Looking for ways to increase your business writing skills? How about the advice in a good book?
Find five of my favorite business writing recommendations on Shepherd.
Author
One of the greatest gifts someone can give you is a reference to a good book.
I read a large number of books - many as research for the books I write, others just because I love to read them. My topic areas include business and marketing, writing, and cognitive science.
These are links to the book review posts. Visit the Resources pages to find suggested readings for either writing or marketing.
Looking for ways to increase your business writing skills? How about the advice in a good book?
Find five of my favorite business writing recommendations on Shepherd.
You don’t need to know someone’s size, allergies, or living situation to send them a book. A book encapsulates a few hours of time spent with a thoughtful author. What a gift!
Every December I share a list of books for writers and authors, plucked from the many books I finished that year. This list reflects a year of eclectic reading. (This is a small subset of the books I’ve enjoyed this year.)
Maybe you can find something for those difficult-to-please folks on your gift list.
(Note: Most of the links in this post are affiliate links to BookShop. You can find all of the titles on Amazon as well without much effort. Bookshop supports indie bookstores, and affiliate fees help support my serious book buying problem.)
How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy. You don’t have to know Tweedy’s music to appreciate his take on creativity. This book would be fabulous for anyone who is curious about song-writing.
Humor Seriously by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas. Humor is hard, but these authors demystify it. They may inspire you to make your work emails entertaining.
Journaling Power by Mari L, McCarthy and Finding Your Joy Spot by Leona deVinne. I recommitted to morning pages this year, partly inspired by these books. Both offer guidance, prompts, and inspiration. Either book would make a lovely gift paired with a journal.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. Do you know someone who writes short stories, or who simply loves them? Reading may give you new insight in how to read—and write—the short short story.
The Story Advantage by LJ Bloom. Written for a business audience, this is a terrific introduction to the art of telling a story, in person or in writing. Read my review of The Story Advantage.
Here are a couple newer books about the business of writing books.
Amazon Decoded 2nd Edition by David Gaughran. Every author—traditionally published or not—should understand Amazon. And there’s no better, or funnier, guide than David Gaughran. Read my review of the 2nd edition of Amazon Decoded here.
Wide for the Win by Mark Leslie Lefebre. Indie authors need to understand the range of their options beyond Amazon. This book helps you see the full range of options available to you.
Do you know someone who is reeling from the changes at home or at work in the past year? Give them the gift of inspiration and support with one of these books by change-makers I admire:
Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change by April Rinne. How do we deal with constant change? By developing our flux superpowers—slowing down, identifying our “enough” and more. Read my review of Flux.
Standout Virtual Events by David Meerman Scott. Virtual event are going to be with us for a while. This is a useful guide on how to do them better.
Undisruptable by Aidan McCullen. If the business world is moving too quickly for you, search for inspiration and courage in this book.
You Are What You Risk by Michele Wucker. Risk has been our constant companion for the last year or so. This book gives us a new vocabulary and lens for dealing with it—and with each other. Read my review of You Are What You Risk.
This year also saw the birth of a new series of short, actionable business books, 33 Ways Not to Screw Up…
…Business Emails. Everyone writes emails at work, and we can all do better! This is my contribution to the series. (It’s also available as an audiobook.)
…Consulting. Marge Johnsson offers golden advice for consultants, whether you’re just starting out or taking your practice to the next level.
…Creative Entrepreneurship. Saudia Davis is a force of nature. In this book, she shares her insight and inspiration for creative entrepreneurs of all types (including writers!)
…Your Financial Life. Year end is a great time to get your financial life in order. Use this book by Jay Kemmerer as a guide.
My reading this year has covered business, science, history, and more. Here are a few of the highlights:
Breath by James Nestor. I’ve changed the way I breathe since reading this. Fascinating!
The Confidence Men by Margalit Fox. A real-world prison break too crazy to be made up.
The Eloquence of the Sardine by Bill François, translated by Antony Shugaar. You’ll look at the ocean with wonder and amazement after reading this lovely collection of the sea’s stories.
The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul. Our intelligence is not contained within our brains!
Fuzz by Mary Roach. An entertaining look at human conflict with the natural world, from the always-entertaining Mary Roach. (This may be my favorite of her books to date.)
