Have You Always Wanted to Write a Book? – Tips on Getting Your Ideas Published...

I get asked all the time what it takes to get a book published, and having written 60+ books over the years for the big publishers (McGraw Hill, Pearson Publishing, Sams Publishing, Wiley) and more recently going the self-publishing route, here's some insights on getting a book out to print...

Getting to the Finish Line

The two biggest challenges I find with writing a book (or planning to write a book) is:

1. getting the manuscript written
2. knowing the process to get the book published once the content is fully written

The focus of this article is on #2, to get you some clarity on how to get a manuscript published. Just like running a race, it’s always nice to know when you are halfway done, or on the final stretch to get that motivation to just push to the finish line. However if you are near done writing your manuscript but have no clue what it’ll take to get the manuscript published, then it’s like thinking there’s a huge hill right at the end, so you’re struggling to make it to the finish line.

So I’m going to help clarify the process of going from manuscript to printed copy, and even provide some guidance on getting some quick publishing experience to realize the publishing piece could actually be the easy part, making the journey to completing the manuscript easier.

The Economics of Writing a Book

First of all, unless you are a well known politician, Oscar winning actor, sports MVP, or have an existing brand like JK Rowling or Stephen King, you likely won’t be able to pay the bills off book royalties. I tried to dig up actual “average author income” data but couldn’t find any quantifiable figures, but the anecdotal comments from various authors who have written articles seem to note that selling 2,000 – 10,000 copies of a book is “doing pretty good” and one might make $2.50-$4.00 a book, so we’re talking $5,000-$40,000 royalties TOTAL per book. I’d probably say $2,000-$15,000 per book is more optimistic at best, it's nice $$, but it doesn't pay the bills long.

So Why Write a Book?

If you don’t make money selling a book, why write one? The answer usually comes in the form of “wanting to share a message.” We write books because we know something, experienced something, have advice or a interesting story (fiction or non-fiction) that we want to share.

Of course if all you want to do is share your message, then you can write a blog article and post it on LinkedIn, or share on Facebook, or post on your blog site.

But most of us want that “book” to physically hand to someone. If you plan to do public speaking tours (or do more public speaking if you’re already out on the circuit), having a book to reference, sign, hand-out is more credible than “follow me on Twitter.”

We went to school for years carrying around books, reading books, referencing books, that “A Book” is the pinnacle of knowledge, and thus when we want to share something of value with someone, having it in printed form is how we share our knowledge and experience.

Working with the Big Boys

With a fully written manuscript in hand, you could go knock on the door of one of the big publishing houses (McGraw, Macmilllan, HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster), but that’s like having a “mix tape” of the songs you and your buddies recorded in your garage knocking on the door of a big recording studios trying to be the next Michael Jackson. The publishing houses get thousands of publishing requests a day and unless you’re already a well-known super star, it’s a long road down that path.

And having written a few dozen books with the big boys, it’s not a fun process. Your book idea (aka “book proposal”) goes through acquisition editors, editors, chief editors, sometimes out to focus groups and forums to review, at a minimum it’s a 2-3 month process and is commonly 6-12 months to even get a proposal approved.

And no one will review your proposal without putting in their 2-cents worth as comments, so you now take their feedback and revise “your idea” to meet “their idea”, and now your motivation to write “your book” changes as you might not actually agree with their ideas. But you know if you don’t change your ideas to their ideas, they may never accept your book for publishing.

Presuming you make it through the book proposal / review cycle, now you get into contracts, which the fastest I’ve ever seen a contract get through the big boy legal departments is 2 months. You could start writing, but until you have a contract, you actually don’t have an agreement to proceed. The contract is a contract, you give up certain rights (like to write for another publishing house for a period of time, or to write on a similar topic without giving your publishing house the right of first refusal), blah blah blah. BUT, once you have a contract, you’re set to begin writing!!!

The best thing I found with a formal contract in hand with a publishing house is now they throw down a bunch of resources. You have editors, a timeline, a project manager, people who are harping at you to get in chapters to get the book out on schedule. It’s a very structured process to get you to manuscript complete.

The hardest time I had during the editing process were all of the editors marking up content and expecting responses. There’s usually someone reviewing the content for spelling and grammar (copy editor), someone reviewing for flow (project editor), and someone reviewing for technical accuracy for technical books (technical editor). You get back your chapters with edits in 3 different colors, with questions in the margins asking what you were trying to say, asking you to revise the section, telling you that your content is redundant to what you already wrote elsewhere in the book, etc.

