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The Writer’s Notebook (October 2026) · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to the Daily Writer, where we help writers become authors of their own lives.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to welcome you to the Writer's Notebook for October 2026.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's what this episode is all about.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a monthly digest where I do a deeper dive into books, conversations, and moments that have shaped my thinking and writing in the past month.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And my goal here is to give you some resources and questions to help you become the author of your own life.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope that the things I'm going to share on today's episode will pique your interest and give you some things to think about.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, let's dive into the book that stayed with me.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I do one of these monthly digest episodes called the Writer's Notebook, of course, I begin with one single book that has really stayed with me for the past month or so.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And let me dive into a book called Tested Advertising Methods, which probably is a book that you've never heard of unless you're into copywriting or marketing or advertising.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So let's do a little bit of a deep dive here into this.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the backstory here is over the next year, I am doing a deep dive into copywriting, which is a skill that will help every writer who's selling anything.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in addition to being a student of the great copywriter Ben Settle, I decided to start with a classic text called Tested Advertising Methods, which of course I've already mentioned.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the author is a guy named John Caples.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the way you spell his last name is C-A-P-L-E-S.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And right now I'm working my way through the updated fifth edition of that book, which, by the way, is almost 30 years old.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the most recent edition, it was published back in the 90s, and it is truly a fantastic resource.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: The principles of advertising haven't really changed in about 100 years or so.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, they've only shown themselves to be more true with the advent of social media and internet marketing over the last couple of decades.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't have the space here to break down everything that I'm learning from tested advertising methods, but here are two big takeaways from this book so far.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Number one is that good copywriting is not about being a quote-unquote great writer.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's really much more about being effective at getting people's attention and moving them to take action.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And number two is that one of the most valuable skills you can master is writing headlines.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And by extension, that applies to email subject lines as well.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the big reasons that I honestly send out a daily email is that it gives me a regular testing ground for putting what I'm learning about headlines and copywriting into practice.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I encourage you to do the same thing by finding a way to practice whatever it is that you're learning at the moment.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I do want to give you a couple of quick side notes about this book before I move on to the next section.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, if you decide to dive into tested advertising methods, I definitely recommend getting the updated fifth edition, which is revised by a gentleman named Fred E.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hahn, and it's H A H N is the way you spell his last name.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of fake and unauthorized editions of this book out there, since this is such a well-known text in the marketing world.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the fifth edition, the most recent one, is easier to read and it's more relevant than previous editions, in my humble opinion.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So get that updated fifth edition, which is revised by Fred E.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hahn.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, secondly, don't bother with the purported sixth edition of tested advertising methods that's available on Amazon and probably other places as well.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a real edition of the book.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is simply an internet marketer's attempt to riff on John Capel's Timeless Principles.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And even though I bought the sixth edition, and it does have some interesting and helpful stuff in it, from a publishing standpoint, I think it is completely inappropriate to market a book as a new edition of another book without the approval of the author or the publisher.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, I do think the author of the sixth edition of that, the quote unquote sixth edition, has done a good job laying out some things that are helpful to us to apply this classic marketing book to the modern age, but I think it completely lacks integrity because he did not have permission, as far as I can tell, to actually update the book and call it tested advertising methods.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you can do with that what you will.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's move into the section of this notebook that I call a conversation.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about it.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: I like to talk about this because I like conversations.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Most of all, I like interesting and challenging conversations.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So let me tell you about a recent one.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was talking with a friend of mine earlier this week about a really difficult time that he went through a few years ago.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And for about a year, he experienced really severe adrenal fatigue.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: He had a lot of trouble with feeling fatigued, being tired, getting good sleep, dealing with brain fog and a host of other physical issues.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually he did get back to good health, but that year was one of the hardest periods that he had ever gone through.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I asked him how he got through it while he continued to work.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he gave me a really good piece of advice.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I decided to work in 45-minute increments.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if I was too tired to continue, I would just stop.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I always started with the most important thing I needed to accomplish that day, the thing that really moved the needle.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there are two great takeaways here, in my opinion.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, it is the value of working in small chunks, whether it's 20 minutes or 25 minutes or some kind of longer chunk of time.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: The point is to pick a finite amount of time to sprint, and then you stop.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you can rinse and repeat however many of those that you feel that you can do.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: The second, and probably more important, is the importance of doing the most critical task first.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it is so easy to get distracted by all kinds of administrative work and other tasks that seem to demand our attention, and yet we ignore the very thing or the project that's going to give us the best results.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: I've really been trying to put this more into practice since I had that conversation with my friend, and I hope that it helps you as well.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let me move on to a question that I'm resting with.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: As you probably know, I love questions, and I really love questions that make me think and that don't necessarily present a black and white viewpoint or present something that is kind of all nicely tied up in a bow.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: I like questions because questions challenge our thinking and they make us question our assumptions.