Want help writing a great business book? Let's talk. Email me
The bath towels at my parents’ house were plentiful but thin, small and scratchy. Not one to expect those two depression babies to acquiesce to my bougie needs, I bought them a couple of big fluffy bath sheets. Inexplicably, they refused to use them. They lived in the back of the linen closet and came …
Are you planning to follow some advice to blog frequently and then roll up those posts into a book? Here’s how to ensure that approach will end up as a book that works. Step 1 Decide on the “controlling idea” of the book. This is a 1-2 sentence thesis. For How-to books it goes something …
“I need to know if you are going to take the Mustang, or not because our cousin knows a guy that really wants it and who said he’ll finish the restoration,” said my sister. The car she was referring to was a 1966 Mustang, my dad’s last project car. It had been sitting in storage …
When it comes to sentence and paragraph transitions, I want you to think of the game Barrel of Monkeys. Barrel of Monkeys is a toy developed in the mid-1960s that is now sold by Milton Bradley / Hasbro. The game consists of a plastic barrel containing 10 plastic monkeys with arms going in opposite directions. …
About 20 years ago, I hired an NYC-based book coach, Jerry Mundis, to help me get the first of a bad novel done—a fictional tale modeled after the movie Working Girl with Melanie Griffith. (To be clear, the bad part is on me—I didn’t hire him to edit it, I hired him to help me …
If you are thinking of writing a book—or even in the middle of writing one—and you don’t yet have a forum that allows you to connect with your target audience, you’re not alone. In book parlance, this forum is called an author “platform.” A platform is important for many reasons but especially so if you …
Most client writing problems I encounter are actually thinking problems. The biggest problem is they haven’t taken the time to identify a point of view, i.e., decide what they really think about a topic so they can communicate that clearly to the reader. Instead, they “kitchen sink” it and assume the reader will sort it …
Avoid using passive voice unless…you know what you’re doing. Unintentional or careless use of passive voice bogs writing down and damages the reader’s experience. Used strategically, however, it can be super useful. A good example of this is in the blurb I posted on Thursday where I said, “The job of a business book is …
One of the many objects I helped my second ex-husband purchase was a 1983 Honda Goldwing. It belonged to a Chicago cop friend of ours. This thing had been sitting in the garage for at least a decade and so needed to be completely torn down and serviced. Luckily, we had another friend who owned …
You want to write a book but intuitively you know you’re never going to make it happen on your own. You probably don’t even know why, so I will tell you. You don’t have the 500 hours (or more) over 18 months (or more) or the inclination to devote that much time to turning your …