Charlene Li and Katia Walsh’s Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, just published this week, is a fascinating case study in how authors can use AI to create better books. While Charlene and Katia are more sophisticated with AI than the average author, they didn’t use AI to write prose. They used it…
Today is the publication date for Charlene Li and Katia Walsh’s Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success. These authors, both old friends of mine, have solved the unsolvable problem: how can you write a book on corporate strategy for AI, a transformational technology, when it’s changing so fast? This is not an AI…
The publisher Hachette cancelled its planned US publication of Mia Ballard’s previously self-published horror novel Shy Girl because it said parts of it were apparently written with AI. Ballard denies it. This has resulted in the usual round of finger pointing between authors, editors, and publishers. For an intelligent perspective on the whole affair, read…
Perfectionist tendencies are often the writer’s biggest obstacle. In the last few days I’ve met a memoirist who was stuck polishing her first chapter over and over and a thought leadership author who kept backing up and revising his primary model idea based on feedback from whomever he spoke with last. These writers seem intent…
I give away a lot. Free expert advice. At Forrester, we charged for content and advice. I found that constraining. I’d rather just give it away and help people. You might think that if you give things away, you lose control over them. Certainly, I can’t stop people from stealing what I give away. But…
There is no definitive book on developmental editing for prescriptive nonfiction — and certainly no book on what editing should look like in the age of AI. So I think I ought to write one. Where I start from on this is similar to where I started when I conceived Writing Without Bullshit. That is,…
Authors often have more than one possibility in mind for their next nonfiction book. Books require so much effort and mindspace that it’s rarely possible to work on more than one at a time. But how to choose? In the rest of this post I’ll show you a logical, analytical way to make the choice….
People think developmental editing is about improving words. It’s not. It’s about feelings. I’m sure that sounds like it makes no sense. But it’s actually the most important thing an editor does, and no machine can do it. How a developmental editor works I start my developmental edit on your manuscript by reading it. As…
Stuff changes when you’re not looking. If you are collaborating on a book, sometimes it’s necessary to take a month or more off. People take vacations. They have life events that demand their time. They change jobs. They have realizations about who they are and what they want to do. People who collaborate — coauthors;…