[NB deliberately posting in afternoon to avoid suspicions of April Fooling – though the real news is so bonkers these days that all the fun seems to have gone out of the tradition….] One of the most fundamental personality traits, common to almost every method of measurement, is the tendency towards extraversion or introversion. It’s […]
Continue readingPutting my full Table of Contents online for comment felt terrifying at the time – like standing naked in Tesco – but has proved more helpful than I dared hoped for lots of reasons: accountability, visibility, content development and engagement to name just a few. (The Tesco gig would be effective in terms of visibility […]
Continue readingI talk a lot about identifying your target reader and getting really clear on where they’re at, what questions they’re asking, what language resonates with them, what they’re trying to achieve. You need to know and understand the person you’re writing for from extensive first-hand experience, there’s no substitute for that. But there ARE tools […]
Continue readingToday’s blog is a guest post over at Birds on the Blog: http://birdsontheblog.co.uk/writing-book-first-build-platform/. ‘…a book is part of your bigger platform, not a standalone. To get readers, let alone publishers, interested in your book to the point where they’re willing to spend time and money on it, you have to secure their attention and trust. And […]
Continue readingMy kids still love being read to. Even the 13-year-old. They’re perfectly capable of reading books for themselves these days – and do, voraciously – but there’s still something wonderful about the ritual of reading together. Picture books are designed to be read aloud, and the best, like Julia Donaldson’s, have a music and rhythm […]
Continue readingWhen I interviewed Michael E. Gerber for the podcast on Tuesday, I went into the conversation better prepared than almost any other interview I’ve ever done. Not only had I read the book (it’s a short, readable book, my favourite kind) but I’d listened to an audio trailer while I was fixing lunch the day […]
Continue readingIt’s the season of dreadful cracker jokes, so in the spirit of ‘When is a door not a door?’* here’s a festive riddle for you: Q: When is a book not a book? A: When it’s a series. OK it’s a rubbish joke, but the point is very serious. One huge mistake that first-time authors […]
Continue reading…don’t just ask them. If you REALLY want to know if an idea has legs, the best way isn’t to ask people if they’d buy it, it’s to see if they DO buy it when they’re given the opportunity. This is an audacious technique, but Nicholas Lovell used it to great effect when he had […]
Continue readingThere are lots of business tools that are useful for writers of business books, and this one is particularly helpful towards the end of the strategic thinking piece, as you prepare to move over into content marketing and more specifically into writing your book. A positioning statement is the pure distilled essence of your strategy […]
Continue readingRobin Waite was a busy man. He was running his own business building websites and developing online business strategy for an ever-growing list of customers. At home, he was doing his bit looking after a 3-month-old baby. So when he decided to write a book, the obvious question was: when? Rob’s solution was to plan […]
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