Thesis: people remember and believe stories. You want people to remember and believe what you have to say. So, before you do anything else, collect stories. Stories that are relevant for what you want to be known as an expert on (research stories, marketing stories, management stories, legal stories, science stories, medical stories, political stories,…
A friend became discouraged and frustrated by feedback on his manuscript. And let’s admit it: accepting criticism is hard. Managing feedback is a common problem. How can you get helpful feedback without taking it personally? The key, as with everything else in writing, is to prepare by choosing carefully who you ask for help and…
Vermont State University is a new institution formed from merging several underperforming state colleges in Vermont. It needs to save money. So its administration has proposed to get rid of eight librarians and most of its (physical) books. Contents of the books would still be available digitally. Popular trade books would shift to a community…
How do you punctuate what you write? I like rhetorical questions, think we use way too many em-dashes, and disdain exclamation points. But how well do I follow my own rules? One way to analyze punctuation habits is with “just the punctuation,” a fascinating tool that allows you enter any collection of text and X-ray…
If you’re going to wade into controversial public discourse, you’d better be prepared for the controversy. Otherwise, you could end up like Bethany Mandel, the author who humiliated herself on video, then made things worse by writing a vacuous essay about how bad it felt. Bethany Mandel is the coauthor of Stolen Youth: How Radicals…
Once a book goes into the page layout stage, graphics cause way more problems than any other element. It’s like a horror story. Here’s an incomplete list of the things that can go wrong — and I’ve seen all of these happen: How to avoid these problems You could choose not to do graphics at…
Indexes are still essential for nonfiction books, especially those with content that readers want to reference over and over again. People still read more in print than in ebooks or audio. As an author, you may not realize that you can make an excellent index yourself, especially if your book is well organized. And you…
What’s hiding in your Microsoft Word manuscript file? It may look fine — but then, when you submit it to the publisher, the results are poor. If you’re used to using Word to create finished-looking documents, you need to adjust your perspective. You’re now using Word to tell the publisher’s page designers and page layout…
What does it mean to read a book? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. It used to be, you sat down with a book and you read it, one page after another. Now you can experience a book through your earbuds while walking in the woods or sitting on a bus, on look…