The Diagram Gallery

Behind the Book

• Why an uncomfortable account disappears at every scaleA family that finds a subject uncomfortable stops asking about it, and a man account goes unheard in his own house.In I Grew Up in California. I No Longer Live There.
• Why applying online works so badlyApplying online puts you in the pile, and the pile is the worst place to be.In I Decided in Thirty Seconds Whether Your Resume Was Worth Reading
• Why breaches start with somebody being helpfulA family donated an old computer to a charity, having deleted their files first and believing it was clean.In I Got Caught Hacking in 1981. The Professor Made Me Head of Security.
• Why Complications was the hardest targetOn the surface it does not fit: no spaceships, no bombs, no immortal admirals, and next to a galaxy that murders its sister or a nuclear war spanning the planet, a quiet drama about law interns looks like a different writer entirely.In Behind the Book: Complications
• Why decluttering advice never tells you when to stopEvery guide is built around getting going.In The Rose Parade Pins That Stopped Me Decluttering
• Why executives go along with a playbook they disagree withThe people describing these decisions were not villains, they were people who had built something they were proud of, explaining how they were pressured to take it apart, usually with some regret and usually...In The Same Private Equity Playbook, One Industry After Another
• Why knowing about preparedness does not make you preparedKnowledge lives in your head and emergencies happen to your hands.In The Fire Jumped the Road Behind Me. I Had Nothing in the Car.
• Why nobody recognises the ethical momentThe moment does not look like a decision.In Ethics Is the Voice That Says Maybe I Should Not Take Credit for This
• Why nobody should find out until you resignThe most important discipline in the whole process is behavioural.In I Asked for a Weekend Off. My Boss Said Fifteen Minutes or You Are Fired.
• Why some irrational beliefs are harmless and some are notPeople imagine a boundary between rational persons and irrational ones, with themselves comfortably on the correct side, and that boundary does not exist.In I Have Owned a Lucky Shirt. I Have Knocked on Wood.
• Why the design of an evening matters more than the effortA well-designed evening runs without the host, and a badly designed one runs on the host until the host is hiding in the bedroom.In I Hid in the Bedroom at My Own Party. It Was Going Fine.
• Why the point of view keeps moving away from humanThe recurring interest is consciousness that is not human, or is not human any more, or has never been human at all.In Behind the Book: Collision with Andromeda

Book Coach

• Book help roles comparedA grid comparing five kinds of book help: collaborator or co-writer, book doctor, developmental editor, book coach and ghostwriter.In Collaborator, Co-Writer, Book Doctor or Developmental Editor: How Each Differs From a Ghostwriter
• The two-hour chase, mappedA dashed red line is the cat, labeled you, and a dotted green line is the lizard, labeled your book.In My Cat Chased a Lizard for Two Hours, and It's the Best Metaphor for Writing a Book I've Ever Seen
• Which route fits your bookA decision tree with three branches.In Ghostwriting vs Book Coaching vs Writing It Yourself: How to Decide
• Why authors stall at chapter threeThe first two chapters are energy chapters.In Stuck at chapter 3: the four reasons authors stall and which one needs which intervention
• Why three abandoned drafts is a structural problem, not a willpower oneThree attempts tells you something before a conversation ever happens: there is material worth a book, the author wants it badly enough to have started three times, and each time something structural stopped them.In I've Started My Book Three Times and Never Finished. Why Would This Time Be Different?

Book Marketing

• A creator's year on YouTubeA joke line chart of a creator's year.In Why YouTube Sucks: A Love-Hate Account (With the Numbers)
• Amazon consolidated the book social networksA list showing Shelfari shut down, Goodreads owned by Amazon, LibraryThing independent but limited, and Twitter login removed.In How Amazon Ate the Book Social Networks
• Anatomy of a blog post that survives both decay clocksA diagram of one blog page broken into labelled parts: a title that answers a real query, an answer-first opening paragraph, question subheadings, self-contained passages, a dated update line, internal links to sibling articles,...In Content Decay: Why Your Best Posts Quietly Stop Working
• ARC copies sent vs. reviews receivedBar chart of ARC review follow-through rates.In ARC Reviews: Real Follow-Through Numbers, and Do Reviews Sell Books?
• Attention span vs scroll speedA joke line chart over one evening on TikTok.In Why TikTok Sucks: The Criticism, Backed by the Numbers
• Free book marketing: what it costs and what it gets youTime spent runs along a log scale from five minutes to a year, and how close each method gets you to a reader runs up the side, from nobody to someone buying the book.In Free Book Marketing: Seven Ways That Cost Time Instead of Money
• From book to conference stagesFive stages from publication to the speaking circuit.In Speaker bureaus and the conference circuit: how a book actually gets you on stages
• Goodreads is easy to enter and impossible to leaveThe left column shows the easy ways a book enters Goodreads; the right column shows every exit path blocked, ignored, or impossible.In You Cannot Remove Your Own Book From Goodreads

