How I Write a Book: The 7-Stage R&D Process Behind Life in Perspective
The seven stages of research and development behind Life in Perspective, from 17 years of my own annual life reviews to 500 beta readers, 4,500 years of year-end rituals, and AI.
Writing
Read More »
What I’ve Learned From Selling 500,000 Books
I recently reached an incredible milestone – 500,000 books sold across 8 titles. That includes 5 self-published Kindle ebooks, 1 co-authored book, and 2 traditionally published books, all released from 2017 to 2023. Here’s the breakdown of how those sales were distributed: Almost every single thing I believed about bookwriting when I started turned out…
Beyond Acceptance: The Transformational Journey of Applying to Grad School (or Anything Else)
My wife Lauren and I met at a co-working space in San Francisco in our mid-twenties. I was working an entry-level position at a creative consulting agency, at the bottom of the pyramid. Lauren was making $15/hour at an arts nonprofit, living rent-free with her aunt. We both saw no pathway to climb in our…
3-Year Update: A Financial Analysis of My Book’s Unit Economics
It has now been 3 years and 3 months since my book Building a Second Brain came out in the U.S., and I’ve just received word that it has now earned out its advance! That probably doesn’t mean anything to readers, but to me as an author, it means a ton. It means that the…
New Book, New Strategy: The 7 Main Things I’m Doing Differently for the Annual Review Book
I recently announced my next major book project: a book on how to complete a year-end life review as a ritual for self-reflection and growth. I’ve had an annual review practice in some form since 2008, and I can’t think of anything else that has more dramatically impacted my life in that time. I can’t…
The 5-Year Journey of Publishing Building a Second Brain
An aspiring author asked me what I’d learned from writing and publishing my book over the last 5 years. I responded with a 17-minute video, recapping the timeline of the project, my biggest lessons, mistakes, and sales milestones. If you’ve ever considered publishing a book or are just curious about what went into the project,
How to Create an AI Style Guide: Write With ChatGPT in Your Own Voice
I recently came across an interesting guide on how to train ChatGPT to write in your own voice and style. It is part of the Substack publication Write With AI, by Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush. I decided to give it a try because if I succeeded, this would solve one of the biggest problems…
The 5 Pillars of My Writing Process
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
What I Learned From The Bullet Journal Method
As I was researching and writing my book Building a Second Brain, I picked up another book to read on the side: The Bullet Journal Method (affiliate link) by Ryder Carroll. There aren’t many books on effective notetaking for the modern world, especially ones that have been as successful as BuJo (as it’s affectionately called)….
Tiago’s Ultimate Guide to Traditional Book Publishing
Publishing my book has been the experience of a lifetime. I’ve learned so much about myself, discovered new horizons of creativity, met so many fascinating people, and heard stories from all over the world about how my message has made a difference for others. Writing a book gave me the opportunity to dig deep into…
The Psychological Toll of Writing a Book
(While Having Our First Child During a Global Pandemic) Writing and publishing my book Building a Second Brain was by far the longest and hardest project I’ve ever completed. From the first call with the agent (who would eventually represent me) in January 2019 until June 2022 when the book was released to the world,…
The Evolution of My Second Brain | Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I joined Anne-Laure Le Cunff founder of Ness Labs, a mindful productivity school for knowledge workers, to talk about all things productivity and notetaking. We covered: The evolution of my Second Brain The difference between note-taking vs note-making The need for mindful productivity My book writing system Are there 3 or 4 notetaking archetypes? It was…