publishing
Experiments Check In
A few of you wrote to me to ask about how my year of experiments is going. To refresh everyone, for 2021, I changed personal websites, started blogging daily again, changed book publishing models, moved to a new newsletter host, and tried to fix an old guitar with my son
Get Your Ass Kicked
From Brené Brown [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9855106-if-you-are-not-in-the-arena-getting-your-ass] via Weekly Thing [https://weekly.thingelstad.com/]: > “If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I am not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today
Experiment 1: Sivers Style
The reason I moved my personal site was to start some experiments — to see what I liked to publish and what my readers liked too. The first experiment was to implement the same idea Derek Sivers had last year with his books. I think it’s genius. The idea he
It’s Time to Get Personal
The personal website seems to making a comeback. Why? When social networks fail, we return to the hub: the place you own, the place where you control the experience. It's where you're indexed for life, if you're lucky. It's where you'
9 Lessons on Landing Pages
I just spent 3 months in meetings and writing sessions helping to create a landing page and content strategy for a new product that I can’t tell you about — you’re not in the product’s audience anyway, so it doesn’t matter. What I can tell you, now
Be a Lazy Billionaire
I was inspired to start updating my oldest available book, The Van Halen Encyclopedia [https://www.cjchilvers.com/the-van-halen-encyclopedia], by a few great ideas I’ve seen from others over the past month. I thought they might inspire you too. I began by updating the book in real time on
How to Get to #1 on Amazon (Or at Least How I Did It Twice)
The second edition of A Lesser Photographer [https://amzn.to/2WL9brx], my book on minimalism for photographers, went to #1 in the pro photography genre sometime this month. I wasn’t expecting it, so I wanted to figure out why it happened. It’s my second time at #1 in
Can you publish a guitar?
Blank canvases products are everywhere. Pens, watches, cars, guitars — there are certain objects that attract artists to create. I love digging into why. In a way, it’s just a different form of publishing. It seems like all the same rules apply: create, edit, integrate, and ship. Repeat until death.