'It's that place of, you know, because it's your business and your livelihood, having to say, "Come and buy my thing because I'm great. I'm great at it. Look at me, look at all these great things I can do for my clients." And oh my goodness, that's difficult.'

Jenny Proctor is living proof that you don’t need to shout to get the right kind of attention. It can feel pretty lonely, being an introvert in the famously extrovert environment of a corporate marketing department. But setting up her own business meant Jenny was free to set her own rules, and the fact that her book, Marketing for Introverts, won the Business Self Development Book of the Year award is proof that her approach is welcomed by others, too.

Whether it’s the quiet power of a well-crafted blog post or the paradoxically introvert-friendly nature of video marketing, Jenny’s insights on how introverts can rewrite the marketing rules are as practical as they are reassuring.

I'm an off-the-scale extrovert, and we discovered, hilariously, that we have at times both secretly envied the other's MBTI profile. But whether you're an introvert, an extrovert, or something in between, you'll find something worth listening to in this episode.

'[And this is} the rationale and the motivation for the book. It's about, well, how do we spread this? How do we do some good with it? How do we improve the economy? How do we make businesses more effective?'

David Falzani has spent decades building and growing businesses, and now, as a  Professor of Practice, helping others to do the same. And throughout that time he's watched entrepreneurs grapple with one constant, intractable, mysterious issue: pricing. 

It's not just about numbers. (In fact it's not really about numbers at all.) The price we put on something, the price we're prepared to pay for anything, is wrapped up in emotion and our deepest most irrational cognitive processes. Understanding that and getting your pricing right is all too often the difference between thriving and failing as a business, which is why David wrote his Business Book Award winner, 'Double Your Price'. 

If better pricing leads to better business, David is equally clear that smarter writing leads to more satisfied readers. (Or at the very least, fewer rewrites.) And he has some good tips to help you with that, too.

'The writing is joyful, more or less. It's painful, but it's also joyful. The marketing of it is much harder.'

Dr Lucy Ryan's book Revolting Women touched a nerve worldwide: many women can relate all too well to the perfect storm of challenges facing midlife women at work, and everyone has an opinion on it.

Which took a bit of getting used to. In this week's conversation, part of my series talking to this year's Business Book Awards winners, Lucy talks frankly about the learning curve when a doctoral research project becomes an award-winning, conversation-sparking business book, and how she learned to love (or at least manage) the work of promoting it.

From being squeezed down to seconds in her first radio interview to talking sex, drugs and rock and roll with Mariella Frostrup, her experience and hard-won lessons are pure gold to anyone setting out to write - and promote - a business book that makes an impact.