The Oasis Within by Tom Morris. A short parable introduces you to the writings of this wise, witty philosopher.
Remember by Lisa Genova. A well-written, entertaining and accessible primer on memory.
Haven’t found the perfect gift yet? Here are a few other thoughts:
In the mean time, enjoy the holiday season and spend some time with a good book!
As a prolific nonfiction reader, I ask two questions of each new book I encounter:
I can usually answer the first question by the end of the first chapter. The second one, about lasting impact, takes more time to assess. Many books are enjoyable to read, but fewer make a permanent impression in my thought processes.
That brings me to the new book by April Rinne, Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. For this book, I can definitely answer Yes to both questions—and you probably will as well.
Back in the spring of 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, I had the pleasure of interviewing April Rinne as research for Get the Word Out. April embodies the idea of servant authorship that I write about in Get the Word Out—she has written this book to serve others as they deal with a world in constant change.
April kindly invited me to read a prepublication draft. So I read Flux last December, and have lived with its ideas all year. And hoo boy, has it been helpful!
This book is about adjusting your mindset for the world in which we live—one in which the pace of change is accelerating without any sign of letting up. The ideas in this book were relevant and useful before the Coronavirus pandemic threw nearly every prediction and plan into disarray. Now they’re even more critical.
The book’s introduction includes a simple exercise to write down everything that is in flux in your life, and to assess your emotional reaction to them. Doing that was an eye-opener. I hadn’t even realized the baseline level of stress I was carrying around. (And I think of myself as a calm person.)
Many short, useful exercises like that throughout the book guide you to examine and shift your mindset around change and uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a difficult thing to manage. We often work hard to protect ourselves from uncertainty, but at great cost. Trying to control the future is a fool’s game, and we can waste more energy resisting change than adapting to it.
The answer lies in adopting a flux mindset. The eight superpowers of the title are really lenses that you can use to shift the way you approach uncertainty. Some may fit you more easily than others, although all are worth reading and absorbing.
Here in late August, I can report that the book has helped me in a year in which nearly every plan is provisional. These are the three superpowers that have landed most permanently with me so far:
Run slower. When dealing with rapid and constant change, it pays to find a different pace. Slowing down has been perhaps easier during the pandemic. Now I find that I relish a slower tempo in my life. I’m not ready to give it up if and when the world resumes its usual frenetic pace.
Know your enough. The world is always pressing us to do more and optimize everything. Why, in fact, do I need to take the most efficient route driving some place? And the value of my day cannot be found in the number of tasks I manage to check off. This chapter is filled with advice for identifying what’s important, what’s enough, and putting aside the gnawing sense of scarcity that often chases us.
There’s also a wonderful play on words if you say the chapter title aloud: Know you’re enough. You are enough.
Let go of the future. If the last year has taught us anything, it’s to avoid hard-and-fast plans for nearly anything. I have become more intentional about releasing my attachment to plans and outcomes. The book suggests we shift from predicting the future to preparing for it, however it unfolds. This mindset has been invaluable in the last year. It’s a gift.
It’s time for me to revisit the book and see if I can adopt more superpowers, because the world isn’t getting any more certain.
If you’re feeling flummoxed, anxious, or otherwise disconcerted about the near and distant future, give yourself the gift of this book.
Listen to or read the transcript of my interview with April last spring
Your friend says she won’t fly anywhere until 2022. Is that excessively cautious? Another friend is flying around the country before they’ve gotten vaccines. Does that make sense? When should you go visit that elderly relative across the country?
In the past year, we’ve all become armchair risk analysts contemplating the various risk levels of our lives. Vaccines, variants… the calculations change from week to week.
Have you noticed that faced with the same information, people make different choices? What’s going on?
Michele Wucker’s new book You Are What You Risk addresses those issues perfectly. It arrives at a perfect moment, just when we need it most.
A new vocabulary of risk
You Are What You Risk is a Deep dive into personal risk, and it gives us a better vocabulary to understand and talk about risk.
Wucker describes us as each having a risk fingerprint, which is influenced by personality, social context, and experiences. It’s a fascinating way to think about this, as we notice the diversity of human behavior in this time of uncertainty.
