Brand New Experiment

Hello again!

It’s been a while since I published my last newsletter. An eternity in internet time.

As a refresher, I began writing a book, Brand New World, during the pandemic. Last year I started this newsletter as a way of sharing some of what I’d been writing in the hopes of getting feedback about the ideas.

The truth is, I published a lot—a total of about 55,000 words over the course of the year. Many words! I covered a broad range of topics, including the history of brands and branding, the psychology of how brands work, the impact technology has had on brands and that brands have had on technology, and why brands are crucial for entrepreneurship and innovation. The response was very encouraging, and it was great to get direct feedback from so many of you.

Writing a book is hard. Getting a book published is really hard.

Since my last newsletter, I’ve been working on turning all of that writing and thinking into a book proposal—an essential step towards getting a publisher to publish the book.

Writing the proposal has been a terrific learning experience. It’s made me realize that while I’ve written enough pages to fill a book, I haven’t yet written a book.

A newsletter can be a wide-ranging exploration of themes, but a book has to be focused and disciplined. A book needs to have a crystal clear idea of what it’s saying and to whom it’s saying it. Over the last few months, I’ve made good progress, thought I still have work to do before I’m ready to start shopping it around.

But writing a book was never really the point. A book is a means to an end; a channel for getting ideas out into the world. I believe these ideas are important—and that they’re especially important now.

So this year I’m trying something a bit different. A new experiment in a new medium. Rather than continuing with this newsletter, I’ll be putting out a series of short videos in which I’ll be talking about the ideas that I’ve been writing about. My hope is to bring the ideas to life for more people, here on LinkedIn as well as on Instagram and Facebook.

This week I released the first video--check it out below. Thanks for reading and for watching. And if you have any thoughts, feedback, suggestions, etc. please do let me know. I’d love to hear from you!