How To Research Stories For Your Books

James Taylor interviews David Burkus and they talked about How To Research Stories For Your Books

In this episode, we cover:

• The process of starting out as an author
• How to research stories for your books
• Organizing your book structure

Resources:

• Recommended Book: Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
• Recommended Tools: Scrivener, Microsoft Word
• Official Website

For More of Creative Life Podcast By James Taylor

Artificial Intelligence Generated Transcript

Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.

James Taylor
Hi, I'm James Taylor business creativity and innovation keynote speaker. And this is the Creative Life, a show dedicated to you the creative. If you're looking for motivation, inspiration and advice, while at home at work or on your daily commute, then this show is for you. Each episode brings you a successful creative, whether that's an author, musician, entrepreneur, perform a designer, or a thought leader. They'll share with you their journey, their successes, their failures, their creative process, and much much more. You'll find Show Notes for this episode as well as free training on creativity over at Jamestaylor.me. Enjoy this episode.

Hi, it's James Taylor here. Today's episode was first aired as part of International Authors Summit. This inspiring virtual summit reveals the secrets of making marketing and monetizing a best selling book. If you would like to access the full video version as well as in depth sessions with over 40 Best Selling authors that I've got a very special offer for you just go to InternationalAuthorsSummit.com, where you'll be able to register for a free pass for the summit. Yeah, that's right. Over 40 New York Times and Amazon best selling authors, book editors, agents and publishers, sharing their insights, strategies and tactics on how to write and market your first or next best sellers. So just go to InternationalAuthorsSummit.com, but not before you listen to today's episode.

Hey there, it's James Taylor, and I'm delighted today to welcome David Burkus. David Burkus is a best selling author, a sought after speaker and Associate Professor of leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University. His latest book, friend of a friend offers readers a new perspective on how to grow their networks and build key connections, one based on the science of human behavior, not wrote networking advice. He's delivered and key keynotes to leaders of Fortune 500 companies and the future leaders of the United States Naval Academy. His TED Talk has been viewed over 1.8 million times. And he is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. It's my great pleasure having David joined us today. So welcome, David.

David Burkus
Oh, James, thank you so much for having me.

James Taylor
So share with everyone what's happening in your world just now.

David Burkus
Like it's good. So we are at the time of recording this. We're a couple months out from the launch a friend of a friend, which is my third, third real book, let's say. And so it's been really fun. You were at that point where you're getting like seeing pictures on Twitter and Instagram of people who've read the book and what have you, like literally just yesterday got an email from a college class that read the book as part of one of their business courses. I thought that was like unexpected and kind of

James Taylor
i think i think we saw that one on Twitter, but everyone kind of standing there with their copies of the book. Yeah, it

David Burkus
was really it's really kind of cool. So that's I mean, for for an author for writer, it's stuff like that is super rewarding. So it's just kind of the push of trying to talk about the book all the time and get the message out there is starting to sort of compound and people are responding. And that's what's really fun. That's when it gets really fun. Now I'm sure your books in various can airport bookstores as well when people are going traveling around around the world have

James Taylor
you have you had the thing yet I was speaking to another author the other day. And he was saying he had his first experience of being on a plane. And the person sitting next to him had a copy of his book. And he was in that kind of slightly like what what do I do? What was? What do I say? Chase? I asked him how are they enjoying the book? What do you think of the book? Or is that double edged sword? Have you experienced it yet?

David Burkus
So I haven't I haven't had that in an airport or something like that. I've had something similar happen kind of at conferences like you go give a speech. And they usually bundle a bunch of books in and so then your, your what's really funny is if you're like the closing keynote for the day, right, the book was in their swag bag. So you see people sort of like thumbing through it and they don't know who you are yet, because you haven't spoken. So you just kind of walk up to them. That's that's happened a couple times. But the plain thing still has not. However, I have gotten text messages from friends of mine who will like you know, take their phone and take a little shot is secretly of somebody reading the book and send it over to me. That's been kind of cool.

