David Moldawer

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

📍 Montclair, NJ https://bookitect.com

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

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