A refreshingly transparent guide to writing that plays on would-be authors’ desire to sell books.
In their follow-up to The Book in a Box Method (2015), Max (How to Naturally Increase Testosterone, 2014, etc.) and Obront break down the intimidating prospect of writing a nonfiction book into a series of manageable minitasks.
Max promises in the introduction, “I will teach you everything you need to know to make sure you write a great book—one that impacts readers lives and cements your legacy.” It might sound grandiose, but Max is confident that his experience writing and marketing bestselling books (for himself and for others) has taught him the secrets to publishing success. The process begins not with writing the first sentence but with outlining the book’s trajectory: setting the proper expectations for yourself, silencing your doubts, and positioning your book (i.e., figuring out “the place your book occupies in the mind of your reader and how that reader perceives your book as fulfilling their needs”). While there are some traditional writing tips here, what separates this from other writing guides is that the authors focus on boosting sales. In one case study, simply revising the book description (the finer points of which they provide) doubled a book’s sales within an hour. While some of these strategies may appear to be shortcuts or Band-Aids, many (like making sure your prose is simple and direct enough for a 12-year-old to read) aren’t easy so much as they are smart and simple. Max, the controversial writer of “fratire” memoirs, serves as the primary author, and the prose is inflected with his distinctive, conversational, and often blunt voice: “Let’s be clear: A good title won’t make your book do well, but a bad title will almost certainly prevent it from doing so.” His approach may be frank, and the tone is assuredly self-congratulatory, but even skeptical readers will find mantras to take back with them to their writing. While this is certainly not the only book an aspiring author should read, Max and Obront provide a vast amount of practical information that few other guides offer due to its explicitly commercial or promotional nature. Nonfiction authors, particularly those going the self-publishing route, will learn much from this business-minded manual.
A refreshingly transparent guide to writing that plays on would-be authors’ desire to sell books.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1406-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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