James Taylor
So tell me what I mean. Wait, wait, did the writing part begin for you? Because I know, obviously, you're your speaker, you work in academia as well. But take us back to that very first book. What tells the story about that?

David Burkus
Well, for me, it actually kind of goes a little bit further back than that. So I knew much about my career is very accidental. But I knew that I wanted to be a writer from about 14 years old. So I was English in high school and things were the that was the subject that really resonated with me I was that that kid that was reading, like beat up copies of jack Kerouac and that kind of thing, which it's funny I read on the road, maybe a year ago and I definitely liked it more when I was 1415. But when you're that young, like you think that means you're going to be a fiction writer you think that means Okay, am I going to be an artistic novelist and do literary fiction or am I going to like sell out like James Patterson but make money, right? That's like the big existential dilemma. So I arrived at university to study English and to study writing, and it was there that you kind of got exposed to a lot of different genres, and this was right around the time where social science books stopped being boring, right? So this was people like Malcolm Gladwell, shivan and Heath, Daniel Pink, they're sort of first books were coming out. In fact, I remember I was I think it was a junior for your third year in university, when the tipping point came out. And I remember reading it and being like, this is fascinating. And this guy's every good, every bit as good a storyteller as a fiction writer, right. So that was sort of a pivot for me to think like, Oh, this is what I want to do. So when I got out, I realized I don't I studied this writing and the storytelling part, but I don't know any of social science. So I went to graduate school for that, I was actually working in a totally different industry. But lots of different economic changes happen in university life, because I had already had a master's degree and a half of a doctorate was sort of the great place to like land, while I was building up the platform to write the first book, etc. So all of the other things speaking, being professor, etc, we're sort of tangential to that big, overarching goal of getting books out there. I mean, literally, like, probably a decade worth of wanting to walk into a Barnes and Noble one day or a chapters or at wh Smith and see my book there. Which finally happened 10 years 10 years later, but it's, it's been a while. It's been a while for sure. But that's

James Taylor
interesting, the way you described it there. We've had some other guests on, I've talked about how they're their speakers who, right, as opposed to writers who speak. And for some of them, really the book is, is a is a business card as a tool to get them speaking gigs, primarily, they don't particularly enjoy writing. It's not an enjoyable experience for them. But they know they need to get books out there every couple of years in order to stay relevant as well. It sounds like you're a much of you can choose in the harder path. Your books are more obviously research driven, as well. So you have to put in these kind of things you get a ghostwriter. And to do, yeah, yeah,

David Burkus
I would, I would, I would never hire a ghostwriter. Because for me, that wouldn't be not being a writer, right. Like I, I respect that model. And that point of view, I also kind of hate that model and that point of view, because they get steals attention away from sort of the writers who also speak but far paid for me to tell anybody how to run their life for their business, right. But I think you hit the nail on the head that I think everybody kind of becomes one or the other. You're either a writer who supplements writing income by traveling around and speaking and by the way, speaking pays better for almost all of us. Or you say I, you know, I'm a speaker, I'm a consultant first, and this is my marketing tool. I don't, I can't really connect with that, because the goal has always been the writing. Now, I will tell you that I have hated writing the first draft of pretty much every book that I've written, I love the research part where I'm like learning and playing around with these concepts and figuring out like, what's the structure of the argument, right. And I love editing and I love the marketing side, but actually like having to show up for work every day and type out 500 to 1000 words. That part I don't know, anybody that likes.

James Taylor
This is the backside on the chair, bit of the process. So as you were you can knew that you sort of mentioned Malcolm Gladwell, and and how the kind of the social sciences started to come into things. Who were those other with the other kind of mentors that you had when you first starting to move into world of writing people that maybe can help you personally helped can support you in that journey? Or were the people that you can have looked at from a fine can be much tracked how they built their their writing and their speaking and everything around him?

