What if you had some help writing your book: a collaborator to transcribe your ideas, do the grunt work of researching huge amounts of material, bounce ideas off, give editorial feedback and even provide their own contributions in the form of a dialogue? And what if that collaborator was available without…
A few of the stand-out moments from the last few Extraordinary Business Book Club episodes – this week we’re asking…. why? Why write a book, when it’s so damn hard? Here’s why. Mark Burns on the stones in the reader’s shoe Bec Evans on treating your book as a prototype…
‘Improv is always, “Let’s just start something now. We don’t know where it’s going to go, but we’ll start now. Whatever tools, whatever cast we have.” That’s what writing should be as well.’ Neil Mullarkey, founder of the Comedy Store Players and long-time sketch buddy of Mike Myers, is on…
Think you’re in a profession that doesn’t lend itself to writing a book? Della Hudson trained as a chemist and is now an accountant, but her book The Numbers Business: How to build a successful cloud accountancy practice was a winner at this year’s Business Book Awards. And even she,…
‘Think about your audience. What stones do they have in their shoes? And what possibilities do they dream of?’ And with this great advice from his editor ringing in his ears, Mark Burns and his co-writer Andy Griffith planned, wrote, rewrote, tested, revised and edited their way to their final…
Self-development books are big business – but is it just navel-gazing on the hand or esoteric theory on the other? ‘At the end of the day people want something that’s pragmatic, and they can actually do something with.’ Fiona Murden has been working with the world’s most senior leaders for…
When we talk about ‘the future’, we’re subconsciously distancing ourselves from some indefinite, hypothetical construct. But in reality, argues Whitney Vosburgh and his co-author Charlie, we are continually co-creating the future in the present, without fully making the connection between the two. ‘Instead of being futurists, we need to be…
Something a bit different this week: I buttonholed some of the top voices in the book industry at last week’s IPG Spring Conference and asked them: What is it that authors need to know but publishers are too polite to tell them? Their answers might surprise you – and they…
‘What is the business case for being unsustainable?’ Professor David Grayson has been involved in social enterprise before it was even a thing, and over the last few decades he has acted as the conscience of business on a range of issues from accessibility and diversity to corporate social responsibility…
‘[The principles behind the book were those of] the lean startup: build, measure, learn, which meant running experiments, testing stuff with users and iterating and improving… treating it as a whole series of prototypes.’ In writing her first book – How to Have a Happy Hustle – Bec Evans drew…
