with people who have been mean, offensive, unmotivated or crude.  I’ve worked with people who belittled everyone and I’ve worked with people who I would not hang out with for one minute after work.  If I wanted to get paid I had to do it.

Since I left Corporate America I’ve been able to choose who I work with.  There have been a few bombs, of course, but here’s the awesome part: when I/we realized it wasn’t a good relationship, we parted ways.

We could move on.

I LOVE not having to work with jerks.    I haven’t had to for a few years but there are two people that I remember that just didn’t work out at all.  They were both towards the beginning of my JibberJobber journey.  Since then I’ve been a lot more careful to choose my relationships better, and it’s been awesome to not have jerks forced on me.

How about you?  Can you choose who you work with?   It can be a priceless experience!

Hey, sorry I’ve been gone for a while… over a week!   Here’s what I’ve been doing:

A few weeks ago my wife asked if I would help with my oldest daughter in a week-long school program.  Some of you know we homeschool… which means they are busy with lots of programs outside of the home.

This one is a week-long “government” simulation with kids age 12 – 18ish.  It’s kind of a long story, but in a nutshell, there is a group of people who left plane earth about 300 years ago to find a new planet, only to be stuck there.  In the last 300 years they grew from 1,000 to 500,000, and live in five countries.  Each of the countries is ruled differently (theocracy, monarchy, dictatorship, etc.).  The kids are split up into one of the five countries and have spent the last four days working within their own government system, understanding it, and also working with other countries.

It has been a BLAST.  This is my first time doing something like this.  I’m the King over the monarchy.  It was fun to figure out what kind of king I would be… nice or mean, eccentric or laid back, etc.  Yesterday I was asked to do something different because all my kids love me and my kingdom too much… doing something eccentric might jar them a bit.  So we basically declared war on a country during peace treaties.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been from morning to night.  My brain is doing totally different stuff, so it’s like the first week on the job where you come home exhausted!  I love getting to know these kids better, especially since I’ve heard about them for so long. Today it ends, so I should be back in the work saddle pretty soon.

Speaking of which, I had an epiphany related to my next book, 101 Alternatives to a Real Job.

For various reasons, I’ve decided to call it 51 Alternatives to a Real Job.

Ugh, just writing that makes me feel like, in a sense, I’m quitting

Actually, there are some good reasons to take it down to 51:

• With 51, I’m pretty much done writing them all up.  What was supposed to be done about 7 months ago can now get done in the next few weeks.  Yippee!!  Gotta get “to market!”  It was killing me thinking this project was going way too long!
• With 51 ideas I’ll have room for more tips and actionable takeaways.  I was getting worried the amount of pages needed for 101 would be too big AND not leave much room for actionable stuff.
• If I ever want to do a second edition, or a Part II, I realized finding 51 more would be A LOT easier than finding 101 more!

Those are the main ideas.  I’m meeting with the editor tomorrow to see what the next steps are, and I hope to have the 51 to a Real Job book out SOON!

Thanks for all your support!

I’m continually asked if I’m going to jump on the ebook bandwagon.  It’s easy to distribute, the author gets more money if you sell through Amazon, and because the Kindle is so prominent (even the Kindle app on the i-devices), it’s so easy to tap into a huge audience of people who can purchase very, very easily (one click?).

I have been on the fence about ebook publishing, for books I want to sell (not give away), for years.

Here’s why: document sharing websites, like scribd, make it super easy for people with questionable ethics, to share your document at no cost.  Here’s an example: you can get my entire book, free, illegally, from scribd (URL here, but I’m not linking to it: scribd.com/doc/90301388/On-Linkedin).

Scribd is not a bad-guy site.  It’s not some offshore, shady torrent site where you can get anything, pirated, for free.

It’s more of a legitimate, trustworthy site, with real stuff.  Like docstoc and many other document sharing sites.

But it was so easy for someone with poor judgement, or no ethics, or who perhaps feels that everything should be free, to post my book in its entirety, to scribd. And I don’t see an easy way for me (or anyone) to say HEY, THIS IS PIRATED!  TAKE IT DOWN! No flag button or link.

A couple of years ago, a FENG (The Financial Executives Network Group) member took my ebook and illegally emailed it to the entire FENG email list.

Nice. Thousands of financial executives just got my book for free.  Did sales increase?  Nope.  You’d think financial execs would have more ethics than to let that happen.  When I asked the FENG leadership I got an apology, but the damage was done.

I only knew about that because one of my JibberJobber users was on that list, and they forwarded it to me.

As an author, and someone who is trying to earn money, I find the lack of integrity when it comes to stuff like this unsettling.

And that’s why I’m not enthusiastically planning on making 101 Alternatives to a Real Job an ebook.

