David Perell Clips
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David Perell Clips
@PerellClips
I interview the world's top writers. New episodes every Wednesday, and this is a feed of the very best clips. My personal account: @david_perell
New York, NY Katılım Mart 2026
1 Takip Edilen671 Takipçiler
@PerellClips I'm really enjoying this interview. Great info!
English
How the children's books industry works:
1. People are way less likely to read children's books on a Kindle.
2. Children's books generally have a longer shelf lives than adult books. If they're a hit, they stay popular for a long, long time.
3. Picture books cost way more to print than traditional books. A 32-page picture book can cost as much to print as a 400-page novel.
4. They have smaller margins because even though the printing costs are higher, they typically retail for significantly less than adult novels.
5. They have three kinds of storytelling: words, images, and the space between them. "It's almost like the author has to be a director, and all the children's books authors will talk about the mystery of the page turn."
6. The one commonality among every children's book writer is that they treat kids with respect. They don't talk down to them.
David Perell@david_perell
Jon Yaged runs Macmillan, one of the five biggest publishers in the world, so I asked him to explain the book publishing industry to me. My main question: why should authors work with a traditional publisher, especially when self-publishing is taking off? What I got was a full tour of how book publishing works. Everything from how authors make money, to how publishers choose which books to back, to the traditional vs. self-publishing debate. Timestamps: 2:01 Consolidation in book publishing 4:01 Celebrity books 7:57 The scale of the publishing industry 9:48 How to get your book published 14:15 New York 16:25 Using data to find great books 29:33 How to work with a publisher 31:11 The economics of a book deal 36:42 How sequels work 42:21 Children's books 48:42 Books in Europe vs. America 50:25 Should writers use AI? 1:00:57 How printing works 1:04:52 Book marketing advice 1:09:48 What a publishing CEO does 1:11:06 Audiobooks 1:15:17 Are people getting stupider? 1:18:20 The publisher business model 1:19:08 Macmillan I've shared the full interview with Jon Yaged below. If you'd rather watch or listen to the interview somewhere else, check out the first reply tweet where I've linked to the interview on YouTube, and also on Apple / Spotify. Enjoy!
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CEO of Macmillan: "Our copyright law doesn't protect things created by AI. Nobody can own it. It's not subject to copyright protection.
So now, as a businessman, am I going to invest in something that has zero barrier to entry?
If I publish that book tomorrow and it's deemed not to be covered by copyright, everyone else can publish a different version for that book."
— Jon Yaged
David Perell@david_perell
Jon Yaged runs Macmillan, one of the five biggest publishers in the world, so I asked him to explain the book publishing industry to me. My main question: why should authors work with a traditional publisher, especially when self-publishing is taking off? What I got was a full tour of how book publishing works. Everything from how authors make money, to how publishers choose which books to back, to the traditional vs. self-publishing debate. Timestamps: 2:01 Consolidation in book publishing 4:01 Celebrity books 7:57 The scale of the publishing industry 9:48 How to get your book published 14:15 New York 16:25 Using data to find great books 29:33 How to work with a publisher 31:11 The economics of a book deal 36:42 How sequels work 42:21 Children's books 48:42 Books in Europe vs. America 50:25 Should writers use AI? 1:00:57 How printing works 1:04:52 Book marketing advice 1:09:48 What a publishing CEO does 1:11:06 Audiobooks 1:15:17 Are people getting stupider? 1:18:20 The publisher business model 1:19:08 Macmillan I've shared the full interview with Jon Yaged below. If you'd rather watch or listen to the interview somewhere else, check out the first reply tweet where I've linked to the interview on YouTube, and also on Apple / Spotify. Enjoy!
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David Perell Clips retweetledi
Did phones kill reading?
"The data shows that both boys and girls are reading less, and they're both saying they like reading less, and it's way worse for boys.
And that's existential. If people don't read as kids, the chance of them reading as adults goes way down.
It also has a huge impact on our society because there's no better way to develop analytical skills than reading. And the research shows that kids who aren't reading at grade level by the 3rd or 4th grade have less successful life outcomes, too."
