What a Book Does for a Price You Want to Raise
Price is a claim about value and you have no evidence a stranger can check. Everything supporting your number lives inside the experience of people who already worked with you.
Category: Writing (Page 10)
GhostwritingWhat Happens When You Disagree With a Chapter
A draft arrives and something is structurally wrong with it. That moment decides more about the project than anything before it.
GhostwritingWhy Your Book Should Exclude People
A book that speaks to everybody in your field reaches nobody in it. Excluding people is not a cost of writing a good book. It is the mechanism.
GhostwritingWhat Happens in a Room When Somebody Has Read You First
The usual first meeting spends its opening stretch on positioning that both parties know is throat-clearing. Somebody who read your book skips it and opens with the specific version of their problem.
GhostwritingWhat You Get From a Book Nobody Buys
A book of mine sold poorly and has been quietly useful for years. Sales is the number everybody reaches for and it is close to irrelevant for most professionals.
GhostwritingWhat Your Book Has to Survive After You Send It
A book has to survive your job title changing, a sentence travelling without its paragraph, a competitor publishing something similar, and being handed to the wrong reader.
GhostwritingThe Consultant Who Wanted a Business Card
A consultant asked me for a book he could hand people. Not an argument, a credential. He got it, and nobody read it, and it did nothing for him.
GhostwritingThe Parts of Writing a Book Nobody Warns You About
You will hate one chapter for no good reason. Somebody else will know your career better than you do. The hardest week is the one after the manuscript is finished.
ObservancesSenior Citizens Day: Nobody Thinks Their Life Is Interesting
I have interviewed a great many people past retirement for books. Almost all of them apologized for not being interesting enough. They were wrong every single time.
ObservancesAlien Abduction Day: Why Invented Holidays Live or Die
There is no founding body and no origin story, which describes most of the modern calendar. The interesting question is why a handful survive and the rest evaporate.
ObservancesGroundhog Day: When a Story Overwrote a Tradition
The forecast is worthless and the tradition is a century old. Then a film came out and the phrase stopped meaning the custom entirely, which almost never happens.
ObservancesPresidents Day: The Name Nobody Made Official
Federal law still calls the third Monday of February Washington's Birthday. The popular name spread anyway, and turned a day about a person into a day about an office.