Newsletter 145. Why, even in your sixties, standing still means going backwards. Plus, journalists draw the line on AI, why your family doesn’t love your memoir, three people to follow, three books to read, and one place to draw your own line against AI encroachment. Conserve or create? In the heart of our careers, we…
People: AI doesn’t. That’s why there will always be room for people, and why human writing, even when flawed, is often better.
Each of us must now daily deal with organizational stupidity. It might be stupid policies at your job, stupid rules of your homeowners association, stupid government and tax policies, or the stupid way the health care system works. But the result is the same: a set of rules set up ostensibly for good and reasonable…
Think for a minute about the creative work you do. Which of these categories best describes your creative work? With these categories in mind, let’s consider two questions: are you the author of your work, and are you growing and learning? Are you the author of your work? Who deserves the byline on what you…
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…
It’s usually free to talk to me. My tagline is “I help nonfiction authors succeed.” And I mean it. If you’re a nonfiction author, I’m nearly always ready to spend half an hour on Zoom to talk about the endlessly confusing alternatives for writing, positioning, and publishing a book. I recently got an invitation to…
One summer about 13 years ago, I decided to test myself. My family was scheduled to drop off my youngest offspring at Wildwood, a nature camp run by Massachusetts Audubon, located in Rindge, New Hampshire. Getting there from my home in the Boston suburb of Arlington, Massachusetts would mean a beautiful 65-mile drive through hills,…
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…
We live in a world where I tend to view anyone who approaches me with compliments skeptically. All too often, what follows “I think you were great” is some sort of spammy appeal to get something from me or get me to buy something. It’s a horrifying world that we live in where even something…