Free Online Workshop on Book Proposals & Filming in the US
This Wednesday, I'll be leading a free online workshop for Reedsy--perfect for aspiring authors!
Fresh back from a week of filming a new series in the US, I’m pleased to announce a free online workshop this Wednesday that’s ideal for any aspiring authors. And a special podcast episode about adventures in learning Slovenian! And a bonus post-Easter sandwich!
Filming a New Series
I was in the US for a very busy week of filming with The Teaching Company for my second series with them, for their Great Courses. The Great Courses were the first to take the most popular university courses and make them available to the general public, in audio or video formats. Starting back in the 90s, they often consisted of just a professor standing at a lectern in a fake studio, so not the most aesthetically inventive, but the content and teaching was always great. I listened to many of these when I was younger.
But they’ve dramatically upped their production value and since the 2000s their courses are on a par with History or Discovery Channel documentary TV series, with amazing postproduction. For the first course I did with them, filmed just after the pandemic, Lost Art, we filmed in a castle as well as on location for narrative openers to each episode. And in post-production they made a virtual museum of lost art! These are proper university-level courses, with syllabi and proper professors. You’ll likely have seen Masterclass advertised on social media—this is a borrowing of the concept but the hook there is that celebrities teach you in short-form, interview-style courses. They are more about the excitement of being “taught” by a celebrity than about the content, whereas The Great Courses is content-first. Really good stuff.
I was filming my second course for them, the name of which is yet to be confirmed, but it will basically be their big, go-to Western Art History course. We filmed 25 episodes in 4.5 days with a great team at their studios outside of DC.
These courses are shown on TV (various networks, you’d have to check locally to see if your cable networks carry them), you can download individual courses for instance via Amazon (here’s my first course in audio). But the best approach is to subscribe to their app, which is touted as “The Netflix of Learning.” You pay once a year and it’s all you can eat from hundreds of top courses.
We’re already discussing my next course for them, I’ll keep you posted.
Learning Slovenian
If you’re curious about the experience of learning Slovenian, there’s a new episode of my Ljubljana Podcast all about it. In the episode I recount some of my own adventures getting to my current level of “fluent but with grammatical errors in every sentence,” as well as thoughts from teachers of Slovenian and fellow expats.
Free Online Book Proposal Workshop
Finally for now, I’m teaming up with Reedsy to offer a free talk about the art and strategy of writing book proposals. Book proposals are absolutely necessary for any non-fiction book you hope for a publisher to take on. But many writers have never heard of them—I hadn’t until after my novel had come out and I wanted to write non-fiction. This winter I published a book, The 12-Hour Author, with all my tips and experience contained within. As part of this book’s promotion I’m giving this free talk on Wednesday, April 23, at 3pm EST. You can sign up for free here.
That’s it for now. A very happy Easter weekend to you all! I’ll leave you with a recipe for the Easter Feaster. Taking the leftovers from the traditional Slovenian Easter breakfast (horseradish, potica cake, smoked ham, hardboiled eggs), we make a sandwich (potica slices for the bread) and grill it in butter in a pan on both sides.
So you start with this on Easter Sunday morning…
And you end with this the morning after…
