You’re a businessperson. You may not think of yourself as a writer, but you know that writing well can boost your results and your career. Naturally, you want to do better. Every week I point you to articles and blog posts that I think will teach you something or spark an idea or two. The posts are about the intertwined tasks of reading and writing. Some weeks there are more pointers than others.
This week I’m pointing you to posts on stories, the Curse of Knowledge, your book launch, and Amazon’s crackdown on phony reviews.
From Noah Zandan: The Science of Stories: How Stories Impact Our Brains
“When was the last time you got lost in a story? Perhaps you sat down to read ‘just one chapter’ of a book and grew completely absorbed, spending three or four hours buried in the pages without realizing it. Perhaps you tuned into a podcast on your morning walk and became so engrossed you went on autopilot, finding yourself back at home without quite knowing how you got there. Or maybe you lost yourself in a movie, heart racing, tears flowing, breath caught in your throat right along with the characters.”
From Kelly Decker: Are You Cursed by Knowledge?
“That is, you don’t know what it’s like NOT to know what you know. This has HUGE implications in our communications. We end up communicating to clients, internal team members, and even our kids in a language they can’t comprehend and then wonder why our product doesn’t sell, that project doesn’t move forward and why our kids just won’t patiently wait when we ask them to.”
Wally’s Comment: You’ll find out more about The Curse of Knowledge in Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
From Denise Lee Yohn: 3 Secrets to a Successful Book Launch
“My new book, FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies, has only been out for a couple of weeks now but it’s already looking like a great success. It’s gotten nearly 50 reviews with a 4.9 rating and been the #1 new release in a couple of categories on Amazon. And people have already started asking me for tips on successfully marketing a book. So I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned about book launches from this and my first bestselling book, What Great Brands Do, and provide a few of the secrets to a successful book launch that I’ve discovered.”
From Mary Hanbury: Amazon has an underground subculture that trades reviews for deals — and the company is finally cracking down
“Amazon sent a mass email to customers who had lost access to their accounts, saying that the deactivations happened either because customers broke the company’s review policy or because they were using the account for ‘commercial purposes.'”
Sources I Check Regularly
I find the posts and articles that I share with you on The Writing Edge in many places. But there are a few that provide insightful pieces again and again. Here they are.