David Burkus
Yeah. So I mean, mentor is a strong word. I think it implies a kind of like we meet every week for coffee, right? We Tuesdays with maurey or something like that. I definitely didn't have that. I would say probably two things. The first was that when I realized, okay, this is the genre. This is the style of book that I want. I started devising a way to get in touch with my heroes, right? And for me, because this was 10 years ago, that was a podcast. Now podcasting is sort of like the GarageBand. Everybody has one now, right? And so I don't know that this trick would work I you'd have to find a different medium. But I was the 47th business related podcast on iTunes, right? Because just it was wide open space, you had to be fairly tech savvy to figure it all out. And I was young and could figure all of that out. And so I started inviting people to come on my podcast because nobody knew what this world was about. Nobody knew that no one was listening to the show yet. And so we did, we probably recorded four or five interviews before the first one aired. And there was anyone actually listening to the show. But the very second episode was Daniel Pink, who remains kind of the template, the role model in my mind, and Dan and I had become friendly. Ever since then, it's been really, really useful. Again, I wouldn't call him a mentor, right? he's a he's a role model for sure. And he's somebody that I can bounce a couple questions off. In terms of that mentorship role. I think that's kind of the importance of peers, finding people who are around the same stage a few people ahead if you'd be behind but mostly peers to to run around with that that kind of works better for refining your craft and learning a bit more. I mean, don't get me wrong, it'd be great if like Malcolm Gladwell called me from his place in New York and said, I want to Skype call with you every week and develop you as a writer. But it's kind of hard to get those people to do that. And so a peer group is a much more useful resource in that context.

James Taylor
So tell tell us about that. You mentioned they can then point to the research and as a stage you really enjoy when you're working on your books. How do you structure your research? What what talk us through when we let's see, if you have a kernel of an idea in your head? How do you go about starting to research that what are the ways that you're collecting your, your kind of segmenting up all this information that you're bringing together?

David Burkus
Yeah, so there's a there's a really good LinkedIn article from Adam Grant that borrows from an actual social social science our article, I'm I don't remember the name of the original author, which is a tragedy because it's his work. But he essentially studied what ideas are sticky. This was before the heat, sir, before Jonah Berger, etc. And he said that at least in like nonfiction, in arguments in the social science world, the arguments that gain traction, get citations, etc, they all follow a very unique format, which is basically we think this, but really this, right, and if you think about every what we could call social science, you know, enjoyable nonfiction, business books, whatever, whatever. I like to call them the big idea books, right? All of those books follow that format, right? We think this, but really, it's this now that can be that can take a couple different trends. Like we could say, we think something is a macro trend, but really, it's a micro trend, or vice versa. We think something is small and individual, but really, everybody's being influenced by each other. You look at like to pick on a Gladwell, right? outliers, we think success is the result of sort of pure nothing but hard work. But actually it's that plus a bunch of different opportunities. And the way that the system is structured kind of picks the winners. And so we need to refine the system. Right? That's, that's outliers. Grant, give and take is the same way. Right? We think nice guys finish last, but actually, they finished last end first. And it's the takers that occupy the middle, right? So every every book kind of all of that. So that's what I'm looking for first, right? What is the we think this but really, there is a wealth of research that suggests something else, right, and and so now I'm providing a different way to kind of look at it, my books tend to follow I once had a, like a negative Amazon review. This was before I decided to stop reading all Amazon reviews. But I once had a negative Amazon review that said, this book reads like a series of medium articles. And I thought, actually, that's a compliment, because that's the exact structure that I want, right? I want an intro chapter or two that introduces you to the argument. And then I want a bunch of individually, essentially essays, that all are in line with that argument, but teaching you about different things, right and different phenomenon. So you're sort of seeing it, I just I like it that way. I think a lot of people structure their books such that you can read the first two or three chapters, and you can get it right. And then the rest is just filler. I like to think that mine can be that because the argument is usually in the first chapter plus a bunch of different contexts for seeing it. So I'm not just rehashing the argument, I'm showing the argument a bunch of different areas. So people actually read to the end. Which is, which is no, I like it there. There. Definitely. There are some books that have that you can get the whole thing in the first two chapters, and never have to read beyond it that sell better than than I do. But I don't think there's enjoyable to read. And there certainly probably weren't as enjoyable to write. That's why those people hired ghost writers.

