Who: Guy Kawasaki

Claim To Fame: Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley icon who first became known as Apple’s Chief Evangelist, helping launch the Macintosh. Guy is both a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He has written fifteen books, including Selling the Dream, Enchantment, The Art of the Start, The Art Of Social Media, and his newest, Wise Guy. His rich and varied career includes entrepreneurship, venture capital, marketing, business evangelism, keynote speaking, and currently, a return to his role of Chief Evangelist with Canva, an innovative company aiming to democratize design the way the Macintosh democratized computers.

Where To Find Guy: His Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Guy: “When God made the universe, He took Guy’s advice and started small and put his whole heart into it. Okay, not everything turned out perfect, but as The Art of the Start makes clear, there are no guarantees, only great opportunities. Read this book and then go do something wonderful.” — Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm

Let’s start with the basics: when and where do you like to write?

I write wherever I am: coffee shop, airplane, airport, hotel room, backstage in a green room. I am a business person who happens to write, not a writer who also does a little business.

Are you regimented about your writing routine or an anytime-anywhere kind of guy?

I am not regimented at all. I cannot be. I would never write if I waited for the perfect moment on a windswept beach when the house is clean, the kids have straight As, and there’s plenty of money in the bank. In addition to general business and craziness, I am not the most disciplined. I know I should write and then do email and social media. Instead I do exactly the opposite.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals that help you get in the zone? Anything you do to signal to yourself ‘The writing day has begun’?

My only pre-writing ritual is booting up Microsoft Word.

Roughly half of the books you’ve written offer guidance on how to market or promote or to use social media.  Many writers are interested in ideas for how to promote their work. What has worked especially well for you in promoting your work?

The gist of my recommendation to writers is this. First, get it into your head that you, not your publisher, is responsible for the marketing of your book. Maybe this shouldn’t be true, but it is. Deal with it. Second, you need to immediately start building your own platform—before, but certainly, while, you are writing. It’s not a serial process: write book and then build platform. You have to do both at once because it takes at least a year or two to build a platform.

What was the response when you announced that you were crowd-proofing Wise Guy, and did any part of that process surprise you?

I’ve done this about four times already, so there weren’t any surprises for me. But for most authors and publishers, their jaws would be on the floor. I announced that I would send the Word manuscript to anyone who wanted it via social media accounts with a total of more than ten million followers. 265 people signed up and therefore got the file. About fifty actually sent back the manuscript with comments. I made hundreds of changes because of them.

When the book was done, I offered a PDF of the near-final book to the same more than ten million people. 1,206 people got access this way. About 700 actually downloaded the file. This resulted in, more or less, 119 reviews, 92% of which were five stars in the first two weeks of the book’s availability.

Your first book – The Macintosh Way – is now available as a free download after you purchased the publishing rights.  Would you advise authors make some of their work available for free?

I don’t have any “proof” that this is a good thing to do, but intellectually, what’s the harm? If it’s not selling and maybe out of print anyway, why not?

Deciding on an idea to pursue writing about can be the most challenging aspect for a writer. How do you come to the point of ‘this is something I need to write about’?

I come up with a few ideas and run them past my agent and editor. I hate to burst your bubble, but I write the book that is the intersection of a big advance, personal interest, and, God forbid, knowledge. This really narrows down the topics.

Once you’ve nailed down the idea for a book, how do you split the balance of writing and research? Do you collect all the material you need and then set out to turn it into a book? Or are you researching and writing simultaneously?

I spend months and months writing an outline in Word. Along the way, I jot down thoughts and snippets. Once the outline is “done,” I start vomiting out the body as fast as I can. The outline changes a lot during the process, but the basic main parts remain the same. Then the fun begins—which for me is editing. I love to edit—by which I mean, I’m refining the vomit if you will. This is the longest, hardest, and most satisfying part of writing for me.

Do you struggle at all with that dreaded enemy of writing: writer’s block? Do you think such a thing exists?

I’m a non-fiction writer, so I don’t have to come up with clever characters and plots. My outline lays out what I have to do. I don’t have “blocks” as much as I have “distractions” like my day jobs, family, email/social media, and surfing.

What books and writers have most influenced your writing and thinking?

By far the book that influence my writing the most is If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. Every writer should read that. I have also read the Chicago Manual of Style from cover to cover. I don’t recommend that everyone do that, but I found it very interesting. I would also recommend Uncommon Genius by Denise Sherkerjian. She examines how MacArthur fellows achieved their mastery in this book.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

Turn aspiration into perspiration. Stop thinking about writing. Stop reading interviews of authors about how they write. Just boot Word and get going.

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