She also asks that we stop throwing around the risk averse label and instead consider terms like risk perception (are we aware of the risks?), and risk attitude (how do we feel about them?)
My favorite definition is risk savvy:
The ability to recognize and assess dangers and opportunities reasonably accurately while balancing emotion and reason, and taking smart precautions so as to avoid being either foolhardy or overcautious.
Michele Wucker, You Are What You Risk
The book dives into the various factors affecting our risk fingerprints, including the societies in which we live, the people we spend time with, our personalities, our sense of purpose, even whether we’re eating spicy food!
While we want to protect ourselves from negative risks, we also need to get comfortable taking chances for positive outcomes. The book offers advice on how to train ourselves to take risks in service of growth and a greater purpose.
In many situations, it’s riskier to stay in your comfort zone than to act on opportunities to stretch and adapt to changing situations.
How can we better manage our own risks? We start by understanding our current risk fingerprint, then working with ourselves and our environment. Even things as subtle as what music is playing in the background can affect our decision making.
We can also build up our positive risk-taking with practice, and by surrounding ourselves with accountability groups (or risk circles) to help us stretch.
Wucker also writes about risk empathy, which she defines as “the ability to relate to the ways others experience risks and adapt your own behavior to accommodate those needs.”
I predict that for the rest of 2021, we’ll yet again be divided. This time it’s not mask-wearing. Rather, we’ll have varying degrees of comfort and understanding of risks of the lingering COVID-19 pandemic. Some people will hop on planes or attend in-person chorus rehearsals quickly, while make different choices.
We’ll need to show each other, and ourselves, grace in the coming months. Let’s understand and acknowledge our different risk fingerprints, and demonstrate risk empathy as we work together to define our new normal.
This book is a great place to start. Kudos to Michele Wucker for working diligently through the pandemic to get it out into the world when we need it.
Find Michele’s Book on Amazon or Bookshop.
Listen to my interview with Michele from last year (while she was writing), in which she tells the story of how this book came about.
Read more author stories in Get the Word Out: Write a Book That Makes a Difference.
Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. But how does one go about examining a life while still immersed in it?
Even with the slowdown of a pandemic, our minds never seem to dial back. The constant chatter of the universe is always clamoring for our attention.
(Dang, I just got another Clubhouse notification. Am I missing out? Should I be there?)
The secret, for many of us, lies in a combination of writing and practice—specifically, a journaling practice. Even if you’ve tried and abandoned journaling before, I suggest you pick up Mari L. McCarthy’s book Journaling Power.
It’s a guide to building a journaling practice into your own life. The book is both simple and powerful.
In the “nonfiction writing” category, this book combines how-to, exposition (why-to), and story.
At its heart, it’s a how-to book. Each chapter shares prompts to get started on (or restart), your own journaling practice.
But for most of us, the problem isn’t knowing what to do—it’s doing it.
Julia Cameron’s description of morning pages in her book The Artist’s Way originally inspired McCarthy. I, too, had read that book, and thought it sounded cool. But then, I went about my distinctly non-artsy life. This practice seemed to belong to a different type of person, in a different type of life.
Not so. In Journaling Power, Mari McCarthy presents extensive research into the benefits of writing for oneself, including many studies I had not seen.
She refers to the work of James Pennebaker, who has studied and documents the value of what he calls expressive writing, or writing as therapy. There’s also other research into the use of journaling on topics as diverse as handling stress, healing from trauma, overall health, and getting to sleep.
Stress? Sleep? Overall health? Sign me up.
Like most good nonfiction writing, Journaling Power supplements this research and instruction with compelling personal stories. And stories might move you to pick up that pen and paper and try journaling one more time.
The author generously shares the story of a health crisis, and how she used journaling to address it and transform her life. She has completely reshaped her life around this practice. It’s an inspiring tale.
She also shares other stories of people finding significant advances through journaling. But the one that matters most, of course, is yours. Here’s what I’ve found.
Reading this book inspired me to readjust my personal writing practice to include those morning pages.
Although I’ve been keeping an online journal in the morning for years, it veers quickly into general planning for the day. Not much deep introspection happening there.
Freewriting is a another critical part of my writing practice—writing to myself to explore topics. Nearly every piece of content I create, from blog posts to books, has its origins in a freewriting file meant just for my own eyes. (See my post on freewriting on the CreateWriteNow site.)
