Author Blog

Author Dan Pink posted recently on his top 5 favorite books on writing. It's especially interesting to see what Dan's picks are for this as his new book is in a very unique format for the Western business book world: manga. Writing is tricky enough alone, but in his case, Dan had to condense everything, and let a lot of the message be communicated by visual illustrations. I'm sure it was a process for him to think differently about what he was going to say, and reduce it to a concise statement that could fit within a series of quick talk bubbles coming from the mouths of the characters in the story.

Nonetheless, his picks for books on writing are dead-on, whether you're writing essays, novels, or comics.

Jim Champy wrote one of the most important business books of the 90s: Reengineering the Corporation. It sold over 3 million copies and is still moving units today. I recently talked with Jim about the experience of writing such a major book, and how he approached subsequent books to help his consulting and ideas continue to grow.

Listen to our conversation here.

Here's another one from the archives, this time from Seth Godin. For those of you who haven't read it, Seth gives 19 essential tips for authors, from when to start promoting the book to smart ways to do it. Since the time of his blog post, his figure of 75,000 non-fiction books published per year has increased, so using these tips is even more critical now. Check it out.

Technology has empowered people to accomplish many things. Bands can put their own CDs out, people can create their own videos and upload them to the web, and authors can write books and self-publish them. The power is in the people's hands - who needs publishers anymore?

Well, we all do. Publishers have a lot of connections, resources, and abilities that neither our internal staff, friends, or the internet can provide. Ability is one thing, human effort and relationships is quite another. But before I go any further, this Scalzi post explains things quite sensibly and thoroughly.

There are certain benefits to self-publishing, but again, it depends on your purpose for writing and what you want the book to really accomplish.

Writing is a building process. You assemble a series of passages to bring readers to discover an idea. If you told the idea on the first page, no one would read the rest of the book. So you build on the material around the idea in order to create a bigger impact when the idea reveals itself. Then the reader has more foundation, their own image of the concepts, and more time to think about how they work and make the ideas work for them.

In Matthew Frederick's 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School he talks about "Denial and Reward:"

"Divert users onto an unexpected path to create additional intrigue or even momentary lostness; then reward them with other interesting experiences or other views of their target. This additional "work" will make the journey more interesting, the arrival more rewarding."

Think about this as you build your next book.

I had the pleasure to talk with Diana McLain Smith, first-time author who wrote the book Divide or Conquer. In our conversation, Diana shares her insight about developing her idea, the writing process, publishers, agents, the purpose of the book, and the lessons the experience taught her. This is something every person considering writing a book should hear. It will also be interesting to other first-time authors to hear a potentially different experience, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the process involved in book writing.

Click here to listen to our conversation.

If you've listened to my recent talk with Diana McLain Smith, you've heard her experience about how getting an agent helped her get her book published. If this is something you're considering doing, your first question probably is, "how do I get an agent?" Penelope Trunk shares her answer to this question here.

We hung out with Mike Kanazawa yesterday. Actually, he gave a great talk in Milwaukee to about 80 local executives on how to focus on big ideas and maintain them to support long term strategy.

But then we really did hang out with him, and talked about the process of writing his book, Big Ideas to Big Results. Mike explained how the process of writing the book affected him, surprised him, sometimes overwhelmed him, but essentially provided many benefits for him.

Check out this two part video interview taken at the 8cr offices:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Jon is out in L.A. this week for the annual book convention -- Book Expo America. So I'm covering for him.

One of the conversations that comes up when writing a book is that of expectations. What to expect from a publisher. And what they expect from you, the author.

That said, here's a good place to start. The publisher Berrett-Koehler recently announced their BILL OF RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES FOR BK AUTHORS. It could be a bit more detailed but does help to frame the conversation.