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How to write a best selling book on e-learning

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 20 Feb 2013, 06:44

Give it a silly title:

  • Smarty Pants

With a controversial sub-title:

  • Why Google will soon control our no.1s and no.2s

Have silly and outrageous headings such as:

  • Justin Beiber gains a PhD entirely online
  • Google Glass banned from 2016 Olympics
  • Know what you child said at school this week - word for word
  • Our virtual selves will never die
  • Learn in your sleep
  • Don't write your book, think it.

Name drop authors/thinkers who have either sold a lot of books or court controversy, are very clever indeed ... or all three such as:

  • Marc Prensky
  • Marshall McLuhan
  • Nabakov
  • Nicholas Carr
  • Malcolm Gladwell

Don't mind adding writers of fiction, especially science fiction:

  • Arthur C Clarke
  • J K Rowling
  • Robert Heinlein

And probably as a good proportion of your readers don't read add some TV or film references:

  • Star Trek
  • 2001
  • Dr Who (a bit niche)
  • Da Vinci Code

And the long gone:

  • Shakeaspeare
  • H G Wells
  • Jules Verne
  • Plutarch
  • Hegel
  • Vygotsky

Add some credibility by quoting:

  • Michael Young
  • Martin Weller
  • Chris Pegler
  • Hellen Beetham
  • Cherie Booth QC

But always take their views out of context and misquote.

Never give the balanced view. You have to demonstrate that you are right about everything.

Then ruin it by misquoting fictional characters:

  • James T Kirk
  • Dr Who
  • Chewbacca

Add you life stoy as padding:

Make it sound like all major life events from your granny sitting in a bowl of peaches to your cycling proficiency certificate means that only you could possibly have come up with these world shattering, incontrovertible truths.

Have someone you seem to recognise on Shaftesbury Avenue endorse your book:

  • Peter Stringfellow gives smarty pants the thumbs up.

(You'd thought it was Richard Branson)

 

 

 

 

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