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I am currently 52 years old and I have been thinking lately about what I want to accomplish in my writing life over the next 20 or 30 years.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And assuming that I stay healthy, there's no reason to think that I would not still be writing at age 82.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like a long way off from here, but I mean, my goodness, when I was 22, to think that I was going to be age 52 at some point was a crazy thought as well.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So time sneaks up on you for sure.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, naturally, my thoughts have turned to what I want the next two or three decades to look like in terms of output in my writing and in my career.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And even though writing careers can take a lot of different forms, it seems to me that there are two primary pathways that writers take number one is authors who write mainly one type of thing.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that includes people like Stephen King, David McCullough, or Seth Godin.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I could name dozens of authors, of course.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: But to break this down a bit, Stephen King writes almost exclusively fiction.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's written a couple of nonfiction books, maybe more than a couple, but it's a very, very small number compared to his total fiction output.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Stephen King mostly writes horror-based fiction, not exclusively, but he does just, I mean, almost exclusively writes fiction, even though sometimes the genres are, you know, he will bend or blend genres a little bit.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: David McCullough, the historian, writes narrative history, and he's passed away a number of years ago.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Seth Godin, of course, writes business nonfiction.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And each of those authors have stuck to one main idea or genre for the most part, but they express it in many different ways.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they occasionally do write something outside of their wheelhouse, but mostly they stick to one type of thing.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the type of writer number one is authors who write mainly one thing.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: The second type of author is the writer who writes many types of things.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this includes authors such as C.S.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis or Margaret Atwood or Mark Twain.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: For example, Mark Twain wrote humor.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was a journalist, he wrote novels, memoirs, essays, and so forth.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Margaret Atwood has written poetry, children's books, essays, literary novels, and so forth.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: So she has more of a wide range.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then C.S.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, of course, wrote children's fiction.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote science fiction, memoir, satire, apologetics, and so on.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I just learned a few years ago that he actually did some academic writing, which I was not aware of.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: So C.S.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, probably of all these authors I'm mentioning in the second category, in my opinion, has the most wide-ranging writing of almost any author that I can think of because he wrote so many different types of things.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And again, these writers are often well known for, they're mostly well known for one thing, but their actual output spans a wide variety of genres and forms.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it has taken me a while, to be honest with you, but I have really come to terms with the reality that I am very much wired to be the second type of author.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that part of being successful as a writer is knowing how you're wired.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to ask you, what makes you happy?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: What turns your crank?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: What excites you in terms of the kind of career that you want to build as a writer?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that for me, I am the happiest when I have my hands in a variety of things, which is a big reason that I like ghostwriting.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Every client represents a new personality and a new challenge.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And over the next few years, I have a bunch of my own projects that I'm going to be releasing, included in two or three or four different book series.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, not just books, but actual book series.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And also I want to explore writing fiction in the next year or two, but I've got to get some other projects out into the world first.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, what I'm saying here is that for me, I like to have my hands on a few different kinds of things because I get bored kind of easily, and I would never want to do just one type of thing for decades and decades on end.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to challenge you to think about the kind of writing career that you want as well.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Are you happiest focusing on one type of writing or genre, or are you wired to explore a variety of things over time?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Just something to think about.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's talk for a minute before I wrap this up about what's ahead for me for the month of October.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the main thing is that my new book on ghostwriting is almost ready to launch.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: I know I've been talking about it for several months here.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a little bit of a longer process than I anticipated to get all the things in place to be able to launch this book, but I promise you it has been well worth it.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: The book is called The Ghost Powered Author, Save Time, Build Authority, and Amplify Your Voice with the Power of a Ghostwritten Book.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this short book is for business leaders who want to harness the power of a great book, but they don't have the time or the skill to write it themselves.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as a ghostwriter, I answer a lot of questions from prospective clients and writers also about how ghostwriting actually works and why leaders should hire a ghostwriter.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you will hear about this project a lot more in a few days when I officially launch it this coming Tuesday.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And also, you will receive some details on how to access a free copy.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, I am giving the book away.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, that is the whole strategy for this book is to give it away to as many people as possible.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, continuing with the theme of ghostwriting, I've also launched a Substack newsletter called Ghostwriter Game, and you can access that by going to ghostwritergame.substack.com.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I have only put up a single post as a placeholder of sorts, and I'm going to be publishing weekly posts starting later this fall.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're interested in the craft in the business of ghostwriting, check it out there and be sure to follow me.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And one more thing that I want to add here is that now that my ghostwriting book is almost ready to put out into the world, I'm starting to work in earnest on my dad's Vietnam memoir.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the tentative launch date is the Veterans Day of next year.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got a little bit more than a year to get this book out into the marketplace.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you will be hearing more about that in the coming months for sure.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey my friend, thanks for checking out this month's edition of the Writer's Notebook.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this is a way for me to share some insight into my world as a full time writer.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope that this really adds some value to your world as well.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Stay safe, stay healthy, and most of all, stay productive.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's ever anything that I can do for you, make sure and let me know.