Book Marketing

• How a backlink and its anchor text teach search engines what you areA backlink is a link from another website pointing at yours, and it exists because somebody decided the content was relevant to their audience.In How to Get Backlinks to Your Website: A Writer's Guide to Link Building
• How a book builds its own audience over timeA curve rising slowly at first then accelerating.In Nobody Will Read Your Book (And Why That's The Dumbest Excuse Yet)
• How a book builds trust with buyersA funnel narrowing downward in four stages.In How Entrepreneurs Use Books to Build Authority | Ghostwriting
• How a book turns a cold sales conversation into a warm oneA normal sales conversation starts cold, with the prospect skeptical and the seller proving themselves from zero.In How a Book Really Makes Money (Hint: Not Royalties)
• How a fiscal sponsor makes book sponsorship workThe engine of the model is the fiscal sponsor, because it solves the tax problem that would otherwise stop a donor cold.In The Sponsorship Model: Getting a Book Funded Instead of Sold
• How a HARO query becomes a citationHARO connects journalists who need expert sources with professionals who can supply quotes, insight and commentary.In HARO for Authors: How to Get Media Coverage That Builds Your Authority
• How a reader reads the same five stars: five is good, four is okay, the rest is not worth it.How a reader reads the same five stars: five is good, four is okay, the rest is not worth it.In What a Goodreads Star Really Means: Three Different Things
• How a review bombing cascades from one trigger to a tanked rating in search resultsFive stages: one trigger, the call goes out, fake accounts spin up, ratings drop within hours, and Google displays the tanked rating.In Review Bombing: How It Works and How to Survive It
• How a review profile decides the sale before the descriptionReviews matter because they are social proof, and social proof drives decisions when a buyer cannot judge quality directly.In How to Get Honest Amazon Reviews for Your Book
• How an author reads the same five stars: only four or five is a good book.How an author reads the same five stars: only four or five is a good book.In What a Goodreads Star Really Means: Three Different Things
• How links build credibility, and how to earn them safelyOff-page optimisation is getting links from other websites and blogs to your articles and home page, and the act of earning them is called link building.In How to Optimize Your Blog SEO: A Complete Guide for Authors
• How much more likely a shopper is to buy, with reviews vs. noneBar chart from the Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University.In ARC Reviews: Real Follow-Through Numbers, and Do Reviews Sell Books?
• How much of the book the reviewer read before rating itThree progress bars showing reviewers who rated a book after reading 100 of 280 pages, after reading only a free sample, and before the book was even printed.In They Reviewed a Book They Never Finished
• How the TikTok radicalisation pipeline operatesRyan McBeth pointed to the case of Aaron Bushnell, a United States Air Force member who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.In TikTok as a Weaponized Echo Chamber - From Chinese Cyberweapon to American Problem
• How to become a #1 bestsellerIt starts at: I want to be a #1 bestseller!In Stop Chasing Bestseller Lists: What Actually Makes a Book Valuable
• How Yelp squeezes small businessesA business gets negative or fake reviews it cannot remove.In Why Yelp Sucks: 7 Reasons, An Unfiltered Review
• How yogababble collapsesWeWork raised billions before the collapse, and plenty of books built on inflated credentials sell copies before anybody checks the claims.In Yogababble in Business and Books: Why Inflated Language Fails
• Payback curve of a ghostwritten bookA qualitative curve of cost against cumulative return.In How Do You Calculate the ROI of a Ghostwritten Book?
• Reader eye-tracking: your book descriptionThe cover, for a book called The Darkness of the Shadow of the Dark, glows hot red with a note: cover did its job.In Why Your Book Description Is Not Converting
• Should You Buy My Books?A highway-sign flowchart where every answer leads to the same exit.In Humor in Book Marketing: Getting Attention Without Begging
• The echo chamber feedback loopA four-stage self-reinforcing cycle.In Social Media Echo Chambers - How the Algorithm Became Your Cult Leader
• The four things that decide whether a self-published book sellsA professional cover matching genre expectations is non-negotiable, because a cover is a thumbnail in a scroll of other thumbnails and if it does not signal the right genre instantly at that size nobody clicks.In Self-Publishing From Someone Who Has Done It 113 Times
• The Goodreads star tooltip scale, one to five stars.The Goodreads star tooltip scale, one to five stars.In What a Goodreads Star Really Means: Three Different Things
• The guru's income vs yoursA joke line chart after joining a writing guru's program.In Stop Listening to the Gurus About Your Writing
• The LinkedIn lead funnelFour thousand connections, three hundred and twelve people who saw the post, nine reactions, three of them bots, and zero leads.In LinkedIn Sucks: Why the Platform Stopped Working for Lead Generation

