Thread by @Nicolascole77

My name is Nicolas Cole, and I'm a writer, ghostwriter, and entrepreneur.

Want the full story? Start here 👇

I started writing online early on.

At 17 years old, I was one of the highest-ranked World of Warcraft players in North America, and one of the first e-famous gaming bloggers on the internet.

I wrote a book about it, called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. amzn.to/3p7ffYc

After HS, I spent a year at University of Missouri studying journalism. Wasn't my thing.

My sophomore year, I transferred to @ColumbiaChi and studied Poetry, then Music Production, then Piano Performance, before finally settling in Fiction Writing.

After college, I started working as a copywriter at an ad agency downtown Chicago.

Eager to build my career as a writer, in 2014 I started writing on @Quora. I challenged myself to write 1 Quora answer per day, every day, for an entire year straight.

By the end of 2014, I had millions of views on my Quora answers, and set a record for the fastest user to go from making an account to becoming a Top Writer.

The next year, I was the #1 most-read writer on the entire platform (200M+ users).

quora.com/profile/Nicola…

I was also one of the first writers to realize (in 2015/2016) Quora was building syndication partnerships with all the major publications.

So I started writing Quora answers in the same styles as pubs like Inc, Forbes, Fortune, etc.

And in 2015, I had 100+ answers syndicated.

In 2016, after Inc Magazine syndicated dozens & dozens of my Quora answers, I landed my own column.

I ended up writing 400+ original columns for Inc, and became one of their Top 10 contributing writers, averaging 200k+ page views / mo.

inc.com/author/nicolas…

Later that year, I quit my 9-5 and quickly fell into the world of executive ghostwriting.

Early 2017, one of my closest friends and I decided to turn my unique ghostwriting process into a business.

We called it Digital Press.

digitalpress.com

From 2017 to 2019, we scaled Digital Press from the two of us to a team of 20 full-time employees and more than 60 clients around the world.

To date, we've written on behalf of 300+ Silicon Valley founders, public company executives, VCs, Olympic athletes, and more.

At the same time, I began republishing all my Quora content on Medium. I quickly became a Top Writer in more than 20 different Medium categories.

This process was how I started to create my unique methodology for online writing distribution.

nicolascole77.medium.com

Then, in 2019, after an exhilarating startup journey, my cofounder and I decided to scale the business back. I missed being a writer.

And in 2020, I published a book called The Art & Business of Online Writing, sharing everything I'd learned thus far: amzn.to/35VqDyU

That year, I also launched a morning newsletter for writers, called Daily Writing Habits.

Every morning, I send writing advice, publishing frameworks, and success stories to 10,000 writers.

dailywritinghabits.substack.com

Today, I spend the majority of my time:

- Writing books
- Advising and consulting startups & companies on their messaging
- Ghostwriting for a select handful of executives
- And writing online

I am also one of the co-creators of Category Pirates🏴‍☠️, a weekly newsletter on Category Creation & Category Design.

This is one of my favorite topics to write about, and is a unique vantage point I enjoy bringing into discussions around publishing.

categorypirates.substack.com

In 2021, I began participating in #ship30for30. I had so much fun writing the first few Atomic Essays, I challenged myself to write 365 of them in a row.

At the end of 2021, I plan on turning them into a book.

ship30for30.com