James Taylor
So you so you find that you kind of go that coal counter-intuitive the the movie contrarian view of something that I think the writer Patrick's fair to Peggy was saying, whenever he gives a speech, he always wants to give that the the bit, it's almost like in a song, you'll have the middle eight is the bit where you can like everyone thinks it's going in one way. And then you kind of like pivot a little bit. It's like, Oh, I think I think kind of expect that thing is kind of unexpected. So you've you kind of know what that thing is. And then you've kind of then got to stop backfilling and supporting that argument and finding the stories and finding examples. So how do you go about doing that? How do you go about starting to research and finding those things to support your own? Yeah, so

David Burkus
um, it varies, right? It really varies by book. So my first book was around creativity and innovation. That's that's how we met. And I had the, the science first, right, I had all of these different studies that outlined all of these different alternative ways of looking at creativity. And so then I had to go out and research the stories, right for under new management, which is my second book, I had the stories I had the profiles of companies, but I had to go find the science. friend of a friend the newest one is back to the missive creativity route where we have the science and then we have to go find the stories. The science is probably easier to find because everybody cites everybody and you can kind of go down the rabbit hole, you find one paper that's in line with your argument and suddenly you've got a wealth of stuff to look up in the citations. The stories are a bit harder. I try and sort of always be looking for For those like I'll give you an example. The Winter Olympics just happened a couple months back maybe actually probably half a year back by now. And and one of the stories that we kept talking about in the United States was curling Believe it or not, no curling is actually like a boring but oddly mesmerizing sport. I don't know if you've ever watched it, you start out like what is this and an hour later, you're still watching it. But the US won the curling medal and the team captain of USA curling was actually a guy who got thrown out of USA curling, and started his own kind of like club that was going to train and compete for the right to represent the us again, because now they hadn't been chosen. And they did. And then they went and won the gold medal. That's a really cool story. So when it happened, I basically bookmarked it printed out every article, I could find about that, and threw it in a drawer somewhere. And I remember that story, because it's the top of a stack of a lot of different stuff. But that's kind of what I'm doing is always trying to collect those stories so that it's not like starting from scratch, I can go, huh, well, the next thing is probably going to be in and around teams. And this is a great team story. So let me file this one away, right. And then you go back and look through your files, and probably half of them turn out to be junk, or actually a bogus story that some publicists ran, right. But you find ones that actually stick and it can be really interesting

James Taylor
now, right? It's like Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene, they'll kind of use the an index card way of kind of collecting all those stories. And then they can have moving them through kind of physically about I guess, other people use things like Scrivener for kind of moving these things and constructing them. When it comes to you sketch kind of sitting down and unnaturally structuring out the whole you mentioned that can a medium type of format in terms of how are you? How are you thinking in terms of the over arching kind of narrative or book and how you structure your books?

