What does it take to write the most-recommended business book of the year? Safi Bahcall, author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, talks about learning to write (and rewrite) a business book that matters, and it’s pure gold for anyone…
‘But that’s really vulnerable. I don’t really want people to read that.’ ‘Well, that’s your story. And if you really want to give this your best shot, you’ve got to go deep.’ When financier, businesswoman and philanthropist Nancy Youssef decided to entitle the book about the lessons she’s learned in…
If you’re a working parent, you won’t need telling that this isn’t really working. You might not, however, be aware that it’s not working for pretty much everybody. In her research for The Mother of All Jobs, Christine Armstrong uncovered a conspiracy of silence that means every working mother feels…
‘Now, I look at work and life and what I know in a different way, it’s almost like I’m attuned to looking for opportunities to bring my thinking together and get it out there by way of a book.’ Michelle Sales never thought of herself as a writer. She didn’t even…
‘The first draft of the manuscript is just ugly. There are pieces, and parts, and this part doesn’t match that part. It looks like a Frankenstein monster. And that’s why I call it Frankendraft. It sets that expectation low, that this will be an ugly, ghoulish creation with parts and…
Matt Watkinson described Nigel Wilcockson, publishing director at Random House Business Books and his own editor, as the brains behind many of the best business books he’d ever read. Nigel is more modest about his role: ‘a good editor is more like a mentor… there in the background to offer…
‘I don’t think many authors would put themselves through what I put myself through. How many authors are confident enough or stupid enough to send their manuscript to a thousand people who they have no idea who they are, and just say, “Okay, just tell me what you don’t like.”‘…
Steve Krug tells it like it is. ‘People don’t read nearly as much of [your book] as you think.’ Painful though it is, he says, much of writing is actually editing: reworking sentences, cutting out fluff, converting long paragraphs to bullet-points, so that you get your point across. Steve used all…
In this week’s episode I chat to John Bond, former MD of Press Books at HarperCollins and founder of Whitefox, which provides publishing services to authors and publishers, about how publishing has changed over the last few years, where it’s going, and what that means for authors. ‘Writers are getting…
