NEVER listen to anyone who denigrates your potential. As a kid, I did~and it almost ruined my life, dimming my prospects. When I was in 5th grade, my mother and I were pulled into the Principal’s office to discuss the ramifications [...]
Creating a full-length book for a client is like constructing a house from the ground up, or like manufacturing a car--both of which have thousands of moving parts. A typical non-fiction memoir has 65,000 to 100,000+ words, with multiple chapters [...]
Before starting work on any book, it’s essential for me to understand YOU. How do you most effectively communicate your ideas and express yourself? What makes you come alive? Some people are natural talkers. Their thoughts just pour out of [...]
Determined first-time authors are sometimes able to sketch out an entire first draft of their book, capturing the basic themes, and even the overall chapter structure. But while many of the fundamental ideas are laid out on the page, the [...]
In between writing books, nothing compares to interviewing world figures for Playboy, the venerable magazine that features the most extended interview format in publishing today. Don't just read it for the pictures! Everyone from Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King [...]
Although the idea of writing a book may, at first, seem insurmountable, it's actually quite doable. The efficient process I use allows any author to write and finish their book within six months. Here's how it works. Preliminary Coaching: Here [...]
A few years ago, as a contributing editor at Family Circle, I had the pleasure of interviewing bestselling author Tim Sanders, who, at the time, had just released a book titled: The Likeability Factor. Tim, a trailblazer in publishing, has [...]
How often do people think about writing a book about their life experience? Carl Sagan Research has shown that an astounding 81% of all Americans say they have a book inside of them. That’s approximately 200 million people [...]
In the The Ghost Writer, the 2010 political thriller directed by Roman Polanski, the film's hero, Ewan McGregor, is hired to ghostwrite the memoir of England's former Prime Minister, played by Pierce Brosnan. As McGregor's character eventually discovers, the ghostwriter [...]
Once your memoir is finished, the all-important marketing phase begins. In fact, before your book is even published, you always want sample copies of it sent out to experts in your field who can provide testimonial quotes for the back [...]