You then work through these edits, make revisions, and resubmit. You’ll go through this process once or twice per chapter. But once it's all done, the book moves along to being published.

Once in print, the publishing house likely will have a marketing team available to help promote the book. They typically won’t get you speaking gigs, that’s up to you to do that level of promotion, but they’ll be available to support your efforts.

Blah blah blah… It’s a long bureaucratic process. There are book publishing intermediaries that can help provide guidance and support in working with the big boys, but the rest of this article is my take on why I like self-publishing these days!

The Benefit of Self-Publishing

When I first heard of the concept of self-publishing, I thought it would be more work, complicated to figure everything on my own, but when a friend of mine introduced me to CreateSpace (now KDP, the Kindle people) I figured it was worth a try, I jumped in to publish my first book with them that I realized how EASY it was!

All the things I hated about working with the big publishers (huge bureaucracy, months and months of wait times, lots of people I didn’t know telling me how to write “my book", etc, etc) was ALL eliminated with self-publishing.

The Benefit of a Book

As has been noted in this article, most people use books as a marketing piece, more than just a brochure or blog posting, but something that can be given out, shared, handed to someone as a “real book”. Those that don’t make money on selling their books typically make their money as a public speaker or consultant. Speaking at an event, because you’re an expert on a specific topic, that has “written a book” on the topic, gets you in the door and in front of potential clients that you’ll provide consulting services to. Or the book may simply be a resource that is intended to be shared at low or no cost to get a key message out.

This is where self-publishing pays off, by being able to write a book with a wholesale cost of say $4 that can be published with a retail price of $5. You can send people a link to buy your book (printed or Kindle format) or you can buy copies and give them away. In the case of KDP, there's no cost to publish with them, you still own the copyright to the book and content, "if/when" someone buys your book off Amazon.com, KDP will print the book and deliver it to the person in a few days. So no inventory, no production costs, no minimum quantities, and you make a few pennies (or a few dollars, dependent on the selling price you set for the book) for each copy sold!

Consider Writing a Primer (Mini-book)

AND if the prospect of writing your ultimate book might be overwhelming, what I’ve recommended to many (and something I’ve done a few times myself) is just write a Mini-Book / Primer!  Instead of writing that 100, 300, 500 page book you’ve always wanted to write, how about a 25-50 pager. It could be a primer to the subject you want to write more on. It could be a short excerpt of what you intend to write on. I’ve turned 2-3 blog posts into a “mini-book” on a subject, to share out initial ideas in a REALLY quick manner.

Start off with self-publishing a “short”, get familiar with the process, then when you’re ready to write your full book, you’ll already have one book behind you!

Wrap-up

Self-publishing makes the “backend” of publishing books easy, so that for those who are looking to “write a book,” all you really need to do is get your content written (I know, not an easy task), but at least the next step of getting the book to print is actually very simple.

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Some Specific Details on Self-Publishing

If what I wrote energizes you to go out and write and self-publish your book, here are some next step tips...

Working with KDP Publishing (https://kdp.amazon.com)

This might end up sounding like an advertisement for KDP, and to be honest, I haven’t worked with any other self-publishing orgs, however these guys “do it all” and I haven’t even bothered looking for alternatives. Here are areas that I’ve found as an author are critical, and how KDP handles it:

Content Creation: KDP provides you with a Word doc template that you cut/paste your manuscript into their template, or just write your content in their template doc file. When you are done, you upload the Doc file (their template merely has chapter breaks, heading styles, placeholders for you to put in your Dedication, Introduction, etc). Doesn’t get simpler than that

Book Cover: If you have a photo you want to upload for the cover design, or you created a nice graphic in a TIF/JPG file that you want to use for your book cover, they provide an online Cover Creator. You step through about 7 steps on the cover creator (noting the name of the book, the authors, upload your photo/graphics, upload any text you want on the back cover) and it creates your book cover for you!

ISBN#: This is the Library of Congress designator for all published books. You can manually register for an ISBN through agents who do it, OR with KDP once you fill in the main book setup page with the title of your book, the book authors, the genre of the book (fantasy, tech, children, etc), you click on “get me an ISBN” and within seconds you have a 13 digit ISBN number! Doesn’t get any easier than that (and at NO cost!)

