The thing I noticed more than anything else in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks was the unity. For as long as I’d been alive, my country had been full of factions arguing with each other. After 9-11, there was a shared sense of hurt and anger. We had felt invulnerable; we weren’t. But we…
One principle is at the center of all debates about AI use: That AI makes workers more productive AI makes workers more productive. But what does productive mean? Based on my experience working with many people who’ve adopted AI in their work — as well as the results of last year’s AI and the Writing…
Newsletter 167. Now that we have AI, is disorganization no longer a disability? Plus, how to write case studies, a book-of-the-month club manifesto, three people to follow and three books to read. File under “whatever” . . . How organized are you? At one end of the spectrum are the obsessive organizers. Every file and…
I get emails and LinkedIn messages from random people all the time. They often purport to want to invest in my (one-person) business or offer me some kind of paid service for authors. Yeah, right. Those are pretty easy to see through. But sometimes they appear to want to hire me as an author coach,…
A social media poster recently asked what part of writing a book their followers hated — ideation, drafting, editing, rewriting, and so on. I think I was the only one who responded “I love all of it.” And I do. Here’s what I love about all the phases of writing a nonfiction book. This could…
Working with AI on your book will enable you to polish your prose to a high sheen (just like all the other similar books). It will keep your work nice and neat and free from grammatical (if not factual) errors. It might even give you a new idea or two (new to you, that is…
This is a followup on Tuesday’s post about a likely author scam called Hunt Down We Read. To be as fair as possible, I invited the person offering me this incredible community review service to respond publicly to the scammy elements I’d posted about, and I included a link to the blog post. They replied…
Newsletter 166. Buyers see books from the top down, so that’s how you should build them. Plus, the end of MIT Sloan Management Review, Google makes eBooks queryable, three people to follow, three books to read, and one writer survey to take. Authors must understand the view from atop the pyramid How does someone choose…
Authors get AI-generated highly targeted pitches all the time. They’re almost always a scam. But they’re getting better. As an exercise, examine this email (it says it’s not a pitch) I received last week. It’s regarding a book I ghostwrote in 2018, called Marketing to the Entitled Consumer. The authors (my clients) were Nick Worth…