A social media poster recently asked what part of writing a book their followers hated — ideation, drafting, editing, rewriting, and so on. I think I was the only one who responded “I love all of it.” And I do. Here’s what I love about all the phases of writing a nonfiction book. This could…
Working with AI on your book will enable you to polish your prose to a high sheen (just like all the other similar books). It will keep your work nice and neat and free from grammatical (if not factual) errors. It might even give you a new idea or two (new to you, that is…
This is a followup on Tuesday’s post about a likely author scam called Hunt Down We Read. To be as fair as possible, I invited the person offering me this incredible community review service to respond publicly to the scammy elements I’d posted about, and I included a link to the blog post. They replied…
Newsletter 166. Buyers see books from the top down, so that’s how you should build them. Plus, the end of MIT Sloan Management Review, Google makes eBooks queryable, three people to follow, three books to read, and one writer survey to take. Authors must understand the view from atop the pyramid How does someone choose…
Authors get AI-generated highly targeted pitches all the time. They’re almost always a scam. But they’re getting better. As an exercise, examine this email (it says it’s not a pitch) I received last week. It’s regarding a book I ghostwrote in 2018, called Marketing to the Entitled Consumer. The authors (my clients) were Nick Worth…
To understand the moral issue at the center of today’s post, you must first understand who Milo Yiannopoulos is. Yiannopoulos is a highly visible Donald Trump supporter and far-right commentator and agitator. That hardly narrows it down; he shares those qualities with hundreds of others. He wrote for the alt-right outlet Breitbart News from 2014…
This is a little experiment. I’m asking you to share something. Write a post on your favorite social platform — LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, Substack, X, your blog, whatever. Include this text (or your own version of it): Has AI changed how you write . . . or what you think of what you read? Take…
We lost Tim Curry this week. He died at age 80. Tim Curry knew exactly what he was — a showman. He wasn’t going to win you over with the subtlety of his acting. He was going to suck you in with a knowing smile and a plummy delivery. He wasn’t a character actor —…
Newsletter 165. Return of the biggest survey of writers’ AI attitudes, including a chance to participate. Plus, the courage to stop a bully, the breadth of professional networks, three people to follow and three books to read. Writers, it’s time tell us how you feel about AI AI-powered large language models have made the biggest…