The Comfort Conundrum

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 …

Could You Write for 30 Minutes a Day?

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 …

What’s Your Agenda?

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 …

How to Work with a Co-Writer

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 …

Five Things to Think About Before You Agree to Co-Author a Book

I’m having a fabulous experience right now helping two professors get out a book on AI and machine learning for marketers. They are both brilliant and personable and respectful, not just of each other’s expertise but mine, too. As you can imagine, given the topic, it’s a bit of a beast, but the book is …

Academic to Business Communications: Making the Jump

In academic writing, you offer a hypothesis, present all the facts in an objective manner, and then offer a conclusion. The objective is to get your thinking in front of other academics (people thinking about the same topic) who will then consider all of your facts and then either validate or challenge your hypothesis/conclusion. The …

Using Presentations to Develop Your Book Idea

There are many ways to write a book and one approach many of my corporate and academic clients like is to work out the book contents by creating a series of presentations and then delivering them to a live audience. What’s nice about this approach is that you can get immediate feedback on your ideas. …

3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Write a Business Book Alone

You’re at the top of the food chain now and it’s great but there’s more pressure than ever to drive business results because if nothing happens, all fingers are pointing at you. At the same time, you know a book would help you raise your firm’s profile with prospects and influencers and give your marketing …

Ideas Are Seeds: When You Plant Them This Can Happen

Sometimes I miss my Michigan and Detroit and so last night I started Googling Detroit things and thought about the inimitable Russ Gibb, who I once had as a substitute teacher in the 7th grade. Rather than recite the lesson plan left by Mr. Westcott, our journalism teacher, Mr. Gibb perched on the edge of …