Book Marketing

• The robots.txt control panelA small green button reads Disallow: /wp-admin/ and its label says it hides the admin folder, which is correct.In Robots.txt: The Most Dangerous File on Your Website and How to Configure It Without Destroying Your Search Rankings
• The writing quality-control loopThen the loop repeats on the next pass, each cycle raising quality, until the work meets the bar.In Writing Quality Control: From Draft to Publishable
• Three tiers of AI involvement and the disclosure each needsLight assistance needs no disclosure, meaningful assistance gets a brief acknowledgment, and major generation of prose needs heavy disclosure in the front matter.In AI disclosure on your book, and what you actually owe readers
• Weighing your marketing numbersThe left pan holds a big heap of hearts labeled 10,000 likes, with a balloon tied on labeled 50,000 trailer views, and it floats high in the air.In Vanity Metrics vs. Conversion Metrics for Authors
• What a book does for a personal brandAnybody can post advice on social media, while writing a book requires sustained thinking about a subject and that depth is visible to anybody who picks it up, so clients, event organisers, journalists and...In How a Book Builds Your Personal Brand: From a 54-Book Ghostwriter
• What a book does for a real estate agent at years one, three and fiveThree stages of a residential agent's book.In What Happens to a Residential Agent's Business One, Three, and Five Years After a Book
• What a business email address signals before the message is readAn address at AOL or CompuServe signals a long time online and that the tools stopped being updated a long time ago, and the impression is outdated whether or not that is fair, which...In 5 Effective Steps to Create Your Branded Email Address and Make a Lasting Impact
• What a profile photo decides in the first hundred millisecondsResearch shows people make judgments about trustworthiness, competence and warmth within a hundred milliseconds of seeing a face, which is not enough time to read a single word.In Your Profile Photo: Why It Matters More Than You Think
• What a reader actually weighs before buying a bookBook buying psychology matters more than any promotional tactic.In Book Marketing: What Actually Sells Books and What Wastes Your Time
• What a Reddit thread is made ofA joke breakdown of a Reddit thread: comments removed by moderators, people replying 'this', bots, arguments about the subreddit rules, people who didn't read the question, and one real answer at the bottom.In Reddit Sucks: Volunteers Write It, Bots Fake It, and AI Companies Buy It
• What a viral LinkedIn post is actually worthA viral post matters because it puts a brand in front of thousands of professionals and decision-makers who would never otherwise be reached, and the value runs well past the raw numbers.In What Makes a LinkedIn Post Go Viral
• What actually triggers a LinkedIn account restrictionA LinkedIn restriction usually follows an infringement of the User Agreement or the Professional Community Policies, and the triggers are knowable.In LinkedIn Account Restricted: What to Do and How to Prevent It
• What authors complain about most on Goodreads, weighted by frequency, with a prompt to add your own storySeven grievances sized by how often they appeared in the comments, each linking to a detailed article, plus a final call to add your own Goodreads experience to the comments.In Goodreads Sucks and is Not Worthwhile
• What happens when theme overpowers characterStrong themes make stories memorable, but when the theme becomes the point of the character instead of something the character moves through, the protagonist reads as a message.In 8 Mistakes That Sink a Book (and the Bestsellers That Avoided Them)
• What public speaking teaches a writer that a keyboard cannotWriters spend most of their time alone with words on a screen.In Toastmasters for Writers: What Standing Up and Talking About My Tattoos Taught Me About Communication
• What you published versus what Goodreads showsA side by side showing correct book data on the left and Goodreads showing the wrong cover, eight editions, and a merged author on the right.In Goodreads Got My Book's Data Wrong and Would Not Fix It
• What your own ISBN opens, and what a platform ISBN closesLibraries prefer books with ISBNs, because that is how they catalogue, classify and order inventory, and without one a book is unlikely to appear in any library system.In The ISBN Blueprint: 10 Rules for Book Identification
• What's in your feedA joke breakdown of a social media feed: ads, suggested posts from strangers, outrage bait, videos from accounts you never followed, and a thin sliver of posts from your actual friends.In Social Media Sucks: Your Friends Left the Feed and the Algorithm Moved In
• Where a book works in a property developer's sales cycleSix stages of a major development deal, from first contact to closing.In The Property Developer's Book and the High-Ticket Sales Cycle
• Where the money goes on a $28.99 hardcoverWhen a reader pays $28.99 for a new hardcover they are funding an entire supply chain.In Why Used Books Cost Nothing: The Economics of Book Pricing
• Where your 10,000 followers goNext, 350 shown your post, with a note that organic reach is about 3.5 percent and the other 9,650 were busy.In The Algorithm Apocalypse: Why Building an Audience in 2026 Is Career Suicide
• Who answers on QuoraAnswers from people who did the thing fall steadily while AI-generated answers climb past them, with markers for the moment a doctor stopped answering medical questions and the moment an answer began 'Great question!'.In Quora Sucks: How the Smartest Room on the Internet Became an AI Answer Farm
• Why a book becomes the source of truth for a personal brandA personal brand without a book is a collection of fragments.In Why Every Brand Needs a Refresh in 2026
• Why a book builds trust that marketing cannot buyA book is the only marketing asset where the prospect spends hours with the ideas before ever making contact.In Books Build Trust, Not Just Revenue: Why a Book Is Your Best Business Asset
• Why a book outlasts a speechA political speech is designed for a moment.In How Political Books Build Careers and Win Elections