Short answer: no, I won’t. I won’t introduce you to my publisher either. Look, I can understand your position. You want to write a nonfiction book. To get the book published, it has to get in front of publishers. The best way to get in front of publishers is with a book agent. And you…
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s book The Tyranny of Big Tech is a diatribe against large tech platforms like Facebook and Google. It’s a remarkably radical, even quasi-Marxist critique for a Republican — one that proposes a series of regulations that would endear him to the most liberal of Democrats. I have problem with both Hawley’s…
I see bad writing all the time. But it takes a prodigious talent to violate every writing principle in a single paragraph at the start of a serious nonfiction book. A book has one chance to grab you by the throat on Page One. If Page One is boring, you can assume the whole book…
If you’re writing a memoir, some parts of your life were probably exciting. Other parts, maybe, not so much. How can you craft all of that into a package worth reading? The problem is that no one’s life is a Hollywood epic. Stuff happens; we do stuff. Some of it is fun. Some of it…
Nonfiction books should start with a bang. Introductions are boring. Ergo, don’t start with an introduction. Despite the logic of this, many business and nonfiction writers start their books with an introduction. They either think it’s required, or fall victim to the fallacy that, having created a book, they need to somehow explain it. Why…
It’s a publishing truism that your book must sell 10,000 copies to be successful. It’s wrong. And it’s also very hard. So let’s take a look at whether you need to sell 10,000 copies, and what it would take to do that. Can you succeed without selling 10,000 copies? The analysis I’m going to share…
Simon & Schuster will not distribute a book by Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, one of the policemen who shot Breonna Taylor. But crucially, this is not a publisher cancelling a book — Simon & Schuster is the book’s distributor. Let’s take a look at all the choke points in publishing and how their reaction to offensive…
I often ask writers I’m coaching how many words will be in the piece they are planning to write. They frequently don’t know. They say things like “It will be about three pages long.” You should get used to thinking in word counts rather than page counts. Why? Because word counts are the best measurement…
People bought over $2 billion worth of audiobooks in 2019, and the market continues to expand. If you’ve written a nonfiction book, it should be available in an audiobook format. But who should narrate it — you, or a voice actor? If you have an inclination to narrate your own book in audiobook format, I…