Full title: Write & Sell Your Damn Book
Author: Paul Jarvis
Publisher: Paul Jarvis (2014)
Genre: Non fiction, motivational
Attributes: 55 pages (930Kb), e-book
On the scale of zero to one: ZERO PLUS (i.e. bought from Amazon.com, $0.89)
To get
going, one needs to get rid of certain fears and anxieties traditionally
associated with publishing. This is, it appears to me, the central message of
this text, half-motivational speech, half do-it-yourself philosophy.
Forget
about book length, writing tools, endorsements, contracts. Forget about
audience, promotion, platforms, printing, pricing, finding the right cover or
the right font type. Forget about all this at least initially. At least while
you proceed with the creation of the book you are going to sell. Jarvis’s
advice is to make a list of all the obstacles you might foresee (and there will
be many, as we know), and then simply do away with every point on that list.
Because what matters is to have
something to worry about rather than worrying about something you don’t have.
 |
| Traditional publishing may very well be the cause of a lot of procrastination when it comes to writing the damn book. Penguin steps and all. Source: The Telegraph |
What Jarvis
brings to the fore is a type of energy that can only reside in words. Reading
the book you get to realize that every single problem has a language that can
speak it. And that, to anyone who thinks about starting a venture (writerly or
otherwise), is the nudge in the ribcage that gets the mechanism rolling.
Everything that keeps the writer from writing is a damned handicap; and that
includes overactive brains that think only in terms of worries and fears. To
put it in Paul Jarvis’s words,
“If you start thinking about making your writing great or selling lots of copies, tell your brain to screw off. Any time spent not thinking about what you’re currently writing is time you’ve just wasted.”
Yes, swear
if you want, along with the author. By spitting these words out you make room
for others to come and inhabit your vocabulary. In doing so, you also find the
way words leave – so that you can use that avenue later, when they become too
much to bear and you need, indeed, to spit them out.
It comes in
circles, doesn’t it?
To sum up, Jarvis’s
text is short, punctilious, aphoristic, with a lot of bullet points to shoot
the page for easy memorization. This is a booklet you finish in under an hour
(thinking included), but which leaves you energized and, possibly, pumped up
for the next writing spree. If you want to learn economy of words, this is one
of the places you might want to try. The book has been designed as a series of
short lessons, each lesson under five pages in length, organized for maximum
gain and minimum waste of time.
“Save the flowery language for your next poetry slam, you hippie,”
the authors yells. And that means making efficiency your
religion, since
“most people have almost no attention span”
and spending too
much time trying to persuade them means wasting hours of your creative life.
And now I’m
feeling very worried about all the extra words I’ve put in this review.
Indeed. Writing does not mean worrying, and nor should we be writing to stop worrying. There is a bit of a hasidic reminder there - whatever you do, give it all your focus, heart and mind. We fail, of course, for we "have almost no attention span" and are at most times occupied by worries and fears, either abstract or concrete.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder how much of that fear of writing we often experience is the result of the preconceptions we have about the writing industry surrounding us. All the stress, all the expectations, all the professionals who know better and are ready to throw a tantrum at the drop of a hat.
ReplyDeleteI'm following Paul's course right now: up to Lesson 11! Hoping to have my new ebook released on Tuesday. :) "Write and sell your damn book" is definitely a book that delivers far more value than it's deceptively low price would imply.
ReplyDeleteI quite like Paul's style. What he says in the book is far from new, we need to admit. But the way he says it makes people feel ticklish in their fingertips. Did you have the same impression?
ReplyDelete