Trying to figure out what you’re building? Figure out first how you’re going to sell it. Write that. Then you’ll know what to build. When Charlene Li and I sat down to plan our book, we needed to start somewhere. She had a lot of great ideas about social media, but we didn’t know which of those…
Now I know who’s responsible for all the packaged, processed food in the supermarket. It’s the Army. I’ve just read Anastacia Marx de Salcedo’s Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat, a new book published this week. I’ve known Anastacia a long time, but I had no idea she could write…
Today I launch #5BullshitThings, an industry-by-industry analysis of the whacked-out way the world works now. I’ll start with book publishing. When rapid change hits stodgy industries you get disruption. Disruption generates cognitive confusion and threatens power dynamics. That, in turn, generates hypocrisy, and incomprehensible behavior. In other words, bullshit. Let’s look at five bullshit things about…
If you’d like to publish (or self-publish) a book, you now have more options than ever. You also have a complex set of choices. I’ll walk you through them and finish with a flow-chart for the various alternatives, including Kickstarter. This post is for potential how-to and business book authors. If you’re writing fiction or history, you’ll have to…
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley is a spectacularly useful book about writing, organized into 74 bite-sized chunks. Ann and I look at the world through the same eyes, and we are fighting the same fight — to help you express yourself more clearly. Here’s my interview with her: Why a book on writing now? There are so…