David Moldawer

Book collaborator and ghostwriter specializing in business, personal development, and self-help.

📍 Montclair, NJ https://bookitect.com

why write a book when there’s this perfectly good short pier off which to take a long walk?

I’m back from an extended hiatus working on an intense book-writing project. The experience reminded me of a fact we editors cheerfully ignore as we exhort our authors to persevere: while writing can be moderately challenging, along the lines of bridge-playing or hula-hooping, book completion is an absurdly improbable

advice on creating work for an audience

I recently spotted this list of lessons learned from running an open-source project [http://taskwarrior.org/docs/advice.html] and found much of it relevant to creating any kind of work on an ongoing basis for an audience. If you’re interested in software development, the original post is worth

if you don’t know what you’re doing, do it faster

> If you read your contract carefully, you’ll see that we ask for the show to be 90 minutes in length, for it to have this many commercial breaks, and for it to be done for this budget. But nowhere in the contract do we ask for it to

what publishers should do

This article appeared in modified form on Boing Boing [https://boingboing.net/2016/01/22/what-publishers-should-do.html]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can’t work at a book publisher for more than five minutes without someone telling you what publishers should do. (You know, “to survive.” “Be relevant.” Something.) Even literary agents, who

how to write a book that holds your reader’s attention

This article appeared in modified form on Boing Boing [https://boingboing.net/2015/12/07/how-to-write-a-book-that-holds.html]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- User experience design is a holistic field that touches on every aspect of the experience the user has with your product, all the way down to opening the box. As a book

you can stop holding your stomach in, no one will ever pay attention to you

> Carl: Your books are safe. While you’re reading them, you get to become Tarzan, or Robinson Crusoe. > Bastian: But that’s what I like about them. > Carl: Mm hmm. But afterwards, you get to be a little boy again.” > —The Neverending Story (1984) It’s

ad hoc: algorithm-defiant human-only curation

Last year, I’d seriously considered partnering with various trusted peers in the creation of a new, “hybrid” publisher. It was clear as Gorilla Glass what traditional publishers were doing wrong so I figured I’d start my own. Then I realized I had no idea what to do instead.

digital everything is terrible, so put down the internet once you’ve read this

In response to my article on how to package your book so that people will pick it up off the shelf [http://mavengame.com/2015/10/06/package-your-book/], Josh Bernoff [http://withoutbullshit.com/] wrote: > Isn’t it more important what browsers on Amazon.com see than bookstore browsers? I

how to package your book

Authors stumble when it comes to titling their work. “Titling,” mind you, not “naming.” Naming says what it is to you, the author. Titling tells readers what it might be to them. Subtle but important distinction. On the traditional publishing side, we’d lump title, subtitle, and cover design under

if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to like it, does it go viral?

> Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. Chatterton killed