This Year Will Be Different

by Nika van Olst, Ewelina Dymek (Illustrator), Diana Joiner (Copy Editor)

This Year Will Be Different is a book for and about entrepreneurial women; a practical guide for everyone who wants to start their own business or become a freelancer. It’s filled with tips, tricks, stories and interviews with women who are now making money as bloggers, designers, consultants, photographers and many more great professions within the creative industries.

Genres: Nonfiction

183 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 12, 2015

About the author

Nika van Olst was born as Monika Kanokova in the Czech Republic. She emigrated to Vienna as a young girl. Since graduating from college, she has called many cities across Europe and the U.S. home. As one of Austria's first bloggers, Nika recognised the power of the internet from an early age, and spent the rest of her twenties pursuing her passion for participatory community building through technology. She published three guides for creative freelancers before founding a sustainability consultancy and design studio in 2020. She recently went freelance again, which might mean just one thing: more time for writing books again! Stay tuned :)

Reviews

[Frances Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A one-stop guide to give you the best start as an entrepreneur in today's modern, online and network-focused age. Essentially a series of interviews with entrepreneurial women from all over the world, operating in a variety of different creative industries, there is plenty of advice and personal experience dished out here. This is intersected with practical, almost step-by-step action items by the author guiding you through the basic steps of setting yourself up as a freelancer, start-up or to just get yourself noticed in your chosen field.

I have to come clean and admit that I'm one of the women featured, but even so I found the remaining 22 interviews fascinating, inspiring and practically very informative. This is essential reading for anyone interested in going it alone and making this year very different... and potentially very successful.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Handling patent law, finding investors, writing business plans, and being hella persistent: these are key actions for the entrepreneurial women interviewed in This Year Will Be Different. It's a friendly, accessible book filled with stories from small business owners, freelancers, and profitable social media folks from all over the world. Most of the interviewees are very young, and within five years of starting their own businesses; the interviews are transparent about the challenges, break-even points, and levels of effort needed to succeed. The women are from a range of fields and technical areas - enterprise networking & IT, papercrafts, fashion journalism, and a lot of travel writers - and it's fascinating to see how each person identified their unique value add or marketable skill and turned it into a self-run business. Each interview is preceded with some well-researched advice, and there are plenty of tools, techniques, and ideas for passive revenue generation presented throughout! Also, between the interviewees themselves and the appendix full of Kickstarter backers offering to stand as resources, people looking to start their own businesses will find plenty of inspiration and resources here.

[Maria Ninfa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring and mind-broadening, a great read!

[Ina · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a lot of great online resources with personal stories about freelancing and side business, so this book is not as relevant as it might have been few years ago.

[Briony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I really enjoyed this book however when I looked up a few of the writers to see how their projects were going, they had ended/died off. So that's a shame. All the same, inspirational and interesting.