Newsletter 75: Resolving to make better New Year’s resolutions, Melania’s stickiness, new agents and publishers, plus three people to follow and three books to read. High resolution Have you made a New Year’s Resolution? You will fail, you know. But if you want to fail successfully — and eventually succeed — here are some questions…
As I’ve explained here previously, there are two types of writers: planners and pantsers. Planners create detailed outlines and break the work down into planned chapters. Pantsers just keep writing to get their ideas out, and deal with the organization later. While I unequivocally believe that planning is better, I acknowledge that many writers can’t…
For those considering making a living writing, ghostwriting, and editing, I thought you might enjoy a peek at what my 2024 looked like. I won’t share dollar numbers, but the total revenue was north of $100K, with me working about half of my time on client activities. The last time I reviewed my business like…
I hope you are having a relaxing time and sharing experiences with family over this week. This is a great time to relax, recharge, and reconnect. But once you’re stuffed with holiday treats, you might enjoy turning your attention to your writing. This is a rare chance to concentrate exclusively on your own content, at…
Businesses are supposed to put the customer first. I don’t. I don’t even put the customer second. I put them third. I suppose my inspiration is the former slogan of the famed Boston-based restaurant Legal Sea Foods: “At Legal, the customer comes second.” Their point was: the quality of the fish came first. And everyone…
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,…