David Moldawer

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

📍 Montclair, NJ https://bookitect.com

i take it back–new media isn’t a cargo cult. click here to find out why!

> “Like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”—Herman Melville, > Moby-Dick You may have read my previous article, on escaping the New Media cargo cult [http://mavengame.com/2015/07/16/escaping-the-new-media-cargo-cult/]. Well, I take it back. To find out why,

what editors do and why they’re more useful than ever

Today, if you aren’t writing fiction, every single word you put down has to do something for you, or have the potential to do something. We write our diary entries in public on Facebook. We send letters to our friends on Medium. Our culture tells us that it’s

you should publish a book

You dream of writing a book. In fact, even if you’ve previously written books, you dream of writing another one. Two things are going through your mind right now: 1. He’s reading my mind. That means magic is real. I can fly. I can fly! crash…thump 2.

escaping the new media cargo cult: or, how I learned to stop worrying and ignore the metrics

This article appeared in modified form on Boing Boing [https://boingboing.net/2015/07/16/escaping-the-new-media-cargo-c.html]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What appealed to me about the Web from the start was that what seemed too niche for the “mainstream” could flourish because you had a mechanism (search, links) for reaching all the

on tools for thinking and irritating your readers

It used to be 15 minutes, but then TED came along.As an editor, I judge the strength of a piece of writing by the weight of its emphasis on a single viewpoint. If you read something written (well) by a person with a substantially different way of seeing the

9 ways to spot a promising book proposal

Ben Leventhal, co-founder of Eater, wrote a Medium article entitled “The 9 Habits of Highly Effective Restaurants.” Speaking of which, do we italicize Medium article titles? Use quotes? I’m going to go with vertical bars, a.k.a. pipes. In |The 9 Habits of Highly Effective Restaurants| Ben identified

books are over (not in the way you’re thinking, I’m just hooking you with an overblown title)

> Shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. —Shibumi, by Trevanian (Writers: There’s nothing

why creative jobs seem harder—and why that’s a good thing

This article first appeared in modified form on the CreativeLive blog [http://blog.creativelive.com/lessons-niche-market-from-creator-of-italics/]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was reading the wonderful show business biography Act One [https://smile.amazon.com/Act-One-Autobiography-Moss-Hart/dp/1250050898/], by the legendary playwright Moss Hart, when the following passage struck me: > It is taken

a 16th-century lesson on finding your niche market

This article first appeared in modified form on the CreativeLive blog [http://blog.creativelive.com/lessons-niche-market-from-creator-of-italics/]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First use of italics by Aldus ManutiusA piece in the New York Times alerted me to a tribute to the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius on display at New York City’s posh Grolier