Episode 544: Writing a Book is Like Driving a Bus, says Joshua Robinson

"Sometimes you swing and a miss on a story, or you get scooped by someone, and I think there's a constant feeling of like you're only as good as your last story, as the last thing you published, and it's hard to shake that," says Joshua Robinson, co-author of The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL (Mariner Books).

Joshua Robinson is here. Now, it was SUPPOSED to be a two-headed monster with Jonathan Clegg but SOMEBODY got pulled into an urgent news situation at the Wall Street Journal and had to conveniently skip thus putting ALL the pressure on Joshua Robinson to shoulder the burden that is a conversation with me. JR and JC are the co-authors of four books in nine years.

Four books in nine years.

Their latest is The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL. It's published by Mariner Books and edited by Matt Harper, who made The Front Runner as good as it is.

Joshua heroically stepped in and did the work of two people. He's the sports editor for the Wall Street Journal and has covered Formula 1, European football, the World Cup, the Tour de France, etc. He and Jonathan are the authors of The Club, The Formula, and Messi vs. Ronaldo. The Club and The Formula are rated 4.6 on the place that shall not be named out of more than 1,800 ratings. That's amazing.

In this episode, we talk about:

* Translating super niche sports for a reader

* The co-author shared Google Doc

* Amusing themselves

* The Big Pages Stage

* How they only write two big drafts, what?

* Marrying the big idea to characters