David Burkus
Yeah, so I don't I don't use no cards. I've worked closely, Ryan's a good friend. And I still have no idea how he does the no cards thing because I need the whole article, right? So what I will do is either a printing out, I actually kill a lot of trees, and I feel bad about that, but most most papers sustainably sourced now, so it's okay. We, I print up, if it's an article, I print that up, if it's a, if it's in a book, I actually photocopy those pages, and I have the pages right to eight and 11 or a4 paper in a big stack, usually, then you organize by chapter, right. So this story kind of works with this chapter. So it goes in a pile over here. And you can actually tell so this, the bookshelf behind me along the floor of it when I'm writing a book is like 12 different stacks of paper, right? The only note cards that I use are actually a note card on top of the stack that tells me what chapter that is, right? So then I go through, and I'll highlight what I like. And I'll make margin notes and that sort of thing. And the writing the act of typing is the act of going through that stack. In terms of the internal structure of a chapter, there's usually like a medium article type of thing, there's usually an opening story that sort of draws you in a thesis of some research that explains that story in that thesis. And then what I really what Dan pink actually challenged me to do when writing this last book was to be a bit more prescriptive. So now each one also ends with like, okay, and if all of this is true, this is what this means for you. Yeah. Which I think that's one of the reasons this one's resonating more. But that's, that's kind of the structure of each chapter. But it starts with those stacks of paper.

James Taylor
And I think that point there, I think that's really good. You put in the book, because that can frustrate me about some of those social science books. It's, it's, it's obviously written by people who really cared passionately about the science behind it and have done all that stuff. And it's, and it's an IT you do have stories within it. But the end, you kind of got you kind of want them to say. And this is kind of what you should do next, if you're a such as this is the next step. And I always kind of feel it's like it's kind of going to a meal and never quite getting to the main course, or you feel kind of unsatisfied, so so I love the fact that he challenged you, you did that on the book, you kind of gave some of those slightly more prescriptive things, because I know some more kind of academic writers would try and steer away from that, because that's not what they're they're about nowhere they're trying to do.

David Burkus
Yeah. And this is actually exactly what we found with a friend of a friend. Right? So the there's a grand thesis, a friend of a friend, but the inspiration for the book was that there are all of these networking advice books on here's how to do something very prescriptive. And they're not based in research. And then on the rare occasion that someone that's actually studied network science writes a popular press book, the main argument of the book is something to the effect of isn't this fascinating? Look at everything that we've discovered. Right? And it is fascinating, but what do I do about that? Yeah, right. And that's where I've really started to see people like myself, like Dan, like others, the sort of social science writers now I keep one foot in academia, but I really see my goal is translating that, isn't it fascinating research into and here's what it means for your life.

James Taylor
So when it comes to old age, I mean, there's, I highly encourage people get their copy of a friend of a friend, is there any particular thing that you find in kind of researching and writing that book, you think particularly applies to authors maybe in in their researching of something or in terms of how they market and sell and get the book out into the world?

David Burkus
Yeah. So I mean, I'll give you two right. The first is that we're in a in terms of writing, we're in a really interesting point, if you work in an organization, we're in this like 30 year arc towards trying to tear down silos and build flatter more matrix organizations. And one of the things that we find from network science is that people cluster clustering happens naturally. And that's a good thing, because information flows a bit more freely inside of a cluster than if everybody was sort of egalitarian Li connected to everybody else. Too much clustering is a bad thing. But like don't ignore it. Now, what I think that means for writers is like you need to find who is your cluster, who is your community of similar writers that are around you, my friend, Jeff Goins would call it your scene, right? And actually, Jeff was the one that told me about sort of the whole story of Ernest Hemingway going off to Paris and meeting with a bunch of people there and becoming I mean, you know, running around having drinks with Pablo Picasso, he had Gertrude Stein, and all these people, Picasso aplicar, that was a weird slip. And it made him a better writer. And I think we all sort of need that. So clustering, don't ignore that. And the beautiful thing is in technology, you can have that cluster, whether it's in person or virtual. The other thing I think is really interesting, from a marketing standpoint, is network science. One of the most fascinating findings is this thing called the majority illusion, essentially, we're tribal people, all of us take our cues off of what's popular, and what's interesting based on what other people are talking about, right. And if that's true, then word of mouth is important. But it's, it's possible to sort of fake word of mouth, if you pick your demographic, I'm going after these specific people, then you can kind of study that network and build relationships with who are the most influential people in that network. And rather than trying to be everywhere, all at once, you can really drill down into just those people. And you can look far more popular than you are. And in in the book, I actually talk about Tim Ferriss nonfiction writer amongst a bunch of other stuff that he does, but he's had three now he's in five crazy successful books. The first one though, nobody knew who he was, what he did was identified, I'm going after 18 to 35 year old tech savvy males. What are the blogs they read, who are the people that they trust were the companies that admire and he spent two years building relationships with the people that were influential in that little niche so that when the book came out, those people were talking about it. And if you were an 18 to 35 year old tech savvy male, which I was at the time that he launched this book, he appeared everywhere. Yeah. And if you weren't one of those people, you didn't know who he was, like, there are still people who don't know who Tim Ferriss is, because they're not in one of the verticals that he's chosen to target. And it's, it's one thing to pick your niche, it's a whole other thing to go Okay, now that I know the niche, who are the people that I need to build relationships with? It'll support me when this comes out and make the book look like everyone is talking about it, even if they're not,

