Creative book cover for "The Next Step: Guiding you from idea to startup"

The Next Step: Guiding you from idea to startup

This is a book to people create companies around their ideas.

There are many other books in this genre, but the most popular tend to focus on one small area of expertise required to create a new company, rather than the whole process from idea to company.

In addition, nearly all business books center around a large amount of writing, seemingly hoping that some of it is relevant to the reader. This book instead asks a series of questions, plus asks the reader to make a few key decisions. These answers then help the reader actually fulfill his/her goal of starting a company.

A well-designed book cover, for a standard 6"x9" book.

I'm looking for a "stylish" design that looks like a business-oriented book, not a work of fiction. Attached are three covers of three other business books which I like for both content and cover: The Lean Startup, Purple Cow, and Business Model Generation.

The "Idea to Startup" image is a high-level flow chart of the process outlined in the book. I include it to help explain the contents of the book, and to provide some potential, but not required, inspiration for the design. Note that the format of the diagram is from Microsoft Word, so if you use any part of this diagram, please DO NOT incorporate the style.

I've also attached my profile head-shot and the same shot in two other sizes. Please incorporate the picture on the back as you see best. My use of this can be seen on http://about.me/luni.

The expected readers are inventors, researchers, and others who lack business experience or business training, but who none-the-less have a desire to start a business. This crowd is broad, but tends to be ages 20-35.