— Jon Yaged, CEO of Macmillan
(And the quote is lightly edited)
David Perell@david_perell
Jon Yaged runs Macmillan, one of the five biggest publishers in the world, so I asked him to explain the book publishing industry to me. My main question: why should authors work with a traditional publisher, especially when self-publishing is taking off? What I got was a full tour of how book publishing works. Everything from how authors make money, to how publishers choose which books to back, to the traditional vs. self-publishing debate. Timestamps: 2:01 Consolidation in book publishing 4:01 Celebrity books 7:57 The scale of the publishing industry 9:48 How to get your book published 14:15 New York 16:25 Using data to find great books 29:33 How to work with a publisher 31:11 The economics of a book deal 36:42 How sequels work 42:21 Children's books 48:42 Books in Europe vs. America 50:25 Should writers use AI? 1:00:57 How printing works 1:04:52 Book marketing advice 1:09:48 What a publishing CEO does 1:11:06 Audiobooks 1:15:17 Are people getting stupider? 1:18:20 The publisher business model 1:19:08 Macmillan I've shared the full interview with Jon Yaged below. If you'd rather watch or listen to the interview somewhere else, check out the first reply tweet where I've linked to the interview on YouTube, and also on Apple / Spotify. Enjoy!
English
A Little-Known Fact about Stories
In every story, there's a tension between three things: (1) what the author knows, (2) what the reader knows, and (3) what the character knows.
It's a three-sided knowledge structure.
"For example, with unreliable narrator stories, your character has a whole lot of stuff that they know that they're not saying, and then you'll get to a bit where the reader realizes that they've not been given the full story.
The other way that triangle of information can go is that when the author and the reader are sharing knowledge that the characters don't have. The main character explores the world. He doesn't particularly understand a lot of the things he finds, but the reader can pick up the clues and stay a step ahead of what the character understands.
In my book, Dogs of War, the main character, Rex, is a bioengineered dog who's being used as a military asset. It becomes apparent to the readers that what Rex is doing is war crimes, but Rex has no understanding of that because he doesn't have the context.
As he goes out into the world, he understands more and starts making his own value judgments about what is right and wrong. That isn't just 'my master has told me to do this thing,' but in those early sections, you as the reader have a lot of perspective and knowledge, even based on Rex's own account, that Rex doesn't have."
David Perell@david_perell
Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of the best fantasy & science fiction writers alive today. What's crazy is that he's kept quality so high while writing ~5 books per year, and this interview is about how he does it. One guy on Reddit said: “Probably the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy author interview I’ve ever seen. Gives great insight into how Adrian Tchaikovsky approaches his novels." Timestamps: 0:35 How to plan a novel 2:27 The two types of outlining 7:07 What makes for a good idea? 8:09 Dragons 14:07 Building good characters 20:02 World building 25:09 A guide to science fiction 33:46 Fantasy vs. science fiction 36:38 How magic works in Sci-Fi 42:04 Writing good fight scenes 50:15 Avoiding writing ruts 59:07 How to improve your writing 1:03:07 Writing a good ending I've shared the full conversation with Adrian Tchaikovsky below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
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"Art excites, expands, and refines our complete human intelligence.
It makes us understand that for most of the day, we're not very alive. That's why very intellectual art is deadening... because it doesn't speak to us as a complete human being.
You've got to go back to this primal notion. There was an art that they called poetry or song, but it was singing, poetry, and dancing all at once.
In dance, even if people aren't singing, there's always this sense that people are about to break forth in song. When people are singing, they're moving their bodies. And when people are writing a really good poem, you should feel it physically."