Write Your Content: Using the template they provide you, just write your content

Editing: While CreateSpace has “services” you can purchase from freelance editors to grammar check your book content, for the $100-$500 they charge for that service, you can ask a friend with good English skills to edit your content. It’s unlikely you want someone critiquing your book, all you likely want is someone to review the doc for spelling errors, grammar errors, flag those sentences/paragraphs that “make no sense” to have them do a quick review/edit. You can pay them instead of some KDP freelancer, buy your friend dinner, whatever might work, but end of the day, the editing piece can be quick and simple.

Publishing: Once you have the content written, edited, your cover created, you simply click “publish” and someone reviews your content to make sure it meets KDP standards (mostly to make sure that your chapter headings are using the right style/font from the template, that your body text is spaced properly, you have a cover created with their tool that looks good).  They turn around the review in one work day, you click “final publish” and that is it!

Print/Kindle: The thing I like about KDP is that they’re not just the middleman, they also handle the online sales (through amazon.com), the book printing (when someone buys the book, it’s printed On Demand (qty 1 or 1000) and directly shipped to the person within 1-2 days), and for eBook/Kindle owners, when you do the “final publish” your book, you can choose to have the Doc template put in Kindle book format. So electronic books and distribution is all handled by KDP.

Royalties: After you upload your book, KDP tells you the COST of your book based on the # of pages, whether you chose the inside text to be black and white (cheaper) or color (more expensive), the type of cover (paperback or hard bound), etc. A book might cost $3 or $5 as the “cost” on the book. You can then determine the cover price of the book from there. So if you choose $9.95 or $24.95 or $99, YOU determine the selling price. The difference between the selling price (ie: $9.95) and what they tell you as the cost to produce (ie: $4.00) will determine your royalty/profit. So every book that sells for say $9.95 (with a cost of $4.00) will net you $5.95 in profit/royalty. Once a month they tally up all sales and wire transfer $$$ into a bank account you designate. All book sales are tracked online, so you can go back into the KDP portal and see how many books you sold (print or kindle) at any time and know what size check you’ll get at the end of the month!

Author Copies of the Book: Something that you’ll find is you’ll want to give away copies of your book. You don’t want to pay your retail price for “your book”. KDP makes it GREAT where you go into the author portal and buy "author copies" of the book at the designated production cost (like $4.00 in this previous example). You can buy as many of the books as you want, they ship them right to you. You can give them away, you can sell them at an event (for $5, $7, $9.95). It’s your book, you determine what you want to sell it for! But bottomline, it’s REALLY cheap/simple for you to get your book at wholesale cost to do as you please.

Promotions: If you want to run a promotion where anyone responding to an Advertisement you have, or people attending one of your events, or something you promote off your blog, they can go to KDP/Amazon with a discount code that you can create off the KDP portal page, and that’ll give people a discount off the normal retail price of the book!

And as I noted previously, ALL of this is FREE!  You don’t pay anyone a fee, no upfront costs, no hidden charges. You write in a template, you upload the template, people buy your book, you get a check for the profit on sales. As I noted, I haven’t worked with any other self-publishers, but when I get it all done online with a few clicks of a button, I have had NO reason to look at alternatives.

Doing Your Own Advertising and Promotion

The only other thing to Self-Publishing (in general) is you need to do your OWN advertising and marketing. As much as the book is on Amazon.com and the Kindle Store for someone to search, find, and buy, other than that, there’s no advertising campaign or marketing department out promoting your book. Even the big publishers don’t really do a lot of individual marketing.

So that means you will want to self-promote your book through LinkedIn, blog posts, your Website, mention it in your speaking engagements you do, post on Facebook, etc.

Step by Step Publishing Process

I went through and walked the process of actually creating a book online with CreateSpace (the predecessor to KDP) a couple years ago. The KDP process is slightly different here/there, but I'd say this is about 95% identical if you wanted to see how I took a book manuscript and got it to publish status in under 18-minutes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ducapRT9X6k

So beyond actually writing the content of a book, to take the words you write and get it in print and available worldwide, call it 30-60 minutes of administration time and you are done! So no excuses now, put your ideas to paper and get your book in print! Hope this is helpful, good luck on your journey!!!