A recent piece by Maris Kreizman in LitHub bemoans the rise of “gig work” in publishing — and in particular the freelancer-driven model being pursued by the new publishing venture Author’s Equity. What naive and misguided claptrap. What’s Kreizman’s objection? In an essay titled “Publishing Models That Rely on Gig Workers Are Bad For Everybody,”…
Looking back over 16 years and 57 book projects, one big favorite is a book I edited: Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine. If you’re a writer or editor, this reflection about that book may get you thinking differently about your own…
People making a point tend to cite statistics. And with simple tools like SurveyMonkey, anyone can create a poll. But if you don’t know how statistics really work, you can seem like a fool. I don’t trust people who use statistical tools in a misleading way. Do you? What’s wrong with this poll on LinkedIn?…
Newsletter 31. Looking back on your career, in praise of college writing centers, the disruption of a Canadian bookseller, plus three people to follow, three brand new books to read, and a plug for the imperfect manuscript. My emotional résumé I’ve been helping a friend with her résumé. The hard part is shoehorning valuable experiences…
Writing books is hard. Collaborating without an effective plan can make it much harder. It’s okay to argue about ideas, structure, terminology, tone, case studies, or audience. Those arguments are productive. It’s not okay to argue about who’s editing which version when — that’s just a stupid waste of time. Even so, I see so…
Note: This convention report was originally published on JaneFriedman.com. With 164 ghostwriters in attendance, the first Gathering of the Ghosts, which took place in New York City on January 22, was likely the largest ever gathering of ghostwriters in one place. As Dan Gerstein, CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, the cosponsor of the event along with the American…
If it’s your ambition to ghostwrite books, what do you need to know, and what do you need to do? To start, here’s an inventory of the skills you need for nonfiction ghostwriting (with some notes about fiction at the end of this post): Whew! That’s a lot to know. But you also need a…
Newsletter week 28: why ghostwriters are having a moment, Wimbledon umpires must know how to swear in a dozen languages, and Texas can’t make publishers, authors, libraries and booksellers into thought police. Plus, three people to follow and three books to read. Ghostwriters ascendant I just shared a whole day in New York with more…
Writers may at any time get called on to write anything from social media posts to instructions to research reports. The more versatile you are, the more valuable you are. I’ll illustrate this with examples from my own career. While it included a lot more than writing, you could easily describe many of my jobs…