I work on book projects for hire. Nonfiction authors pay me to help with ideas, get coaching, edit their books, or ghostwrite their books. There are three approaches people take when reaching out to me. The three approaches Imagine my inbox, which is stuffed with all sorts of publishing news, people who want me to…
Newsletter 146. Writing trains minds, while outsourcing it to AI leaves you stupefied. Plus AI as writing collaborator, editors who upload your manuscript to AI, three people to follow, three books to read, and how you can establish that you’re not just data. Writing is thinking. AI can’t do that for you. “I didn’t really…
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…
Newsletter 144. Why writers must embrace “less is more,” and what to do about it. Plus, how Shy Girl was outed as AI-generated, why AI illiterates will be unemployable, three people to follow and three books to read. Shorter I don’t know what’s wrong with what you wrote. But I know how to fix it….
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…
Given the churn that’s going on now in technical fields, there are likely millions of formerly employed people who have been laid off and are asking, “Should I become a consultant?” This also applies to people who’ve retired or left a long-term job and aren’t quite ready to hang it up completely. If you’ve got…
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;…
You write things. People critique them. Sometimes lots of people. As a writer, you then need to respond to those edits and create another draft. The challenge is to make sure that the text becomes better after you edit it. This is way harder than it sounds. There are basically five levels of response to…
Here’s what I learned about communicating knowledge from my work as an analyst . Your job as an analyst looks like this: Let’s talk about the last part. How to communicate insights A leader who needs to make a decision asks your opinion. (In the analyst world, this is called an “inquiry.”) Here’s what you…