20 Quotes From The Art And Business Of Online Writing By Nicolas Cole

Today is the 1 year anniversary of The Art and Business of Online Writing.

I started writing this book right at the beginning of the pandemic. I was stuck at home. I had just scaled back my ghostwriting agency, Digital Press. And all of a sudden, I had a ton of time on my hands. It had also been almost 4 years since I had published my first book, Confessions of a Teenage Gamer, which was a memoir about my teenage years as a professional World of Warcraft player.

It took me 4 years to write my first book.

And it took me 4 months to write my second one.

Why my 2nd book took 10x less time to write:

I started writing my first book my senior year of college. And back then, I still subscribed to the belief system that in order to be “a writer,” you needed to bleed your way through whatever work of art was currently in focus. In some strange, almost masochistic way, the longer that first book took me to write (and the more chapters I re-wrote and re-wrote), the “better” I thought it was.

It wasn’t until I hit publish and sent it out into the world that I realized how wrong I’d been.