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I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through.

I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.

I find it fascinating that a lot of business books that do well are from people who've never made any money in business.

My books didn't fit a marketing niche.

Every woman who has a business book has a platform. For the most part, they're either a television personality or someone who had the perfect pedigree and worked their way up the career ladder.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products.

I did have a nice career in print, but traditional publishers don't always have the resources to create individualized marketing for their authors. Mine never figured out how to package books as hot as mine so that they found their full audience. Finally, I got frustrated enough over my lack of traction to walk away.

This book was company for me - I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.