But morning pages are something else altogether—something just for me. I write it by hand first thing, before checking email. No one will read it but me.
Journaling is an inexpensive, effective form of self-care—cheaper than a spa day, healthier than a drink.
I’ve been doing this every day now for weeks since reading her book, and am floored by the results. The process has given me new perspectives on tricky issues and awareness of invisible burdens and limits I carry with me.
This book has reignited that practice for me, and its benefits are already showing up in my life.
What will journaling do for you? If you’ve been skeptical, or stalled out on your practice, pick up Journaling Power. Then start writing—for yourself.
Read my post about freewriting and its role in my book process on the CreateWriteNow blog: How Journaling Led Me to Writing Books.
For more inspiration, read the post Move the Starting Line.
As an indie author, I have a silent business partner that is wealthy and powerful, sometimes high-handed, and occasionally mysterious.
That partner is Amazon.
David Gaughran is one of my go-to sources for insight into Amazon. His advice has helped me better understand how to use Amazon in my book launches and promotions. So when he published a second edition of his book Amazon Decoded, I got it right away, even though I’d read the first edition. And I’m glad I did—the second edition is filled with much more detail.
Authors have many theories about Amazon—some of them crazy and conspiratorial. Some speak with confidence about a “magic number” of reviews you need before everything happens. Others talk about Amazon’s hidden agendas. Most of it is pure speculation.
David Gaughran offers solid, actionable advice, grounded in research, experimentation, and common sense. If you’re an author, this book is an excellent investment of your time and attention.
Let’s answer that question using the author’s own words:
“If you understand how the system works, you can encourage Amazon to recommend your books more frequently. Not only that, if you also understand what makes books visible in the Kindle Store, you can make simple tweaks to increase the footprint of your book in Amazon’s system, meaning that more readers will discover it when browsing for new reads.”
David Gaughran
Here’s my perspective. Having a better understanding of how Amazon works will help you get your book into the hands of the people who value it. Amazon can help you embrace the goals of servant authorship (serving people with your book) by putting your book in front of its audience.
If you’ve been publishing books on Amazon for a while, this book should trigger a number of “Aha!” moments. You’ll understand why some things happen or what you’ve been seeing.
Part one explains what’s happening in the Kindle store, and the mysterious issue of sales rank.
Part two is all about metadata, which sounds wonky but is definitely worth spending time to get right. (Bonus: there’s no end date on tinkering with a book’s metadata. It’s always worth revisiting.)
Visibility on Amazon is the subject of part three. Here Gaughran demystifies the difference between the best-seller list and the popularity list, also-boughts, and much more.
Part four covers ebook distribution and offers perspectives on that troubling question: should you stay exclusive to Amazon or publish your ebook in other places as well?
Part five is all about promotions—you know, discounts and sales. These can play an important role in helping your book find its audience.
In the last section, he puts it all together in sample promotion plans.
The book is rich in geeky detail. If you’re like me, you may have to take breaks in reading to go browse Amazon with fresh eyes.
After reading this second edition, I have a much better understanding of KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited. I’m a “wide” author myself—and I’m not talking about my girth, thank you very much, but about making books available through multiple retailers. Even so, I benefit from understanding what Kindle Unlimited readers see and how this affects my books.
As a bonus, Gaughran writes with self-deprecating humor. For example:
I have an analytical mindset, I’m told—which I think is a polite way of telling me that I have the natural empathy of a dehumidifier, but it’s also handy for figuring out how systems work
David Gaughran
From a nonfiction, explanatory writing perspective, he keeps the tone light and entertaining while clearly explaining algorithms and metadata. That’s a fine example of writing to be understood!
Caveats: As the subtitle indicates, the book focuses primarily on Kindle books rather than print. And parts of the book are aimed at fiction writers, including most of the sample launch and promotion plans.
That said, there’s still plenty of wisdom for nonfiction authors and those who rely on print sales. Read it and become wiser about reaching your audience with Amazon’s help.
Find Amazon Decoded on Amazon or on Bookshop.
Hurry over to David’s website and sign up for his email list.
If you’re interested in book marketing, check out my monthly book marketing webinar series.