James Taylor
yeah, that kind of idea that kind of creating almost like crowding around when something's happening. We had a human cloud on this and who kind of came up around the same time as Tim, with both bloggers when bloggers blogs were kind of in their infancy and just and can be everyone would be kind of good to blog world. And they all kind of got to know each other and it can speak to also your cluster. You know, he said there's a whole bunch of as we all kind of came Chris Brogan, you know, they all kind of came around the same time they all kind of came came up together really. And then obviously, some have gone on to great things. But I think that's a fantastic strategy to use if you can know your your audience. And there's another one Ryan holidays actually spoken about. I remember interviewing him years ago, for his book, trust me, I'm lying secrets of a media manipulator, which is a fantastic book. And he talks all about this, it is actually quite simple to find out who that New York Times journalist which blogs, they follow, which Trump's Twitter accounts they follow and then start to implement influence those and then they can have lead on to each other and suddenly feels like everyone's talking about this Tim Ferriss guy or this this other one, you can creating random actually a relatively small number of people.

David Burkus
Yeah, no, exactly right. And I was just putting this into practice with I was I was on the phone maybe a week ago, with a friend of mine that started a charity, I won't name him in case that doesn't work. But a pretty notable worldwide charities. He's launching a book at the end of this year, early next year, and we were talking about podcasts. And one of the things that he said, which was brilliant was he said, No, I don't want to know what all of the ones are. I want to know what the 20 I have to be on are to make the 63 million people who listen to podcasts think, Wow, everyone is talking about me, right? Which is totally possible to do. And in a world of technology, like Ryan was saying, it's even easier to find that out because you can I mean, you go to their Twitter and you can see who they follow right? Or go to their medium or go to their Facebook, whatever it is, you can see pretty clearly who everyone's taking their cues from. here's the kicker though don't then just go spam. Those people make a deliberate effort to build a real relationship with those people help them so that when that time comes, it's time for you to do your thing. They're eager and excited to talk about you and suddenly Everyone who's watching them is like, Man, it's James Taylor guys everywhere.

James Taylor
And I guess that's one of the the other part of your life, there's a speaking. And I think one of the best places to do that is still live events is great. I love online. I love doing things and communicating online email and doing online just now as well. But there's nothing like having that conversation with someone, especially if you're like, in a green room, you're speaking and they're speaking or you're, you're having a conversation, you're doing a book signing, being able to have those kind of conversations. It's like, it's a different type of thing. You having completed them conversations,

David Burkus
Yeah, totally. And I'll even I'll even try and level that up and say, Okay, I'm speaking in this city, even if they're not in the conference, I'm not going to see in the green room, what have you Like, who do I know, that's in the city that I need to reconnect with? Yeah, right. And I'll make it like, I'll usually land on the first available airplane into that new city, and I'll leave as late as I possibly can, on the day that I have to leave to maximize that time to sort of reconnect with us, we all get to sleep on the plane, right, but to maximize my time reconnecting with those people, because what we found and I deal with this a bit in front of a friend is that online communities and networks are fantastic. But they are a supplement to not a replacement for your existing offline network, you've got to take it offline eventually.

