If you hijacked the names and content of experts to boost your own product and then realized that perhaps you’d made a mistake, how would you apologize? Here’s what Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly parent company Superhuman, posted on LinkedIn, once he realized that his product impersonating experts without their permission was a mistake: Back…
I give away a lot. Free expert advice. At Forrester, we charged for content and advice. I found that constraining. I’d rather just give it away and help people. You might think that if you give things away, you lose control over them. Certainly, I can’t stop people from stealing what I give away. But…
Grammarly has a fascinating new feature. It will make editorial suggestions in the persona of famous individuals. Regrettably, they didn’t get any of these individuals’ permission to hijack their names and slap them onto editorial suggestions. The result has been a huge backlash including legal action. The best writeup that reveals the absurdity of this…
Newsletter 142. Think paying to escape ever-shittier monopolies is the way out? You might not like where that ends up. Plus, women subverting the publishing establishment; escaping the author spending spiral, three people to follow, three books to read, and one way to jumpstart your writing career. You can’t pay to escape enshittification forever Everything…
Given the churn that’s going on now in technical fields, there are likely millions of formerly employed people who have been laid off and are asking, “Should I become a consultant?” This also applies to people who’ve retired or left a long-term job and aren’t quite ready to hang it up completely. If you’ve got…
It’s usually free to talk to me. My tagline is “I help nonfiction authors succeed.” And I mean it. If you’re a nonfiction author, I’m nearly always ready to spend half an hour on Zoom to talk about the endlessly confusing alternatives for writing, positioning, and publishing a book. I recently got an invitation to…
One summer about 13 years ago, I decided to test myself. My family was scheduled to drop off my youngest offspring at Wildwood, a nature camp run by Massachusetts Audubon, located in Rindge, New Hampshire. Getting there from my home in the Boston suburb of Arlington, Massachusetts would mean a beautiful 65-mile drive through hills,…
I’m convinced that somewhere, some executive at the health insurance company Humana is on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the only possible explanation for the absurd behavior of this company, as I’m about to describe. For reasons far too tedious to go into, I changed the pharmaceutical portion of my insurance to Humana this year, starting February…
Newsletter 141. Is bombing Iran strategic, disruptive, or just chaotic? Plus, the emptiness of AI-generated mathematics, the Authors Guild labels human-created books, three people to follow, three books to read, and the coach that could get you back at the keyboard. Is the Iran war a strategic disruption? When you and your organization make a…