I Published My First Book This Week, Here's What I Learned

I published my first book this week; here are 10 things I learned over the last 10 months.

#1 Word of Mouth is All That Matters

My book's called RESET: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money (The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy). I've spent the past 10 months more-than full-time working on it. It's already a no.1 bestseller on Amazon, and no. 2 in the ultra-competitive personal finance category. Where have these sales come from? From people I know who've read the book (I sent a fair few advance review copies) and told their friends. Few sales have come from social media, albeit I'm sure I've had random purchases on the back of people liking the front cover, clicking on to Amazon and reading the amazing 29 customer reviews.

#2 Nobody Cares About You

Apart from your friends and family. Everyone else only cares what they can get out of you. It's a harsh and uncomfortable truth but the world owes you nothing. If you provide them with something that's valuable to them, that's where the gold lies. I'd recommend everyone watches this Alex Baldwin speech in Glengarry Ross, if you don't believe me. Go for it: whatever you're doing, show the world what you've got.

#3 Focus on What Is Important

Writing a book is the hardest thing I've ever done. There's no right or wrong way, and you can choose hundreds of different dead-ends to go down (I self-published and did everything myself from start to finish, with the help of some wonderful alpha, beta, and influencer readers, of course). Counter-intuitively, as a PR man well-versed in the promotional arts, I did little promotion throughout the 10-month process. Instead, I focussed on making the product as good as I could. Long-term, I believe this will prove to have been the best strategy. Clients – never ever hire a PR to polish your turd. PRs – you won't be doing your job properly if you don't tell clients when this happens.

#4 You Can't Do Anything Meaningful On Your Own

At the end of February 2018, I finished my first draft. I sent it to 10 alpha readers. I spent the next couple of months editing then sent it out again to a few of the same people and about eight new ones, for a fresh perspective. Two months later I issued advance review copies to influencers. One month later I published. The book would be a shadow of itself without the help of others.

#5 Don't Listen to the Noise

I'm as guilty of this as the next man. If you spend your life listening to friend's opinions of this, that and the other, it can get a little confusing as to what you think. Aside from close friends and confidants, I've cut myself off from all networks over the past 10 months, in an effort to write something pure, which reflects the truth as I believe it to be.

#6 Take Action and Amazing Things Happen

I met a guy in the sauna on Monday. We got chatting. He was in a big job in London and jacked it all in to start again in Glasgow (no connections here, he'd done his research and knew the schools were good). He's read hundreds of self-improvement books. He's now added another one to his tally. On Wednesday he sought me out at our health club, lent me The Year of Living Danishly and said my book was the first that he felt had been written for him. He went on to say it'll be translated into many languages. I didn't know him a week ago.

#7 Learn by Doing

I've been writing for 20 years, and done more than my fair share of active learning over the past six. However, penning a book has made me a much better writer, and improved my grammar no end (and this is from someone who always fancied himself as a bit of a grammar pedant/expert). It's also built on the last four years' developing my own writing voice by issuing a weekly newsletter, and helped me work out what I think about the world. Not everyone wants to write a book, I realise that. But getting stuck into something that you know in your heart you really want to do in life, following your passion and beggar the consequences, is an emotionally rewarding (if tough) path to take.

#8 Don't Do Things for the Money

One per cent of authors sell more than 1,000 copies, and I imagine the percentage is much lower for those who self-publish. As a wise friend said on the phone last night,

"if you'd have been doing it for the money, you may as well have taken a wheelbarrow to Bank of Scotland, filled it up with tenners and tipped them down the nearest drain."

I've not written RESET to make a buck; it certainly ain't a "business card" book. Instead, I've followed a pretty unconventional path over the past six years, learned a lot, and want to share what I've gleaned (and the wisdom of hundreds of Nobel Prize-winners, academics, financial independence aficionados, PRs, personal finance experts and self-help authors) with others who stubbornly cling on to the belief "there is another way", yet have neither the time nor the inclination to find out how what it is.

#9 The Number One Factor in Personal Happiness?

Not close relationships with friends and family, not health, not finding meaning. The number one indicator in living a long and happy life (according to a 300,000-strong meta study) is positive daily interaction with random strangers. As anyone who's a member of my aforementioned health club will attest, I wrote RESET exclusively in its confines. It's this interaction with people I don't really know in the club that kept my spirits up during 10 months spent largely in my head. Remember this the next time you buy an overpriced giant latte from Starbucks (roughly equivalent to the ￡2.95 first-week price of a Kindle copy of my 373-page book, if you'll excuse the plug).

#10 Show and Tell

Zak and Jude have got "show and tell" today. Both asked to take a copy of RESET to show their class. Both are still young enough to want to be like their dad when they grow up. If so, they'll make great PR men.

David Sawyer (45) is a United Nations award-winning PR man, 2:40 marathoner and owner of Glasgow-based Zude (see what he did there?) PR. He lives in Glasgow with hits wife, Rachel, you kids (Zak and Jude) and pet – Hamsterdam. RESET is his first book.

This blog post does not appear on David's company blog and was written purely for his LinkedIn connections.