Donald Trump ordered the Secretary of the Treasury to stop minting pennies. Pennies are stupid. They cost 3.69 cents each to produce and distribute. Producing 3 billion worthless pennies cost the government $85 million last year. The only problem with this is that Congress, not the President, authorizes minting of coins, so you can add…
Why is it so taxing, and why does it take so long, to write a nonfiction book? Here’s one way to think about it. A typical book might be 50,000 words long. You must decide which words to use — and those are not easy choices. That’s 50,000 decisions right there. Of course, not everything…
Here is my philosophy on what I share in this space. I am a curious, thinking, analytical person. My background as a startup executive and analyst has given me skills I can use to think about things that matter in business. My experience and as author and editor has taught me insights about writing and…
Newsletter 81. Can you really win by threatening your negotiating partners? Plus, Simon & Schuster ditches blurbs, Ray Dalio dribbles out insights, three books to read and three people to follow. The price of brinksmanship Our president Donald Trump is adept at brinksmanship. Look at his actions over time and you can see a pattern:…
Authors and their publishers are partners. But partners need clarity regarding their rights in a relationship. As an author working with a publisher, you have the right to review and approve: If your publishing contract does not include these elements, ask that they be included. Even if your signed publishing agreement does not include these…
Publishers are under profit pressure. Like many such businesses, they have responded by merging, eliminating redundancies, automating processes, and offshoring to save labor costs. Authors are creative. Most have no experience in publishing processes; even those who’ve written a book or two will be like be encountering some elements of the process for the first…
What’s the difference between fair use and piracy? Fair use is when I use your content. Piracy is when you use my content. That sounds like a joke. It’s not. It’s how people behave. And if the entity alleging piracy is a large company, it’s a business model. I touched on this Wednesday. But the…
After a year of study and more than 10,000 comments, the US Copyright Office issued its second report on AI and copyright. This report attempts to address the question of when works created with AI tools can be copyrighted. (A third report, to be released later, will address the contentious issue of the legality of…
Newsletter 79: American tech pirates want protection from Chinese tech pirates, patent examiner crisis, data infrastructure erosion, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Nobody whines louder than a disrupted disruptor Chinese AI model Deepseek has thundered onto the scene, competing effectively with existing players like OpenAI and Meta while using far…