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…
Why is writing a nonfiction book so hard? Because it’s unlike anything else you do — or write — in the rest of your work. There are ways to mitigate all of these weirdnesses. And if you write more than one book, you can begin to get used to them. This is why there are…
After a while, experienced ghostwriters and editors get a sense of which clients are going to be a problem. But it goes both ways: if you hire folks like us, you should also be aware of problems to watch out for in your editorial partners. Red flags for ghostwriters, editors, or book coaches evaluating clients…
Agile is a popular philosophy for application development. It focuses on iterative development, customer focus, collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement. It’s also a horrible way to write a book. The positives of Agile don’t apply to books Agile is appropriate where a world where the needs of the customers and the available technical improvements are…