But then, am I missing out on gobs of sales?

The decision hasn’t been made, but it’s hard to get excited about making a move that could completely wipe out any legitimate sales.

I’d love to know what you think.

A question I asked on LinkedIn Wednesday prompted this post.  See the question and great answers here: 101 Alternatives to a Real Job: What pitfalls are there to starting your own business?

After scrubbing, this is how my hand looks. Need to get gloves. Green because one of my fav neighbors, with Irish heritage, wanted a green background

I am writing a really fun book titled 101 Alternatives to a Real Job.  I have submitted 41 of the 101 to my editor, and have about 10 more that are out to people doing it for quotes.

More than just a list of ideas, with blabbering by me, this book includes quotes and tips from people who have actually done these things.  I’ve come to believe that the reason this book will be so awesome is because of what others are contributing, not what I’m writing.  I’m excited to see it evolve, although I sometimes wish I would have titled it 47 Alternatives to a Real Job, since I’d pretty much be done by now :p  Oh well, onward!

Anyway, a few circumstances lined up just the right way and I decided I needed to try one of these out for myself.  I am a believer of the idea that so-called experts need experience in what they talk about, or in my case, write about.  So I finally picked one that seemed easy to start, easy to do, and easy to bring in the money.

I bought a kit so I could paint numbers on curbs.  Supposedly you can make $20 to $60 an hour.  I know many of the people in my audience, whether you are reading it here or at one of my presentations, would welcome the chance to earn anywhere in that range.

I proposed the idea to my kids and set up a cool and so-far very effective system: they sell and I paint.

They bring in the money, I deliver on the service.

Easy, efficient, and a money machine, right?

EXACTLY! The first night, in two hours, they collected $65.  Not bad at all.  The second night, in two hours, they collected $100.  In four hours they sold $165, which is about $41/hour.  That is really good money, especially for an eight and eleven year old, don’t you think?

Here are a few points where this business is a pain:

• I have to get a solicitors licence from the city.  It only cost me $30, but it took a good hour because of drive time and the time I had to fill out the form, etc.  This is honestly a pain.   And it’s kind-of-almost embarrassing.  After all, what’s a smart successful guy like me doing getting a door-to-door solicitors license for???  Shouldn’t I do something productive with my MBA?  Yes, definitely a pride issue.
• In order to get a solicitors license, I had to go to the state Bureau of Criminal Affairs and get a background check.  That’s what I was told. In fact, they call it a “Criminal History Record.”  I took some of my kids and their friends, and walked into what seemed to be a big jail cell with a bunch of bad guys waiting to do their own paperwork.  My littlest was 2, the oldest was 11.  I suddenly felt worried that I brought these sweet, cute kids into a place that would make a bartender nervous.  Oh yeah, it took another hour or two to get this done.  This was much further away from my house than the city building.
• I rolled this business under my existing business (JibberJobber LLC).  That means I am already licensed with the city (a pain and a seemingly waste of money, since the city doesn’t do anything for me), and I have a Federal Tax ID (another pain).  I did this about six years ago (and have kept current), so it was easy to put that in, but I thought if I didn’t have this, it could easily be a barrier to entry.  I remember the three days it took to do all the business set-up a few years ago, thinking how much I hated that part of it, and that that alone was enough to make people start businesses illegally, without registering with the different levels of government.
• Along those lines, I should mention you should have a business checking account, which is actually not just another bank account, but a certain type of bank account.  Not fun or fast!

That’s most of the administrative, bureacratic pain.  Technically, I wasn’t even supposed to have made a buck yet!  Here are the things that cause me pain in actually doing this type of easy-money business:

• Knocking on doors.  This is not in most people’s comfort zone.  In fact, I am not looking forward to the time when my kids aren’t doing it (because of other activities), and I do it.  I know I need to… I need to get over it, but door-to-door is just not my favorite thing.
• Delivery. So my sales team sold a bunch of stuff.  Now someone (me) has to deliver!  And delivery will take time – twenty or thirty minutes per sale.  The more they sell, the more work I have to do (remember, this isn’t my day job!).  I like how I can do it whenever I want, but it’s still weighing on me until I finish delivery.
• Weather.  This week we’ve been rained out I think three times.  No sales, no painting, NO MONEY.  It’s a great idea, but if the weather doesn’t cooperate you are stuck.

Why am I doing this?  For various reason.  I’ll outline the good stuff  in another post.  But I thought I share my thoughts on “barriers to entry” for a business that seems to not have any.

Oh yeah, I read yesterday a college kid was making about $80k/year doing curb paintings.

Read the LinkedIn question and answers here: 101 Alternatives to a Real Job: What pitfalls are there to starting your own business?