Last week, an email landed in both my personal email inbox and and my professional email. It offered “PR Strategy & Media Campaign for The Age of Intent.” These days, we authors are all receiving floods of AI-generated spammy offers. But this one stood out from the pack for its cluelessness. Some key points: High-quality…
What’s the best way to promote a nonfiction book? It seems like every expert I talk to has a different take on this. I asked ChatGPT. The list it came up with is, frankly, a reasonably good survey of everything you, as an author, might consider, including 100 different tactics. Platform & audience building Content…
I’ve been intimately involved with five books by other authors in the last several years. I ghostwrote four and extensively edited and rewrote the fifth. All four of the ghostwritten books underperformed. I’m not just talking sales. I mean that they failed to accomplish their authors’ goals for generating business, increasing visibility, or boosting influence….
I help authors succeed. That’s my brand. Don’t abuse it. Look: I am generous with my time. It’s my instinct to help. If you’re a first-time author, you probably have lots of questions about books; I’m likely to spend 30-40 minutes on the phone with you. I’m also likely to give your recommendations for which…
Few people, when deciding to work on a business book, recognize what they are really creating. A book is not just an idea made real and and powerful. It’s not just a way to spread influence and generate business. It’s a database that you can mine to power much of your work moving forward. How…
You should make friends with authors who write in the same sphere as you, even if your approaches differ or your books compete. Why? Because readers of competing books are far more likely to want to read yours — and because together, you’ll be defining a perspective worth considering and publicizing. And, of course, because…
Election forecaster and statistics pundit Nate Silver has a new book out. It’s called On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything and it’s billed as an investigation of “the River,” the “community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape–and dominate–so much of modern life.” Like any author, Silver and his…
I hear it so often, it’s almost a cliché. “Wow, writing a book was way more work than I expected it to be.” I’ve almost given up on explaining why this is. Almost . . . but not quite. So if you want to know what unexpected work you really should have expected — and…
In her article “Everyone’s a sellout now,” Vox’s Rebecca Jennings laments the poor, sad situation of authors who’ve found that only by selling out and promoting themselves can they generate books sales. Some notable excerpts: The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle…