Product People

Paul Jarvis ( Everything I Know), Sacha Greif ( Discover Meteor), and Nathan Barry ( Authority) invited me to host a Self-Publishing Hangout with them this week. It was a great opportunity for me, because I’m about to publish my first “book” ( Amplification). Our Google Hangout ended being a 2 hour marathon of us sharing our experience with writing, publishing, and promoting eBooks, as well as answering questions from everybody in the chat room.

In Part 1 we cover choosing a topic, whether you need to be a good writer, writers block, fear and quality!

Show Notes

In Part 1 we cover choosing a topic, whether you need to be a good writer, writers block, fear and quality!

Notable quotes

Nathan: “If you try to wait until you’re a great writer, that’s bad. I had someone contact me who read every one of my blog posts. He said in his email: ‘Man, when you started you were a horrible writer. But I could see you getting better each post you wrote.’ I would say: start writing, and use that to get better at writing.”

Paul: “I feel the same way. I don’t think I’m a great writer, but I know that I’m a lot better now than when I started writing. The only way I got better, was by writing. I write every day; I don’t publish work every day (that’s not the point). The more that I sit down and write, the more ideas that I come up with that are worth publishing.”

Sacha: “I didn’t have a fixed amount of words to write every day. I approach writing like design: start with a sketch, low fidelity mockup, high fidelity… every iteration comes close and closer to the real thing. I start with outline of the chapters, and start filling them up. For Discover Meteor, we must have gone through each chapter about 10 times, it was really iterative.”