One year ago, things were rough. I was in grief over the death of my father, I had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and my wife was due for shoulder surgery. No matter what age you are or what stage of life you’re in, these are the moments where you ask yourself, “Can I…
Newsletter 19. How viewership evolves, media conforms, and finance destroys. Plus a survey finds AI all over publishing, an agent pokes the industry in the eye, an ugly electric truck, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Three painful lessons from David Zaslav’s Warner Odyssey I was fascinated to read Jonathan Mahler,…
The marketing thinker Scott Wilder recently posed this question on LinkedIn: “Would you write a business book today even though in a few years all information will be created and discoverable using AI?” What do you think? Will all information be discoverable using AI? You could have asked this question 15 years ago in the…
Take a close look at what has happened in the last few months and at OpenAI, in the last few days. The Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, and the entertainment industry companies were forced to yield to their demands. Because without writers or actors, there is no entertainment. Movie theaters, streaming services, and…
Writers often complain about the painful process of drafting substantial content, like reports, white papers, or book chapters. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your could be creating great content rapidly and enjoying every moment of it. You just need two things: Planning. And writing time. Writing in flow versus endlessly struggling, typing,…
I recently wrote about how to negotiate with your publisher. But the publisher-author dance is remarkably subtle, and if you don’t know the steps, you might inadvertently make the relationship awkward. The key for authors is to know when to go first . . . and when to expect the publisher to go first. The…
Why I love text more than other medium, how Amazon prices, a machine reads your book pitch, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and witty link. Why text is good and books are best There’s an explosion in content. Blogs, Substacks, Medium posts, Threads, Podcasts, vlogs, you name it. Which format is…
As I’ve written, the advantage that human writers have over AI is wit. Ergo, if you want to continue to make a career of writing, you must develop your wit. Is that even possible? Yes. I’ll explain. What is wit? Wit is the ability, not just to inform, but to delight readers with your writing….
I was fascinated to read how silliness and puns energized the people of Somerville, Massachusetts to solve a common problem — and it made me wonder about whether home-grown humor could to save the world from everything else that threatens it. A grate idea in Somerville Here’s Boston Globe writer Steve Annear on how Somerville…