Books
I write the way I talk. Practical, honest, and to the point. None of them are long, because none of them need to be.
They mostly exist because I got sick of not being able to find a straight answer on something, so I worked it out and wrote it down. Every digital copy is free and always will be. Hard copies are on Amazon if you want the object.
Coming next · The Legacy Series
Dad died at forty-one and left me thirteen minutes and twenty seconds on a cassette. Mum went with no warning at all and none of it had been sorted. These two are about making sure neither of those happens to the people you leave behind. Both sit with The Legacy Studio.
For Mum. She went with no warning and none of it had been sorted. This is the admin of dying, dealt with while you're well enough to do it, so the people left behind aren't guessing at everything.
For Dad. Thirteen minutes and twenty seconds is what I got. This is how you capture a life a decade at a time, so the people who love you get more than a rushed recording at the end.
Out now
A field guide for learning designers
For designers who care too much. Enough Bucket Dysmorphia is what happens when designers, experts and stakeholders start with good intentions and end up building digital monuments to anxiety. Twenty-two chapters of symptoms I've had myself, each with the way out. L&D people tell me they feel seen, then a bit attacked.
For experts trying to sell what they know
Packaging your expertise is a strange business model. Unlike a startup or a shop, nobody is ever going to buy this off you, because the whole thing is leveraged on you being you. Accept that early, put the right systems around it, and you can absolutely crush it anyway.
Stop solving. Start creating space.
Written off the back of a keynote at the national HR conference. Leaders keep trying to solve every problem that lands on their desk. Mostly they shouldn't. The job is making space for the people who can actually solve it.
A book as a go-to-market strategy
Written for a Learn Awesome client as part of their educational marketing. Their tech solved a real problem, but the market didn't know it had that problem yet. So we wrote the book that explained the problem while they went looking for product-market fit.
Go gentle, it was the first
From the fitness industry days. Nutrition is buried under complexity and misinformation, most of it sold by someone with something to gain. This one cut through it so people could work out what actually applied to them.
Why the digital version is free
That's value one at Learn Awesome and it isn't up for negotiation. It's also why I'm never going to be a millionaire off these, which is fine.
I met a bloke around my TEDx. To keep him anonymous, let's say his name rhymed with Yellow. He didn't introduce himself. He jammed his book in my face and waited for me to be impressed, because he was A Published Author.
So what is a published author? It's a book that got printed. It has a cover, an ISBN, and a barcode so a shop can sell it. That's the entire list. You don't need a publisher for any of it, and a publisher will cost you.
The funny part: Yellow had paid his publisher about fifteen grand for the privilege. Not the other way round. Smoke and mirrors, and I can't stand smoke and mirrors. If I know something worth knowing, I'd rather you just had it.
It'll cost you an email address and I'll send you the odd update. Unsubscribe whenever, no hard feelings. That's the whole transaction.
Prefer the paper? Every one of them is on Amazon and I'd love you to grab a copy, but that's for the object, not the knowledge.
How these get made
I threw up in my mouth a little, and then did what I always do when someone tells me what something costs. I asked whether it was actually true.
It wasn't. You don't have to pay anyone anything. You can write, design and publish a proper book in a weekend for under a thousand dollars, and I've now done it five times.
The exact process I use, start to finish. Fifty bucks, because charging ten grand for it would make me the thing I was complaining about.
This is the whole method in one go: figure it out yourself, then hand it over so nobody else gets fleeced for it.
Books are the slow version. Tell Steve what your people need to walk away with.
Book Steve