In the Wall Street Journal, Jacqui Shine just published a piece called “Want to Earn Six Figures as a Writer? Try Ghostwriting.” Before you writers all start rushing into the ghostwriting field with your hands out, I thought it might be instructive to describe what it actually takes to become a well-compensated ghostwriter. First, a…
Newsletter 73. A nuanced look at simplification, the Author’s Guild’s AI rights position; a mega-agency that might forget creativity, plus three people to follow, three books to read, two podcast interviews, and a partridge in a . . . no, enough of that already! It’s complicated We crave simplicity. Boiling things down to their essence…
A case study is a story. That tells you everything you need to know about how to research and write it. Specifically: do not interrupt case study stories with any other type of content. What you read here comes from experience researching, interviewing, writing, and publishing more than 100 case studies in business books, as…
Case studies will make your business book more credible and readable. But they don’t all have the same impact. After writing more than one hundred case studies in my own books and editing hundreds of others, I’ve developed this set of criteria you can use to evaluate your own case study list. More is better,…
Newsletter 73. Change you can believe in is change you can understand, merry Christmas to booksellers, how to stump ChatGPT, plus three people to follow and three books to read. How change feels There are two kinds of change: change in what you do, and change in who you are. Both create uncertainty. But the…
You are an expert on your topic and your ideas. I will never know as much about your topic as you do. I am expert on nonfiction books. You hired me because I know more about books than you do. This is the basis of our collaboration. It’s our greatest strength. It’s also our greatest…
One of my favorite charts from the Business Book ROI Study is this log-log plot of investment vs. revenue. Each dot represents the most recent book of a single published business author. The axes are logarithmic because the spending and revenues vary over several orders of magnitude. The red dotted line is the profitability line:…
Gotham Ghostwriters and the American Society of Journalists and Authors are soliciting entries for the second annual “Andy” awards. The Andys go to authors and ghostwriters who collaborated to create great books. To win one, both the author and the ghostwriter have to agree to submit the book. The categories are Business and Thought Leadership,…
The basics of publishing contracts are simple: the publisher agrees to pay you (the author) money up front (an advance) and royalties on book sales, and in exchange you give the publisher exclusive rights to print and sell copies of your book and keep part of the proceeds. But as the economics of publishing have…