Thoughts on "The Art and Business of Online Writing" by Nicolas Cole

Let’s start out with the good and then cover the bad.

Interesting Content

The Art and Business of Online Writing is a very practical book. It covers all the things you need to know for writing online:

• How writing online actually works.
• Where to publish your writing.
• What to write about, and how to find your target audience.
• How to write headlines that people will click on, and content that people will read.
• How to create a personal library of content.
• How you can make money writing online.

It’s obvious that Cole’s knowledge on the subject goes deep, and that it’s the kind of knowledge that comes from long experience — from having spent a lot of time figuring out how it all actually works. He writes from the inside, and that makes his advice both trustworthy and valuable.

I’ve already applied several things from the book in my own writing, and I will probably return to learn more in the future.

Bad Presentation

So the content is good.

The presentation and structure though, not so much.

I recently listened to a podcast with Cal Newport where he talked about writing his new book. In this episode, Cal explained how he spends a lot of time editing, adjusting everything until the pieces really fall into place and click into a tight whole — and that it’s this tight unity that creates an exceptional book.

Nicolas Cole should have listened to that advice. Because The Art and Business of Online Writing is far from tight and coherent. It feels more like a long collection of articles strung together into book form, with nothing to unite them into a clear whole. And because of this, the book leaves a weak impression.

It doesn’t even have a table of contents.

Like, come on.

The language isn’t great either. It’s formulaic and repetitive, with too many personal anecdotes. It seems like Cole has applied his formula for writing online to writing this book. But what works for shorter articles online just doesn’t work very well in book form.

Overall Decent

That said. I would still recommend this book if you want to start writing online.

But it’s a shame, because with the knowledge that Cole obviously has, the book could have been outstanding.

Now it’s just decent.