— Dana Gioia (@DanaGioiaPoet)
David Perell@david_perell
Dana Gioia is one of the world’s greatest living poets. He’s been writing for ~55 years, and this 3-hour interview is all about his approach to writing. Some lessons: 1. What is poetry? Here’s a definition: “Poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” 2. And who is the mother of the muses? Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. 3. You can’t understand poetry until you start learning it by heart. Yes, memorizing it. The metaphor of knowing something by heart means storing a piece of wisdom in the center of your being and making it a part of you. 4. Poetry exists in the body before it exists in language. For him, great writing is about putting form to felt sensations. 5. First drafts are an act of madness. They’re messy and chaotic, and it’s worth embracing that. Only in the process of revision does the structure begin to reveal itself. 6. The most valuable ideas arrive suddenly, fully formed but fragile, and they won’t wait for you to be ready. If you don’t write them down immediately, you’ll probably forget them. 7. His artistic process: Confusion, followed by madness, exhilaration, and despair. 8. Aspiring writers who can’t find the time to write run the risk of living a life of regret, where destiny takes the wheel and steers them off-course. Seneca says, “If you follow your destiny, it guides you. If you resist it, it drags you behind it.” 9. What’s the purpose of art? Most people, most of the time, go through life half-awake. The purpose of art is to awaken us to reality and help us feel our situation. Done right, it excites, expands, and refines our complete human intelligence. 10. Can you write with a full-time job? T.S. Eliot had a day job at a bank. Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. Dana Gioia worked a full-time job in New York and wrote in the evenings. 11. Life is like a wallet full of one-hour bills. You only have 24 hours to spend every day. If you want to do serious writing while raising a family and maintaining a full-time job, almost every hour of every day has to be budgeted. 12. Poetry should turn. It shouldn’t just climb to an emotional height. It should pivot, contradict, or contain its own rebuttal. But most new poems go something like this: “I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, the end,” or “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, the end. There’s no twist, no turn. 13. You don’t need to be 100% original. All you need to do is assemble parts of the reality that already exists. As George Balanchine said, “God creates, I assemble.” 14. A foundational book in his life: The City of God by St. Augustine. He says there are two cities that exist: There’s the City of Man, which is ruled by wealth and power and all the laws of man. And there’s the City of God which is eternal and governed by the rules of God. 15. Great poetry exists at the level of intuition, and it’s the same intuition that academic education tries to suppress. With great poems, like great songs, you feel before you understand. 16. Art is an argument with yourself. Yeats said: “Out of arguments with others, we make politics. Out of arguments with ourselves, we make poetry.” 17. Great writing should astonish the creator, and if it doesn’t astonish the creator, it won’t astonish the reader. 18. Robert Frost once said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” 19. Beauty is being able to see the form, the shape underneath reality, and to understand why it is right, even when it is destructive or terrifying or humiliating. The most powerful kind of beauty is to discover the secret shape and rightness of things that are terrifying. 20. On novels: Most people don’t understand what a novel is — and how revolutionary the form was. So, what’s a novel? It’s a story that tells you simultaneously what’s happening on the outside of a character and what they’re thinking on the inside. I’ve shared the full interview with @DanaGioiaPoet below. If you’d rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
English
"No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."
A lot of bad writing just has no surprises. It's conventional. But every time a piece grabs you by the throat, you can tell it astonished the writer first.
Dana Gioia says: "I want to create a sense of wonder. One of the primary things that literary writing does is to give you a sense of wonder, of awe, of joy, often from things that you see every day that you've never seen in quite the same way."
— @DanaGioiaPoet
English
If you want to do serious creative work, you must dare to be ambitious.
People might call you cocky or arrogant, but you have to reach for the quality of the greats: Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Austen,
Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding says: "You're not trying to write a crappy book, are you? One of the ways self-consciousness comes into the classroom is that people don't want to be accused of trying to write as well as, say, Faulkner.
But wouldn't you like to write a book that's as good as your favorite book? You're only a jerk if you say you did it.
And when people read my books and they say, 'Have you been reading Shakespeare and the Bible?' You bet your bippy I have. And I want you to know it."
