My book of the year is Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque. It has wonderful things to teach authors at any stage of their career; it helped to revolutionize mine.

This is a febrile time of year. The sins of the old year are washed away, and the ambitions of the new are laid out. It's a clean slate, a fresh start, a time to gather stones together. It's also a time when people like to review the year gone by and make predictions for the next.

I won't poke that particular hornet's nest, let's just say there has been a fair amount of tumult. I remember saying a few years ago that chaos was the new normal and that people shouldn't expect things to settle down any time soon — at least one prediction that has both aged well and remained evergreen.

I'm not one for fretting about the future, but I definitely am one for preparing. And the best insurance policy against any seismic changes in our industry is to have a large group of engaged readers which you regularly communicate with through a platform you control.

I knew this, and I still screwed it up. But I stopped screwing it up in 2018 and Newsletter Ninja is the reason why.

Please note that this is a somewhat biased recommendation. Here's what I said when speaking about Newsletter Ninja a few months ago:

Disclosure: Tammi edited Digital 3 and Superfans, but I asked Tammi to edit those books because she knows her sh*t inside out and is a literal ninja.

I also wrote the foreword to this book, which Tammi has kindly allowed me to reprint here. And the reason why I wrote the foreword, and the many, many reasons why you should buy this book, will become very clear once you read the excerpt below — so thank you Tammi for letting me do that.

Before we get into it, I should mention that you can buy Newsletter Ninja from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and Google. And you really, really should. Here's, erm, me with more:

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