In Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes, Mark Penn shows that 75 of the most important trends in the world today are the smallest ones. Exploring everything from politics to religion, food to entertainment, Penn follows the numbers to uncover what's really popular, not what we think is popular. Because while these trends are shaping the world, they’re relatively unseen – they’re under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as 1 percent of...

Ten years after his New York Times bestselling book Microtrends, Mark Penn identifies the next wave of trends reshaping the future of business, politics, and culture.Mark Penn has boldly argued that the future is not shaped by society’s broad forces, but by quiet changes within narrow slices of the population. Ten years ago, he showed how the behavior of one small group can exert an outsized influence over the whole of America with his bestselling...

Do you want to be a more relaxed author?There are plenty of books and tips on writing faster, learning more marketing tactics and strategies, trying to maximize your ranking, hitting the top of the charts, juicing the algorithms, and hacking different ad platforms. While these are all important things — which the authors themselves regularly write and talk about — it's also important to recognize that your author journey is a marathon, and not a sprint.Joan...

Ten years after his New York Times bestselling book Microtrends, Mark Penn identifies the next wave of trends reshaping the future of business, politics, and culture.Mark Penn has boldly argued that the future is not shaped by society’s broad forces, but by quiet changes within narrow slices of the population. Ten years ago, he showed how the behavior of one small group can exert an outsized influence over the whole of America with his bestselling...

The adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and President Bill Clinton proves that small is big by identifying 75 hidden-in-plain-sight trends that are moving America, revealing that the nation is no longer a melting pot but a collection of communities with many individual tastes and lifestyles.**"The ideas in his book will help you see the world in a new way." —Bill Clinton"Mark Penn has a keen mind and a fascinating sense of what makes America tic...

While experiential staging is well documented in tourism studies, not enough has been written about the diverse types of experiences and expectations that visitors bring to the tourist space and how communities respond to, or indeed challenge, these expectations. This book brings together new ideas about cultural experiences and how communities, creative producers, and visitors can productively engage with competing interests and notions of experience and authenticity in the tourist enviro...

Former chief warrant officer and amputee Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson, are opening a detective agency. They have high hopes that the thriving mountain region will provide a steady stream of cases.Their first client, a quirky elderly woman in a retirement community, makes a strange request. She wants Sam to right a wrong she committed over seventy years ago. Her victim: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her crime: stealing a manuscript when Fitzgerald resided in the stately Gr...

In Asheville, North Carolina, the Blackman & Robertson Detective Agency faces a disturbing reality: no clients. Sam Blackman finds inactivity intolerable, so when partner Nakayla Robertson suggests a mushroom hunt on the site of a historic freed-slave commune called the Kingdom of the Happy Land, Sam reluctantly agrees. When he stumbles across a skeleton, his adventure mushrooms into a case of murder. But it isn't his case—he has no client—and the local authorities tell him to butt out.

Sam Blackman is an angry man. A chief warrant officer in the criminal investigation detachment of the US military, he lost a leg in Iraq and has been outspoken in his criticism of his medical treatment. Then, ex-marine and fellow amputee Tikima Robertson walks into his hospital room, hinting that she has an opportunity for Sam to use his investigative skills. But before she can return, Tikima is murdered, her body found floating in the French Broad River.When a journal dating to 19...

An author’s talents may seem obvious and indisputable as they move words and ideas into gathered phrases and stories.But where do these ideas and stories come from? A lonely thought that suddenly gathers form? An inspiration from a Muse? A suggestion from an everyday event?Perhaps in the case of their darker, more malevolent stories, other forces are at work. They help to nourish single words into sentences and paragraphs that ease themselves from the shadows and are sudden...

Welcome to the first adventure of the Super Hero in training Reminator! Meet his old family and new, as he moves from his country farm to the big city. He trains, learns, and grows. From special dog to special hero!

When Cherokee burial remains are unearthed on the site of a local cemetery's expansion, Barry Clayton, part-time deputy and full-time undertaker, finds his dual occupations colliding. Then, during the interment of the wife of one of Gainesboro's most prominent citizens, Cherokee activist Jimmy Panther leads a protest. Words and fists fly.When Panther turns up executed on the grave of the deceased woman, Barry is forced to confront her family as the chief suspects. But the case lurc...