James Taylor
Now having gone through this journey of writing all these different books now has that was there a key aha moment or lightbulb moment a time when you said okay, actually, this is I want to tweak the direction I'm going with my writing or I want to serve maybe a slightly different audience or the books need to serve a slightly different purpose for me now than when I when I first started writing,

David Burkus
I mean, not not in terms of of changing a book or something like that probably one of the best insights that I got was actually from Ryan Holiday, I was on a call with him. Some point, we were talking about a bunch of stuff and kind of what the authors that take it seriously. And you can see slow and consistent growth over time, right, which is, which is what you want to be, I'm gonna be great if you can be one of those authors that Oprah picks and you sell a million copies, but you can't plan for that, right? And you can't sit around and hope for it. So the only like logical path is to be that one that slowly builds an audience over time. And one of the things Ryan said is because you know, what people get hung up on is that the job of being a writer is not to write a book all the time and occasionally step out into the world and market it. The job of a writer is to constantly be marketing yourself and your ideas. And occasionally, you introduce a new book into that. And so that's it's been about a year of really kind of thinking about that first, like my personal platform audience, that community that's around me, it's probably more important to spend time cultivating that, than worrying about writing the perfect book, it's never going to be the perfect book. There's stuff in my first book that is out of date. Now there's stuff in the book, I just wrote that I wish I could rewrite. I mean, what one guy wrote a profile of Jordan Harbinger, one of the best podcasters of all time, and he changed the name of his show, and like broke up with his business partners, right in between publication, right. So but I can't control that, right. The one thing I can control is okay, I need to build this community of of people around me the Kevin Kelly thousand true fans type of idea. That's the real job. And then occasionally, you introduce content into those people. Yeah,

James Taylor
I mean, even some another guest we had on this event was David Allen. And David Allen, is he consistently wants to do one podcast interview a week, which is promoting a book, you're getting things done, which was written, you know, quite a few years ago, and it's there's new versions of it, as well as adding new books as well be said, it just is a consistency, as you were saying, as Ryan was saying, it's a consistency thing. Rather than just kind of, you can write the book, and you just kind of go into that, you know, one to three months of promotion, and then Okay, forget it. Okay. And I'm going to move on to the next thing is, it's a it's a bit of a marathon in that way.

David Burkus
What No, you're exactly right.

James Taylor
So we met you can we talked about a little bit earlier about some tools and things? Are there any other tools that you used, that you they help you particularly when you're you're writing and you've written a particular app, on your computer, or the things that help you organize your information? Yeah, I

David Burkus
mean, so you mentioned Scrivener. I imagine half of the people, if not more that you're interviewing, use Scrivener. I hope they're sponsoring this because we're giving them a lot of love not, um, I find it a really great app for first drafts because you can move stuff around, but really, it's the word count tracking feature that does it for me, right? You tell it. Okay, I need this many words by this day. And I write on these days of the week. And when you show up for work in the morning and boot up your computer and boot up the app, it'll go Hey, good morning, you've got to write 575 words today to stay on pace. And then when you hit that word counter to give you this really satisfying little thing, right? That is fantastic. So that to me is that is the most useful source of it. So I love it as a as a first draft tool. I'm old school though we get into editing and stuff like Track Changes in Word is still kind of one of the best ways to go back and forth on a document with your editor. I know there's some functionality like Google Docs that makes it easier because now you're not female. The file back and forth. But I don't think the commenting features and that kind of stuff work as well. Right. So yeah, I write in Scrivener I edit in Word. And those are probably the two apps that are the most open on my computer besides social media when I'm trying to prevent myself from writing, because I'm feeling the resistance, which every writer spends time on, right? So yeah,

James Taylor
I bought a book. And if there was one book that you'd recommend to someone on the craft or the other, or the business, the marketing of writing, what would that book be?

