I am sitting on my lanai, where I’ve been for the past two hours, writing. It’s incredibly humid, but not unbearably hot due to an ongoing thunderstorm. Lightning flashes close by, with increasing frequency, and I’m reminded of the safety lessons I was taught as a kid. I’m sitting on a wrought iron chair, six…
Details
We live in a world filled with interruption. Interruption has become its own form of entertainment. Interrupters are rewarded. They’re the 15 second clip blasted out by every news outlet. They’re the outspoken pundit who is invited to every Sunday morning talk show. The problem with interruption (outside of the fact that it is very…
Details
One of the biggest deterrents to writing a book is finding the time to write. While you can write a, shall we say, “lesser” book – an ebook or a quickly thrown together collection of blog posts, the book that you’ll use as your brand flagship deserves and needs your time and careful attention. There…
Details
A few years back, I had a friend who would say, “Barbara, you’re on the cusp. You are right there. I can see that you’re going to be famous!” (Yeah, I know. We need to hire her to hang out with us when we’re having bad days, right?) I would smile and thank her, knowing…
Details
I have a hangover and I didn’t drink last night. (Or for the past several nights, come to think of it. I’m slipping!) But I have that uncomfortable feeling, a little queasy, a bit of a headache. Maybe it’s the nagging knowledge that I should have done something and didn’t. It’s the open loop. The…
Details
If you’ve been thinking about writing a book, you already know that it can increase your authority and credibility. But no one talks about the flip side: If your book is poorly written or produced, it can hurt your credibility. Credibility Means Getting Your Facts Straight The most obvious way to lose credibility is to…
Details
I’ve talked about being a bestselling author before in videos and seminars, but the topic has been the subject of so much debate in two writers’ groups that I am in that I can’t resist diving back in again An article by Brent Underwood in The Observer (Behind the Scam) discussed how he became an…
Details
I have several prospective clients who contact me from time to time saying they want to write a book. At least three of these people first contacted me over five years ago. So far, they are still “getting ready” to write their books. Maybe you, too, are still getting ready to write your book. Like…
Details
Withholding is just not pretty. If you’re writing a nonfiction book or information product, you need to tell everything you know about the subject. People buy from you because they need that information. Now that doesn’t mean that you can’t break your subject matter down into several books or products. But you do need…
Details
Choosing your book topic would seem to be pretty much of a no-brainer for most of us—after all, we typically set out to write books about the industry we work in. Most of the people I coach, ghostwrite or edit for use books to reach out to their specific target markets. Their general topic is…
Details