- Get clear on the purpose. Or, to paraphrase Simon Sinek: Find your why. Let’s face it, writing a book will be a long and often difficult task. It will be yet another unfinished nice-idea project unless you are absolutely clear on why you’re writing. So write down the book’s purpose, why it’s important to you or others, what you are trying to achieve, etc. You’ll keep coming back to this again and again.
- Choose a publishing route. “Why so early?” I hear you ask. The method you choose should be intimately linked to your purpose. If you want to maximise book sales, perhaps you want to get a mainstream publisher to take on your book. Good luck with that. If you have published previously, or are well-known in your field, a media celebrity, or perhaps a company executive, you might be able to attract the attention of a business book publisher. For the rest of us, you have got a <<1% chance. So self-publishing is the most likely route forward. This means you pay the self-publisher up-front fees to take your lovingly crafted work through the process. Do your research: do you want it available as eBook, paperback, hardback, colour, in your country only, with one retailer only, etc., etc? I chose Grosvenor House Publishing, which allowed print on demand worldwide with an eBook option, plus proofreading and book cover design services. Or you might decide writing a series of blogs or recording podcasts is the way forward.
- Do lots of research. Consider whether there are lots of books available on this topic already. What can you add that’s new? Work out your sources of information: people and resources. With people, you’ll need to persuade them of why it’s worth their time (your clarity of purpose will help here). I was extremely fortunate that so many people I spoke to wanted the story of Advanced RISC Machines/Arm Limited to be told. I’m particularly indebted to founders: Sir Robin Saxby, the first CEO, and Jamie Urquhart, the first COO.
- Build a structure and narrative. Can you tell a story that flows from beginning to end? Can you create multiple chapters to build the book? Or, in reality, do you peter out after three significant points? I found a Mind Mapping tool invaluable – you might like to use Post-It notes on a board. The important thing is to feel you’ve got enough strong topics that can be turned into separate chapters and joined into a coherent whole. I also used this technique for each chapter’s structure and, if needed, the next level down: a fractal approach.
- Start writing. Something. Anything. “Write without fear, edit without mercy”, as someone possibly said. After doing your research and working on a structure, you need to start writing. This is where you begin to move from a nice enjoyable hike in the foothills to serious mountain climbing. What more can I say? You’ve just got to start and accept that when you re-read, you’ll want to edit, edit, edit. You’ll probably also throw away large amounts of hard-earned words. It took me four revisions before my first major version, which I decided was structured poorly after being released for review. So I started again on an entirely new version borrowing some of the old text as I went along. Painful but necessary.
- Your time not writing is more important than time writing. Plan your days or weeks so that you have lots of non-writing time. For family reasons, I choose to write only two days a week for much of the time (with a burst of action near completion). The time I spent doing manual labour in the garden, thinking about the book, was just as valuable as the time in front of the keyboard.
- Find some critical friends. Your ideal reviewer is someone who has the time to spend reading your “masterpiece” and is willing to give you brutally honest feedback. I’m fortunate that the culture I was writing about in Arm Limited included a healthy dose of total honesty. So most of my reviewers didn’t hold back – it was just what I needed. It was a pain in the neck receiving so much, and I didn’t use it all, but it was a vital ingredient. Final note, you can’t ask them to review in detail more than once, so use your review tokens wisely. Although, I was incredibly fortunate that Jamie Urquhart was kind enough to check both my versions 1 and 2.
- Create a proofreading “team”. I chose to pay my self-publisher to do minutely detailed proofreading. I also did at least four read-throughs of the “final” version, including one using an Apple pencil on the PDF. Every time, I found mistakes and things to correct. I also decided to pay for Grammarly to check my text. It found 2,500 issues I had to work through – and it improved the clarity of my text. You can’t get enough proofreading done.
- Choose a title and cover design. Ideally, a short, snappy title plus a longer sub-title to explain the contents. I’m grateful to a friend with whom I brainstormed ideas until we landed upon “Culture Won” to summarise how the internal culture helped Arm Limited overcome all sorts of challenges. I chose, also, to pay for a cover design. I wasn’t expecting my book to be piled high in bookshops to attract people browsing. However, I did want something that honoured the title and the company I was writing about. I’m grateful to Arm Limited for allowing me to use their colour palette.
- Plan your marketing. If you’re lucky enough to have a publisher buy the rights to your book, they will be in charge of marketing and will pull you into their plan. However, for us mere mortals who self-publish, all the marketing falls on our shoulders. Of course, you can choose to pay for help, and your original purpose will guide you. Your choice of social media will depend on your target reader, for example. I felt that LinkedIn was where many of my likely readers would lie and after only one month and a small number of posts, the book has sold over 1,000 copies. Reaching out to trade magazines might work for you, too or any other organisation that might give you some publicity. Most importantly, have a plan and execute it.
Finally: Just get started.