As you structure your book, deductive logic is leading you astray — especially if you are an academic. State big conclusions first, if you want readers to keep reading. The logical, and wrong, way to structure a nonfiction book Here is the logical way to structure a book: Very nice. Very easy to follow. Very…
Think about a book that comes to mind. It might be a book you’ve received as a gift, a book you bought long ago, a book you stumbled upon in your bookcase. How does the book make you feel? Excited, as if a whole new world has been revealed? Intrigued by new ideas? Relieved that…
One of the most creative things I do is to help authors select titles and subtitles for their books. While doing a book titling brainstorm yesterday, I asked the AI writing tool ChatGPT to come up with suggestions; it did a creditable job and generated some subtitle text we may end up using. But is…
Why should authors put in the work to create a better book? The goal of a business book is to help the reader to succeed. Everything about it should support that goal. That means maximizing the value of the reader experience. Let’s call it RX, by analogy with CX (customer experience) and UX (user experience)….
When it comes to hiring a writer to write a book that you don’t have the time or skill to write yourself, how hard could that writing job actually be? The writer doesn’t even have to come up with anything original, since it’s somebody else’s content. Why should that be expensive? Well, consider a few…
I’ve made a hell of a lot of mistakes while working on 42 nonfiction books. I learned from them. And although my clients may not realize it, that is why they pay to me work with them. I show them how to do it right, and how not to do it wrong, based on all…
Here’s how to make progress when writing comes easily — and also when it feels like a struggle. I need to start with this assumption: you know where the chapter you are working on fits into the book you are writing, and what its purpose is. You know what question the chapter is trying to…
I love audiobooks. Here are a few thoughts about consuming them, and creating them. Audio occupies the mind when the body is doing something else I don’t listen to music much. (Yeah, I know, that makes me a psycho.) I’ve listened to business books, light nonfiction, heavy analytical nonfiction, and fiction books. I’m listening to…
Even if you hire a ghostwriter to write a book for you, you’ll still need to put in plenty of time on the book. You can outsource the writing, but it’s still a collaboration. And your involvement, more than anything else, determines the speed of the project. I have ghostwritten two books. The cost was…