David Burkus
So Ryan actually is a great book that came out last year called perennial seller that is, it's not a book on how to write well, it's not even a book on how to market it's a book on questions you've got to get answered before you start making your work. So that you give it the best chance of success again, and Ryan will tell you like, there is still a need for that magic fairy dust if you want to be the million copies seller. But it's possible to be the you know, I don't sell a lot, but I sell 10,000 copies a year. And that's a great living, right? So if you're going to do that, there's a lot of questions and things you've got to think through. And so that's a really solid read on that one. That's probably the most current one that I'd recommend, of course, like, I have a beat up copy of Strunk and white somewhere. Because I'm always wondering what the proper use of a semi colon is, and all that kind of stuff. But Ryan's been a really influential on this past year.

James Taylor
That is an amazing book, we've had a number of our guests that have mentioned that book has been very influential to them as well. So I'm going to leave you with a final thing, I'm going to take away all these books that you you've written in the past, and we're going to go back to Ground Zero with it. And we're gonna have to start again, no one knows who you are, you know, no one, you have you have no platform. What would you do? How would you get your especially your kind of writing back up again? How would you get publishing? Yeah, so

David Burkus
I mean, I probably couldn't start a podcast the way I did now, because it's such a crowded medium. But I would look for something some way to invite people that I respect and admire into create content that might be video series. Now that might be summits, that might be something like that. And the other thing that I would do is I would focus on you know, we I didn't have time to get into it. But I think all of us that write nonfiction sort of trade up the chain in terms of we write for wherever articles for wherever we'll have us and then we try and write for bigger and bigger and bigger places. So I would probably have to start that cycle over again, thankfully, if I have the knowledge, I have now just not the platform, you could do it in a much shorter period of time, because now I know which ones are a waste of time. But that's really the thing, right? You start writing somewhere if no other place, then you start on like medium, and then you beg to be a part of people's publications. And then if something gets popular there, you ship it off to Business Insider, and you go, Hey, this was really viral over here, would you like an adapted article, and then you kind of crawl up the chain. And eventually you find yourself writing for like HBr or courts or something like that. And now you've got an audience and that now the only job is making sure that you capture some amount of them. So they come back for your next piece of work.

James Taylor
Now, if people want to connect with with you to learn more about for every friend of a friend, this is a great book. So I would highly recommend people check that out. If they want to learn more about your other books, your speaking there are things that you can go going on your podcast, where's the best place to go and do that? Yeah. So

David Burkus
David burkas calm is probably easiest. It's a hard name to spell. But James, I'm sure there's like a link here. Yeah. Or like over here somewhere? I'm not sure. Yeah, there you go down, we'll

James Taylor
be somewhere,

David Burkus
somewhere right there. I'm sure there's a link to that. So click over that. That's probably the best place to start. From there. We can go on social if that's your thing. You there's email right there. There's a bunch of resources about the book that if you want to check out articles adapted from it, etc, before you take the leap, but I hope you take the leap and grab a copy because I think it'll be quite useful, especially if you're thinking Hmm, what do I need to do to find my scene to find the group of writers that are going to help me and propel me forward? I think it's a I think I'm a little biased, but I think it's a really good resource for that. So check it out, for sure.

James Taylor
Well, David, it's been a pleasure speaking to you as always, I always love when we get a chance to catch up and I get to, to learn all your work, because you're speaking you're writing your podcasts, you know, all these really cool things. Thanks so much for coming on today. And for sharing your insights.

David Burkus
Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me.

James Taylor
If you're interested in living a more creative life, then I'd love to invite you to join me as I share some of the most successful strategies and techniques that high performing creatives use. I put them all together in a free downloadable ebook that you can get by going to jamestaylor.me. That's jamestaylor.me. To get your free downloadable ebook on creativity.

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