There’s a simple trick I use with every author or prospective author I work with: I treat them like an author. My meeting invites always have titles like “Talk about your book.” My project plans include titles like “Stages in the development of your book.” I always refer to them as authors. Every first-time author…
The em-dash (—) is getting a lot bad press these days. Writers overuse it, and not coincidentally, so do AI language generators. An em-dash is a perfectly reasonable piece of punctuation, but if you’re going to use it, you might need a little more detail on when and how. So here’s a tutorial on the…
If your book stinks, I can’t make it great. But if your idea is awesome, maybe I can. I get hired as an editor by all sorts of people. They bring me a manuscript — or sometimes, just an idea and a chapter or two — and say “Help me.” I have all sorts of…
These are the rules for working with writers and editors in a way that demonstrates good manners. If you follow these rules, everything will be efficient and run smoothly. If you do not, professional writers and editors will curse you and your descendants. (Yes, I’m writing this today because I’m annoyed at some people.) The…
Newsletter 78: How to be nice to yourself while writing a book, un-weaponizing free speech; book sales creep upward, plus three people to follow and three books to read. When it comes to books, concentration matters from start to finish The best part of writing books, for most people, is the writing. When they’re writing,…
I, like every other Microsoft Word user, started a document on January 16 only to find a strange icon cluttering up my word processor screen. This is Microsoft Copilot, which exists to provide me with artificial intelligence help in writing documents. I’ve been a professional writer since 1982 and am making my current living as…
There is an elephant in the room today. There is no point in talking about anything else today, when all anyone can see is the elephant. Soon, people will start blaming nearly everything on the elephant, or alternatively, giving it credit for nearly everything. This is a mistake. A lot what happens next has been…
When the Soviet Union fell, a collection of individuals took control of privatized industries and began to accumulate massive wealth and political power. These individuals were called oligarchs, a term meaning a small group who together hold political power. Now liberal pundit Robert Reich is talking about American oligarchs. Do we really have powerful oligarchs…
I recently received this email (some words redacted): Hey Josh, I hope you’re doing well! About this time last year, we started to put together our very first [redacted] Summit, and we knew when 200 experts and speakers responded to our call to participate, we had something special. That said, it still blew our expectations…