David Perell@david_perell
Paul Harding spent 15 years writing a novel that dozens of publishers rejected, only to finally get it published and win the Pulitzer Prize. Some highlights from our conversation: 1. Your writing can only be as good as the best stuff you’ve read. 2. Don't write for bad readers. Don't write for readers who won't like what you're doing. 3. Get allergic to pre-fabricated phrases: So much language is spoken unconsciously. It’s riddled with cliches. It’s fine to use it in your day-to-day life but bringing it to the page is a recipe for terrible writing. 4 How can you break free from pre-fabricated language? Try the counterpoint technique: If something is liquid, describe it as a solid; if something is white, describe it as black; if something is quiet, describe it as loud. You get the idea. This simple exercise will break you out of the linguistic autopilot that so many people are stuck in. 5. Want to observe the world more carefully? Slow down. 6. Paul’s mantra for good writing: Maximum density, maximum readability. It means packing as much meaning into every sentence without making it feel like a mountain. 7. Get intimate with your favorite books. Literature is the only art where people say 'I read that once.' Nobody says that about their favorite album. 8. Paul Harding tried writing political novels because he thought that’s what he was supposed to do, only to realize that they were awful. Then he surrendered to his artistic grain and started writing what he actually cared about (and only then could he have won the Pulitzer Prize). 9. The biggest barrier to quality writing is the idea that you already know what you’re looking at. Drop that presumption. Drop all use of received, acculturated, or habituated language. Writing is a fight against the brain’s tendency to categorize the world and move on. 10. Good writing shouldn’t feel cluttered, but it’s fine to have a very cluttered first draft because it’s so much easier to remove things than add things over time. 11. The problem with answers, as opposed to questions, is that they can close off thinking as opposed to opening it up. Paul says: "If somebody reads my book and gets what the point is, they never have to think about it again." 12. Give yourself permission to be ridiculously ambitious. Melville was just trying to write a book as good as Hamlet. Shakespeare is just trying to write a book that was as good as the Joseph story in Genesis. Paul says: "You're not trying to write a crappy book, are you? Wouldn't you like to write a book that's as good as your favorite book?" I've shared the full conversation with Paul Harding below, and the links for YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts in the reply tweets.
English
What happened to regional styles?
There was a point in American culture where writers from the South wrote fundamentally differently from writers in the North or the West. I don't think that's true anymore.
The whole culture of the country is becoming so homogenized. You go overseas and you find the McDonald's or wherever.
If we're going to fight this anywhere, it has to be in the cultural artistic creative sphere.
That's our last chance to create regional pockets of creativity.
— @tedgioia
English
It's very difficult to come out with something creative because the system will shut you down.
A lot of the crises we have in the culture now are driven by too heavy a reliance on formulas.
We need to give our most creative people more freedom.
When The Beatles were first signed to a record contract, their songs were not very sophisticated.
But they got better and better at every album. They took more chances.
And finally, they got to a point where every album was a fundamentally different experience than the previous album.
This shook up the music culture, and the record labels would give their artists a lot of creative freedom.
Nowadays, we have the exact opposite.
— @tedgioia
English
"If the writing is bad, it's better for it to be bad and honest.
I would rather see writing that is suboptimal, that has personality, that has intent, and has conviction, than writing that textbook correct, but dead and boring and stale and stiff."
— Lulu Cheng Meservey
English
"No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader" - Robert Frost
A lot of writing nowadays has no surprises. It's well done in a conventional way.
But the pieces that really grab you by your throat, you can tell that they astonish the writer.
One of the primary things that literary writing does is to give you a sense of wonder, of awe, of joy. Often from things that you see every day that you've never seen in quite the same way.
If you don't have that, the writing feels impoverished.
— @DanaGioiaPoet
English
Wonder is an essential survival skill. Especially for writers.
"Wonder is powerful. Kids have it. So when I write for children, I let wonder take charge.
Science finesses the real into wonder.
Science doesn't mean unweaving the rainbow. It can help us continue to be astonished by the world and just understand a little bit better. That's wondrous."
— Robert Macfarlane
English
How to Free Yourself as a Writer
"Curse your ass off and just take all the nonsense out after after you're done. Be brutally brutally honest and try to say the thing that you're not supposed to say.
And then build the story out of that... anything to to push you past your point of resistance."
— @TomJunod
David Perell@david_perell
Tom Junod is a modern-day Tom Wolfe. A two-time National Magazine Award Winner with a singular voice, who's famous for long and rhythmic sentences that bend the conventions of style and punctuation. We talked about about his haunting 9/11 piece about 'The Falling Man' and his defining pieces about Obama and Fred Rogers, but everything leads up to an epic anti-AI rant at the end. Timestamps: 0:42 The art of a sentence 2:01 The Falling Man on September 11th 7:18 "Say the unsayable" 16:10 Look for contradictions 19:40 Ellipses 28:35 Lessons from Fred Rogers 40:48 Write to improve your thinking 46:14 Tom's favorite writing trick 50:11 What makes for a good ending? 54:57 Advice for young writers 1:02:58 "Writing is a tug of war of souls" 1:04:30 Tom's anti-AI rant I've shared the full conversation below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!
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