New Book Notes: Nicolas Cole, The Art and Business of Online Writing

Moinsen, everyone! 👋

I hope you’re all doing fine. Today, I have prepared a new book notes post for you. I recently finished reading “The Art and Business of Online Writing” by Nicolas Cole, a very interesting person as well as book. Below you will find the most important bits of the book included right here in the newsletter.

In case you would like a more in-depth version of it because the book seems interesting to you, here’s a link to the full post.

And, you can also listen to the full post as a narrated version on the Teesche Podcast!

Enjoy – all the best to you,
Teesche

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Writing online is a game which can be won if you learn about what keeps most humans interested and change your content accordingly.
2. Practice makes perfect and if done publicly, it helps you learn what works and what doesn’t.
3. When you think about earning money with your writing, be aware that you first need to build credibility by giving away most of it for free and then provide exceptional value with some paid content.

🎨 Impressions

This is a book which reads like an article on some online magazine, which isn’t coincidental. The writer, Nicolas Cole, is a highly successful online writer with many years of experience. He knows his stuff. There are a lot of actionable takeaways if you’re looking for how to increase readership of your writing online, wherever that may be. It is interesting though, that this book tells you how to write clickbaity content which is optimized for reader retention. This holds the question if that’s the most valuable type of writing. It still feels a bit trashy and blown up, and since the book is teaching you all the techniques while using those techniques itself, it left me with an uneasy feeling of getting slightly tricked, maybe.

On the other hand, in a bunch of the episodes within the book I lost focus and just had a hard time staying alert and making reading progress in the book. This is rather ironic since the book supposedly tells you how to write in the most captivating way. Or is it that I’m just not that interested in this topic? It certainly changed my way of thinking about online writing. I’m now more on the look for clues as to whether an article I’m reading has these properties I’ve now learned. Regarding my own writing, which I wanted to improve by reading this book and learning from it, I’m quite sure I won’t change much. I don’t feel like optimizing for amount of readers or reader retention and would instead rather stay authentic. I know this resonates with some people and that’s great as it is.