Years before I understood what a customer acquisition funnel was, I understood something more fundamental: how to make a stranger care.
That is, after all, what every author must do. You sit down with nothing but a blank page and a story only you can tell, and somehow—through craft, persistence and a healthy disregard for the odds—you convince millions of people that your words are worth their most precious resource: time. More…
No one ever reads a book backwards.
Agents won’t. Editors won’t. Most readers won’t get past the first page if it doesn’t grip them. For would-be writers — especially those struggling to gain traction in the publishing world — there’s a hard truth that isn’t discussed often enough: the opening pages of a novel act as both invitation and litmus test. More…
There’s a manuscript in every writer’s past—or present—that won’t stay quiet.
It may sit in a forgotten folder, buried on a hard drive with a working title that once set the writer’s heart on fire. It may be printed out and boxed in a closet, marked with notes and red ink, held together by binder clips and regret. It may have been abandoned mid-draft or rewritten ten times over, or restarted in half a dozen places. More…
I’ve built my career on words. As a bestselling author and business owner, I’ve spent years learning that great writing isn’t about stringing sentences together—it’s about thinking clearly enough to say something worth reading. So, when generative AI arrived and many in my industry worried the written word would soon be dead, I didn’t panic. I got curious. And after two years of watching this technology reshape the content economy, I have a take that might surprise people on both sides of the debate: AI isn’t coming for the best writers. It’s coming for the ones who were never really writing in the first place. More…
