If you are creating a draft of a book chapter, essay, blog post, or other content that others must review, it’s tempting to just assemble something quickly and fling it out there. After all, people are just going to criticize it anyway. Alternatively, you may be tempted to make your draft as complete and polished…
Writing is easy. Planning is hard. Research is time-consuming. Ideation comes from experience. Those four thoughts, taken together, are the fundamental theorem of nonfiction writing. Imagine a book chapter. (It’s not very different if it’s an article or a blog post — the same thing applies.) Ideation can often happen quickly. One moment you don’t…
Whether you’re writing in a corporate setting or as a freelancer, you’re likely to face this common issue: multiple “client” individuals that you must satisfy before the project is complete. How can a writer serve more than one master? In my experience, this is both extremely common and very tricky. In the business writer survey…
If you’ve considered writing a book, you have a choice to make. You can get to work on the book, or you can put it off — perhaps forever. Writing a book will potentially establish you as a leading thinker in your space, and get your ideas out in the space of public discussion where…
There are three types of audiences to which you can pitch your book. You could aim for a big, well-established audience. Maybe your book is for marketers, managers, coders, or people who lack confidence. The good news is, you could potentially sell millions of copies. The problem, of course, is that hundreds of other books…
Build a Better Business Book has 33 reviews on Amazon. Of these, 32 are five stars, and one is one-star. This really pisses me off. And it’s not because I hate criticism. It’s because the bad review didn’t teach me anything. Hate a product? You can do better than this. If you truly think a…
Newsletter Week 14: The problem with rampant technology; AI “assists” in the creation of journal articles; authors join musicians as Spotify serfs; plus three people to follow and three books to read. Marc Andreessen says “trust technology.” Here’s why that’s dangerous Mark Andreessen of the venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” I have to…
I learned early in my career as an analyst that if you can name an idea or a trend, you can own it. My employer Forrester made huge strides after one of its analysts, John McCarthy, coined the term “client-server computing.” And it’s also where John Kindervag invented the Zero Trust security model. This can…
In 15 years of working with authors, I’ve learned this about titles and subtitles: This means they need two different types of ideation processes. Titles are a bolt from the blue A title should be catchy, clever, and unique. You can’t “get close” to a title. It’s either right, or you need something different. As…