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The two things I love most -- other than my wife Laurie Lauria, of course -- are business and comedy. It's natural for me to find the comedy in business situations ... and just as natural for me to watch a situation comedy and think about business. So, when I saw this piece on BuzzFeed 21 Pieces of Career Advice From “Seinfeld", I decided to take it deeper. After all, behind all good comedy is truth, and Seinfeld was the best. I wondered, what could we truly learn about career success (both "do's" and "not-to-do's") from the four main characters, Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine?

Many publishing experts claim that after writing excellent copy for your eBook (see my last post, Becoming a Writer, Mapper and Synthesizer), the next most important thing to do is create a good cover design. As Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, states: “A great cover design makes a promise to the reader.”

Mind mapping to design your cover can help you keep that promise.

In my last blog post, I wrote about how to use mind mapping to discover the reasons you would want to publish an eBook. Once you’ve established that, the next step is to actually write the book — which can seem an incredibly daunting task.

So, I enlisted the help of authors who literally and figuratively wrote the books on writing: Anne Lamott with Bird By Bird, Stephen King’s On Writing, The Artist’s Way’s Julia Cameron with The Right to Write, and screenwriter Robert McKee’s Story. After re-reading each book with an eye on how mind mapping might be most beneficial to the writing process, I came away with one clear answer: synthesizing.

If you want to get somewhere, you need a map. That’s why when my wife Laurie (yes, that’s right, she’s Laurie Lauria) suggested that I publish an eBook on my experiences getting money back from big companies, I immediately turned to Mindjet’s MindManager to map the project. My relationship with Mindjet began in 1999 when Laurie showed me an article about mind mapping software she found in an airline magazine. She had seen me hand-drawing mind maps that I used to enhance my creativity for problem solving. She recognized that since I was both an engineer and a writer, a software tool that would allow me to use both my left brain and right brain would be quite beneficial.