So today I met up with seven others, all graduates of the last running of the This Book Means Business Bootcamp, and we sat together in the Jane Austen room in Reading Museum and wrote for most of the day. We met at 10am, chatted and faffed around for a bit, then set our intentions […]
Continue readingIf you’re like me, you find sitting down to write your book in silence alone in a room agonising. Every time I do it I can feel the energy draining from me. There’s an urgent clamour of Stuff That Must Be Done Immediately, from answering an email to sorting out invoices to stripping the beds […]
Continue readingSo this is interesting. US actor Alec Baldwin has just had his biography, Nevertheless: A Memoir, published with HarperCollins. He’s done something smart, which is to create a Facebook page for the book to host the communinty of fans and as a platform on which to host additional content and an insight into the story behind […]
Continue readingSo this is fascinating: the world’s first ‘smart typewriter’. Typewriters have romance, but they’re hopelessly impractical these days. You can’t juggle text around in the way we’ve become used to on our laptops and PCs, and they are offline relics in an online world. Many writers like the idea of using one, just like Hemingway, […]
Continue readingOne phrase in this week’s podcast particularly caught listener Bec Evans’s ear: ‘find your tent poles’. It is a GREAT metaphor: it conjures up a vivid mental image, it makes you think ‘Huh?’ and the almost immediately ‘Oh, I see!’ Here it is in context: Mark Levy talking about how you create an original book […]
Continue readingToday’s blog is over at BookMachine: reflecitons on publishing’s role in positioning authors following my conversation with Mark Levy. Read more…
Continue readingThis is/was Delivery Day, twice over. 1. I delivered the first section of my own book to the editor today. (I now have a cover design too, which I absolutely love.) 2. The completed proposals are trickling in from those who’ve completed the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge. The deadline is midnight, there are 11 […]
Continue reading[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 readingI’ve just read – for the first time – George Orwell’s famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to it before now, it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d usually have been all over as a keen Eng Lit undergraduate. I can only think the ‘Politics’ bit put […]
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 […]
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