There’s something book publishers don’t tell you when you sign their offer on the dotted line: almost all the responsibility for promoting your book will fall on your shoulders. A lot of authors complain about this fact, as if it represents publishers shirking their duty or being lazy. I see it quite differently: authors are responsible for selling their book because they are by far the best positioned to do so.
The next area I want to examine is finances: How much money has the book made in the year since its release? How much did I spend to catapult it to bestseller status? And would I do anything differently? Here are the real numbers.
In the second part of this blog series, I shared how I treated my book as a series of small projects culminating in a final product. The same was true for each of the 10 chapters it contained: each one was its own project, with a deadline and a goal for what that chapter was trying to achieve. Each chapter had its own project folder (according to my PARA Method), where I collected everything I would draw on – notes, sources, supporting materials, stories, action steps, and key details.
The conventional approach to intelligence has been to rely only on our own personal mental capabilities. We tend to assume that intelligence resides only in our skulls, the same way the computation of a computer is sealed inside its aluminum case. But in her book The Extended Mind (affiliate link) Annie Murphy Paul argues otherwise:…
I recently sat down to attempt something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create a high-quality book summary. As I wrote in my Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books, writing book summaries is one of the very best ways I’ve found to absorb an author’s ideas deeply into…
One of the most common questions I’ve received since the release of Building a Second Brain has been how I used my own Second Brain to write it. There is absolutely no way I could have done this without my Second Brain. I honestly cannot imagine how anyone undertakes an endeavor of this magnitude without some kind of external content management system to depend on.
We recently crossed the astounding milestone of 100,000 copies sold of my book Building a Second Brain! That’s just in the U.S. and UK, and over the next few months, it will go on sale in 20+ other countries and languages around the world. I have to be honest: every goal that I ever imagined for this book has been fulfilled.
Over the past few weeks, we completed our first rigorous cost-cutting exercise in the 10 years Forte Labs has been in business. Cost-cutting is a strange subject to talk about as a creator-led business. We’re not supposed to worry about those pesky annoyances called “expenses” or “profitability.” We’re on the Internet, and the Internet is…
This research project started with a simple question that has crossed every author’s mind: How can I tell which books are successful? TV shows have Nielsen ratings, music albums have the Billboard Top 100, and movies regularly publicize their box office earnings, but not books. Bestseller lists like The New York Times are notoriously subjective, while more objective ones like Amazon and The Wall Street Journal only provide rankings, not raw numbers.
The modern era didn’t start with the invention of the car, the television, or the internet. It was the arrival of the humble filing cabinet – a simple metal box with drawers that held pieces of paper on their edge – that changed everything. As Craig Robertson argues in his book The Filing Cabinet: A…
About a decade ago, I came across a video on YouTube that profoundly shaped my view of how culture works. Everything Is A Remix by documentary filmmaker Kirby Ferguson argues that all new creative works are built from preexisting ones in an endless process of what he calls “remixing.” From music to movies to video…
For years I’ve heard about a phenomenon called intergenerational trauma – the idea that the impact of traumatic events can be passed down from one generation to the next. I have to admit I never believed it was a real thing. I had only heard about it in very woo-woo circles in San Francisco, and…
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