Newsletter 108. Forget driving traffic — drive thinking instead. Plus disturbing AI-generated children’s books, Claude admits it’s a ripoff, three people to follow and three books to read. Ideas > algorithms Did anyone read what you wrote last week? The answer depends on algorithms. Algorithms determined whether it was visible in their email or social…
As your editing and ghostwriting career grows, you may find yourself working with senior executives, CEOs, celebrities, or other rich and powerful people. This can be intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be, if you keep a few principles in mind. The key thing to remember is that although this is an asymmetric relationship, it’s…
Newsletter 107: How young adults got a raw deal, preparing for the writing trek, sign onto the Anthropic lawsuit, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and another chance to make your voice heard. Spare a thought for Generation Z I’m a Baby Boomer. Very few of my followers are in Gen Z….
Authors know things that other thinkers, no matter how accomplished, don’t. You can tell by the knowing looks when we get together. To a certain extent this is like sex: it’s hard to explain to virgins what’s different. Even so, I’ll try. What authors know People with ideas think they know all about those ideas….
There are a lot of people, mostly in Silicon Valley, who knew Shel Israel better than I did. But Shel made a positive impression on me and so many others, so I wanted to pay tribute as best I could, now that he’s gone. In 2006, Shel and Robert Scoble published Naked Conversations: How Blogs…
Newsletter 106: Writing incurs pain, but it’s up to you which pain to suffer and when. Plus, a new survey on AI and the Writing Profession, Bookshop.org surges, three people to follow, and three books to read. Writing? Choose your pain. Writing, like anything else that requires effort and growth, involves pain. The good news…
Starting today, you can participate in the “AI and the Writing Profession” survey. This survey is a joint project of Gotham Ghostwriters and Bernoff.com. Dan Gerstein, the CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, proposed this project to me and I enthusiastically agreed to become his partner in it. The web is filled with all manner of opinions…
Short answer: no. If you have a series of blog posts, podcasts, SubStacks, columns, or videos, turning them into a book seems like an obvious idea. After all, you have all this content teed up and ready. Why not just pour it into a book format and publish it? Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Mark…
Newsletter 105. Trump’s ultimate goal is the destruction of reality, or at least how we measure it. Plus, will AI doom consultancies; Johns Hopkins licenses books for a pittance, three people to follow, and three books to read. The war on reality We’ve heard past presidents declare war on concepts: the war on cancer, the…