Read:
How Bestseller Lists Work (Tim Ferriss): Ever wondered what it takes to hit the New York Times bestseller list? Well, the truth is that it’s mostly luck, timing, and making sure you’re on the Times’s radar. I’ve seen lots of books with extremely high sales not hit the list, and I’ve also seen plenty of books with moderate sales hit the list, simply because they launched on a slow week. The takeaway? Hitting the NYT list isn’t as much about sheer volume of sales as it is about playing your cards right, while the Amazon lists are a more accurate representation of a book’s popularity.
How to Gain a Massive Following on Instagram: 10 Proven Tactics To Grow Followers and Engagement (Courtney Seiter for BufferSocial): As I’ve written about here, Instagram is an interesting platform because it engenders engagement, and it isn’t over-crowded (yet). It’s also a place with high conversion from fans to sales, so it’s been the hot new thing in the publishing world lately. Is it better for visually driven nonfiction than for fiction? I think so. I’m still of the belief (more on that here) that Twitter is the best social media home for fiction writers.
I Quit My Job Today (And So Can You!) (Sarah Knight on Medium): Ooo, juicy! Don’t we all love a I-quit-my-job-and-went-after-my-dream story? Chasing a passion over a paycheck is practically the American Dream of the millenial generation. Read Sarah Knight’s story of how she quit her Senior Editor job at Simon & Schuster to go freelance, and check her website out here if you’re an author looking for a top-notch editor.
Will Book Publishers Ever Start Fact-Checking? They’re Already Starting (Boris Kachka for Vulture): “It’s every editor’s nightmare,” says an editor. “You live in fear that someone’s gonna get by you. It’s like working for the TSA. You don’t want to be the guy who let the terrorist in.” Being the editor or agent behind a book that’s found out to be fraudulent truly is what our nightmares are made of, but there are so few systems in place for vetting authors and books. Happy to see that some imprints and private companies are finally filling this gap.
The Clues to a Great Story (Andrew Stanton in a TED talk): This is a Watch, not a Read, but it’s a worthwhile one. Stanton is the writing genius behind smash hits like Toy Story and Wall-E, and if anyone knows how to spin a good story, it’s the minds at Pixar. In his words: “Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We’re born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.”
Eat & Drink:
When I was in college, I studied abroad in Verona, Italy. If you do an Italian vacation right, you should expect to gain a few pounds. If you live there for nearly four months, you can expect to buy a whole new wardrobe. This happened. And naturally, I blame a cookbook.
