Top Ten Tips for People Thinking about Writing a Book

If you checked the list of what people want to do before they die, you’d see that many want to write a book. This is a good thing because the more people who write books, the more enlightened the world will become. It just so happens that technology has made the process of writing a book easier than ever. Still “easier than ever” is not the same thing as “easy.” I wrote a book called APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur to help you write your book. Here are my top ten tips.

1. Write for the right reasons. Writing is ...

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Excerpt: Guy Kawasaki’s ‘What the Plus!’

Guy Kawasaki shares an excerpt from the first chapter of his latest, What the Plus!: Google+ for the Rest of US:

CHAPTER 1: WHY I LOVE GOOGLE+

Rational Exuberance

If Google+ was “two guys/gals in a garage with seed funding,” I would adopt a wait-and-see attitude, but this is hardly the case. Although new projects have failed at Google before (as at many large companies), this doesn’t mean that search is the only thing Google can do.

Google+ is Google itself. We’re extending it across all that we do—search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube—so that ...

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Guy Kawasaki: Plan C in Self-Publishing

You may be thinking, “There’s got to be a catch,” and there is. While the advantages of self-publishing are many, there are disadvantages, too:

• Advance. There are only three kinds of authors: those with a big advance, those who wish they had a big advance, and those that are lying. A six- or seven-figure advance is a thing of beauty: it enables you to focus on writing, and it’s proof that the publisher is serious about your book. And if your advance is large enough, you can deal with the fact that your publisher can’t directly sell ...

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Guy Kawasaki: The Doctrine of Self-Publishing

There is no shortcut to awesome. — Zoe Winters

The only thing worse than crushing people’s dreams is to mislead them. The problem isn’t that traditional publishers are dumb or evil. There are plenty of smart and nice people in the industry—probably more than most industries because a love of books motivated these folks.

The problem is that traditional publishing was geared to a world with limits, but these limits no longer exist:

• Shelf space in bookstores.
• Access to printing presses.
• Expertise to edit and produce books.

In the old, constrained world, something had to select and distribute ...

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Guy Kawasaki: Should You Write a Book?

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. -- Charles Caleb Colton

Why People Read Books

Dozens of people have asked me to critique their idea for a book, and my response is always the same:

Imagine that you’re in a Barnes & Noble bookstore (let’s hope there are still bookstores when you read this) or that you’re on the home page of Amazon. You see books by Isabel Allende, John Grisham, Anne Lamott and Lee Child. Over in the business ...

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Guest Post: Guy Kawasaki

I love to do business with small businesses—in-store, online, for myself, for others, for pleasure, for work—it doesn’t matter to me. I love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world. And I love to help small business owners because they aren’t flying around in corporate jets and lunching with investment bankers. American Express’s idea for Small Business Saturday is a marvelous one, and I’d like to help out by them explaining 10 ways that small businesses can enchant their customers.

Put likable, competent and passionate ...

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