How does an award-winning, globetrotting journalist think about weaving the wealth of material he amasses—enough to fill many books—into a simple story line? He likens his approach to the organization of a John Coltrane jazz piece. Award-winning South African journalist Beauregard Tromp spoke at a writers’ conference in Boston a couple of weeks ago. Tromp, [...]
Why is writing so tough? Because….“All good writing is a contest with the inexpressible.” A contest? Writers compete with themselves to say things that, at some point, they can’t find words to say at all. And eventually they hit the inner walls of their brains. The quote comes from Richard Todd, co-author with Pulitzer Prize-winner [...]
If you surf for advice on book writing, you’ll find consultants who promise to teach you how to write a nonfiction book in a month, or even a weekend. I don’t have any idea how one would write 50,000 publishable words in a weekend or a month. Writing a book takes a long time, and [...]
Have you ever enjoyed a good, trenchant quote by a famous statesman—only to find the quote was made up? The wisdom came from a reporter or politician or speechmaker who embellished the original? Every such instance is a good reminder to check facts with original sources before you repeat them in a book. In last [...]
Why do people enjoy a book and recommend it to friends? One motivation is that they find it makes them better. It improves their lives. It makes them want to make the world better. Film director Jon Turteltaub makes this point about films. In an interview, he once said, “A lot of people seeing my [...]
Steven Piersanti, president of Berret-Koehler Publishers (John Wiley & Sons), updated his missive, “The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing,” this past spring. Piersanti, as usual, made no bones about the challenge of writing and publishing a successful book. Authors would do well to read his update. What I find most timely, other than the [...]
A lot of people emphasize out-of-the-box thinking as a means to creating a great book (or a great anything). In my experience, though, the creative process alternates between out-of-the-box and in-the-box thinking. We go out of the box to explore new thoughts. We go inside to focus them and make them relevant for our audience. [...]
I was recently looking for a way to describe the two ways most authors make an argument persuasive: engaging readers’ intellect and engaging their emotion. It turns out that Aristotle argued there were three ways to persuade: ethos, pathos, and logos. The threesome makes a handy package to remind each of us not to overlook [...]
Writing in a Harvard Business Review blog, Robyn Bolton asks a good question about selling a product into a new market. Would you prefer to get 1% of a huge, established market or 100% of a new one? Translate that question for authors: Would you prefer a little bit of a million-person readership or all [...]
If you troll the web these days, you will find that lots of people offer ghostwriting services—help for authors in structuring, writing, and editing their books. That’s one of my roles, and I enjoy talking with prospective authors about their book plans. Who doesn’t like to get in on the ground floor of a project [...]
