Newsletter 165. Return of the biggest survey of writers’ AI attitudes, including a chance to participate. Plus, the courage to stop a bully, the breadth of professional networks, three people to follow and three books to read. Writers, it’s time tell us how you feel about AI AI-powered large language models have made the biggest…
A nonfiction book is not a conversation. No matter how conversational you feel, it’s written in the form of a lecture: “I know these things, and I’m sharing them with you.” True, you can imagine a book as a conversation for planning purposes. I’ve recommended that you imagine the questions that your reader is asking…
These are all things I now know a fair bit about: I’ve worked intensely on 80 books as an author, editor, or book coach. That’s where I learned all this stuff. What these topics have in common These topics are all about ideas. They’re all nonfiction. But other than that, they’re all over the map….
There are five ways to price big jobs like a ghostwriting or editing job. These are their pros and cons. The challenge of pricing by milestones Most of the ghostwriters I know price by milestones. It attracts clients and maximizes the trust between the client and the writer, because the client sees and pay for…
Newsletter 164. Why do people pay to have their work insulted? Plus, Google pays for Spirit Airlines’ data, the White House’s gender confusion, three people to follow and three books to read. Please, sir, may I have another? A popular meme suggests: “Describe your job badly.” With that in mind, here’s what I do for…
Recently, two authors that I’ve never met contacted me to ask if I was really soliciting business from them. Bless them, because they revealed a secret: somebody is going around pretending to be me. I’m lucky that these intended victims reached out to me to ask what was going on. (Authors tend to help each…
The economics of business book publishing are ill-suited to the needs of authors. It’s time for a new kind of publisher: the venture publisher. A venture publisher is part investor, part publisher, and part business partner. To understand how this new model would work, first consider the failings of current publishing models. How business authors…
Anthropic, the company that created the AI tool Claude, has announced it will include invisible watermarks in Claude-generated content, including text, graphics, and code. As a writer and editor, I’ll concentrate on what this means about AI-generated text content. These are some key features of Claude’s watermarking: Why this is great Tools like Pangram are…
Newsletter 163. Why the most successful people crack wise and act wisely. Plus, Berrett-Koehler’s hybrid imprint, Anthropic indelibly marks its content, three people to follow and three books to read. Silly serious One principle explains all of my success and the fact that I’m still working and happy past normal retirement age. I’m seriously silly….