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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'

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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

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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

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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

How to Get to #1 on Amazon (Or at Least How I Did It Twice)
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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.

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Why keep old tweets?

I decided to delete my first 10,000 tweets. More will be deleted in time. Why? The more important question is “why not?” I see no advantages in keeping an archive on any social media platform, and lots of potential disadvantages.

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Craig Mod on What Makes a Good Newsletter

Craig Mod, prognosticator of publishing, recently tweeted [https://twitter.com/craigmod/status/1062225639619551232] about newsletters: > “There's a tendency to over-design newsletters as of late. I think this misses the point, the *power* of a newsletter is from its intimacy. You can design intimacy out of an experience

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The Value of a “Good Old Newsletter”

From Kai Brach [https://click.densediscovery.com/recipients/dd6f7cc0-7dae-460e-8cf6-cc6766b6b381/web_view] , Publisher of Offscreen magazine and the Dense Discovery newsletter: > “Funny enough though, the good old email newsletter is currently experiencing a bit of a comeback. Perhaps as a reaction to the bottomless, anxiety-inducing social feeds, the email sits

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The Mechanization of Knowledge

> “Improvements in communication make for increased difficulties of understanding.” — Harold Innis [http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8557] This quote messed with my head for a while, yet it accurately describes the point we're at with some forms of online publishing. Breaking the barriers and killing off the

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I Launched a Book on Patreon

I finally did it. I set up a Patreon account [https://www.patreon.com/cjchilvers]. I don't expect a lot of people to sign up, because I've yet to launch much of what is planned for the coming year, but those who do join this early