If you’re creating a nonfiction book collaboratively, a good collaboration design will save you endless hours of work. An unwise collaboration design is not only wasteful, but will generate a poor result. Today, I look at the actual costs and benefits of good or poor collaboration design. What is collaboration design and why does it…
A nonfiction book proposal that attracts traditional publishers shows three things: Authors are very focused on the first two. Publishers are very focused on the last. Traditional publishers are very tough to convince these days. Advances are down. Expectations are up. If you’re an author, hybrid publishing is a faster and easier option, although it’s…
Newsletter 97: Two decades of persistent value from my long analyst gig. Plus, in defense of a dash, hallucinatory “formatting issues,” three people to follow and three books to read. How 20 years at Forrester changed my life I spent 20 years at one company: Forrester. It’s been 10 years since I left. When I…
If you’re a professional writer — say, a writer writing for an editor, or a ghostwriter writing for a client — you need to understand the psychology of book drafts. You may look at your drafts one way, while your editor or client sees them another. You’ll have less angst in your life if you…
All ghostwriters are good writers. That’s what clients imagine they are paying for. The challenge, of course, is that good writers — even great writers — are as common as robins in the spring. What gets ghostwriters work, of course, is referrals. And what gets referrals are the skills they have other than writing. These…
Great ideas and great writing make books succeed, even if the title is not perfect. While it pays to put effort into the perfect title, you’re almost certainly overthinking it. Truths: Some great books with the wrong title MIT Professor Clayton Christensen was brilliant. He invented the concept of business disruption. If you know Christensen,…
What would you think of an author who wrote like this: Build a Better Business Book is the first accessible & comprehensive guide for authors who want to create impact. Learn how to refine your idea, choose a publishing model, & research, write, publish, & promote a book that matters. Includes advice on how to…
I’ve been interviewing authors about how they use AI. One result surprised me. First, know that the authors I spoke with take pride in their writing and find it enjoyable. Almost none of them use AI to write things. One author actually went to the trouble of telling her AI, “Do not answer any of…
Unless you carefully plan your rewrites, you risk wasting lots of effort — and worse, wasting your ability to bring a fresh and creative mind to all parts of your nonfiction book project. The naive approach to the book is to write all the chapters in order. This is easy to conceive, but it creates…