Reading time: 5.49 1,384 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, I have a Shelf of Shame. It’s filled with the dusty carcasses of courses I’ve bought and abandoned over the years. Need to write an about page? There’ll be a course for that. Lemme at it. Want to create a newsletter in InDesign? I spy a course called “InDesign for Beginners” take my money. Gonna learn the guitar? That online course looks spiffing I shall partake. Do I get past the first module or two? I do not. I am a...
4 days ago • 6 min read
Reading time: 1.39 389 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Do you remember back in the Covid times when that dickhead politician came out and said, “Everyone’s tired of experts”? Every now and then I think about that. It’s like my Roman Empire. The idea that it’s a good thing to glorify ignorance and thickness. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being ignorant about stuff. We all start out that way. But staying ignorant is a problem, especially now when we’ve got the whole of...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 2.14 529 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, For two years Kevin’s book languished, tormenting him from book purgatory. He’d started and stopped it so many times he had spiritual whiplash and despaired of ever getting his message out there. Until he found me and booked me for a day to help him figure it out. In just one day, we took his book from 2-year-abandoned hot mess to a well-structured plan. Six months later, he published it. Shortly after that, it became a...
6 days ago • 3 min read
Reading time: 0.57 224 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, The least qualified person in the room is already calling themselves an expert. And guess what? Their audience believes them. So why shouldn’t yours believe you — someone who actually knows their stuff? Too many of us worry we’re not “good enough” yet. We think we have to know everything about our subject or idea before we’re allowed to write a book about it. Well, I have two secrets to let you in on: Nobody knows...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 2.20 553 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, What if the story that changes everything hasn’t been written yet? If we want to see ourselves in the stories we read and see, we’re probably gonna have to write them ourselves. Sometimes it’ll simply fulfil our human need to be seen, heard, and understood… and sometimes it literally saves lives. Malone Mukwende, a medical student, noticed that Black and brown skin was missing not only from his training but also from...
8 days ago • 3 min read
Reading time: 1.48 426 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Relatability is everything. I once had a client who wrote a fantastic book called Eat Drink Think. Her book is about addiction, about ending the battle with food and body image and living a life of authenticity and joy. Renae Saager’s book contains multitudes, as does she, but one line gut-punched me: “Stop trying to love your body.” She was incredible at seeing through the glossy, aspirational, unreachable, beautifully...
11 days ago • 6 min read
Reading time: 1.29 352 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, When Sharon was in college, double majoring in English & Psych, her English professor told her she “can’t write and never will.” She’d written short stories as a child, and journalling seemed to her like good prep for writing a memoir (it is). And although Sharon had always dreamed of writing a book, after that encounter with her low-quality professor, she just assumed writing was a talent she didn’t have. So she didn’t...
12 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 2.06 498 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, I’m elbow-deep in soil and worms, building a new vegetable bed, when Joe finds me. He’s a bit surprised because I’m supposed to be writing my book. “I thought you said you were too busy to bowl,” he says. I am. Too busy to bowl, I mean. I’m supposed to be writing a book. So obviously I am now building a new vegetable bed and also cleaning out the greenhouse and filling the bird feeders. It’s URGENT. I’m too busy to have...
13 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 0.35 136 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just 37 pages long. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is just 133 pages long. Johanna McWeeney, one of my first MicroBook Magic authors, wrote Stop “Falling Short” in just 43 pages. Each of these little books has made a huge impact on my life, and two of them have shifted cultures. You don’t have to write a 1,000-page tome to make a difference...
14 days ago • 1 min read