52 Novels

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If you delve into the crazy world of online entrepreneurship—a place where copywriters seemingly only sell copywriting courses and everyone is raking in six-figure Google AdSense checks—chances are good you’ll come across someone attributing at least some of his or her success to Napoleon Hill’s classic book, THINK AND GROW RICH.

This thin little abridged treasure, all of 233 pages, is packed with gobs of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and rags-to-riches vignettes designed to teach us all that the road to boundless prosperity is as simple as thinking about how rich we want to become… and then it happens.

Apparently, THE SECRET—the latest hooha that’s taking money from wackadoos around the globe—ain’t telling us anything new.

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. Hill claims he studied—at the urging of Dale Andrew Carnegie—the paths of thousands of people from all walks of life to determine the common traits of two groups of people: the filthy, stinking rich, and the filthy, stinking poor.

He came up with a set of thirteen things, what he called The 13 Principles of Success. I won’t list them all here because I don’t want to spoil the surprise later.

Okay, there’s not really a surprise later… it’s just that most of them are common sense—believe in yourself, overcome fears, make specific goals, blah, blah, blah. That kind of stuff.

Besides, the specifics are widely available elsewhere. (Question for those who clicked the links just before this: the similarities are striking, no? Good thing Hill never had the Internet… the public would’ve pimp slapped him for stealing Ben Franklin’s work!)

I don’t mean to sound unkind. I’ve read this book several times and there’s lots in there I think is quite good.

And the more I thought about some of the things in the book, the more I realized that the book isn’t just a road map/self-help manual for zany, over-the-top Internet marketers. There’s some honest-to-goodness advice for we fiction writer types, too.

So here they are… Six ways writers can profit from Napoleon Hill’s THINK AND GROW RICH:

See how you can use TGR to be a better writer…