Lessons Learned Writing My First Book

Two and a half years ago, I was sitting near the front at F8, Facebook’s developer conference, when Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of the Messenger Bot Platform. It was an exciting time—the world went bot crazy. All the other major tech companies launched bot platforms of some kind, and the tech press heralded the end of phone calls as we shifted to a bot-centric world. Within a few months however the hype had disappeared, as people quickly realized that the vast majority of bots were pretty useless—and were more likely to frustrate your customer than actually help them.

Despite the hype, there were a number of momentous changes coming together that would transform the way companies interacted with their customers. Messaging was (and still is) rising up to become the primary method of communication, not only between individuals, but also between businesses and consumers—in the last 12 months, the volume of business-consumer conversations in Messenger increased from 2 billion to 8 billion a month. At the same time, there has been major advancements in artificial intelligence over the past couple of years. If you combine these elements, providing human-plus-automation-powered support over social messaging channels, you can deliver an amazing service experience to customers that’s fast and effortless, while decreasing service costs at the same time. As the global head of customer service at a major retailer told me recently, “after years of just optimizing existing channels, customer service has become exciting again!”

From my conversations with people across the industry, I realized that the rapid shifts taking place could be confusing. Social media, messaging, bots, AI... I’d been living and breathing these changes, and it was clear to me how businesses could take advantage of these technologies to transform their overall approach to customer service. But for others to come to the same understanding, they would need to have a pretty deep knowledge of the changes in consumer behavior and the best practices that were starting to emerge.

While I could share my knowledge in a multi-hour meeting, I knew that to really have an impact on the whole industry I would need to get my ideas out to more people than I could meet one-on-one. The more I thought about it, the more I got excited about the potential of writing a book. I’m a prolific reader of business books, and have always enjoyed writing (although had never written anything longer than a blog post), so felt that I would be up for the challenge if I had enough time, and the right support.

I made that decision two years ago, and finally released Message Me a couple of months ago. Writing the book was a great experience, although a very different type of work than I’m used to. When I speak to other entrepreneurs and executives, they often want to understand what it was like writing a book. So I thought it would be useful to share how the process went, and some of the lessons that I learned. I hope you find it useful for your own book someday!

The book writing process

I knew that I would want to actually write the book myself (I’m very particular when it comes to writing), but I also knew that I would need help from someone who had actually done it before. So I hired Chris Pemberton of The Levy Group, who joined to help me structure the book, edit, and manage the publishing process. I originally thought it would take about a year, but as I learned, writing a book is not like just writing an extra-long blog post. There ended up being five key steps in order to get the book live:

Step one: structure

After doing a brain dump of all of the different topics I wanted to cover, we started experimenting with different narrative structures. After a few iterations, we decided that the first half of the book would cover the history of the industry and the major changes that were taking place, then the second half would be a practical guide (illustrated with real case studies) on how to implement the new technologies and processes. Just this process took a number of months as we went back and forth with different ideas.

At the same time, I started collecting all of the case studies I wanted to include, many from completely new interviews that we conducted as research for the book. Once I had a core outline of the chapters and case study material, I was ready to actually start writing.

Step two: writing

I knew that I would need to commit significant time to the writing process. Luckily, I had hired a COO, Ido Bornstein-HaCohen, a couple of months prior. Part of his job description was to ‘free up Josh’s time to write the book’! With Ido up to speed, I started to block out 4hr writing periods 3-4 times a week. Long form writing was very different from my normal day-to-day: my attention is normally flicking between meetings, back-to-back calls, emails, and Slack. But to really create, you need to focus your time and energy without any distractions.

I started every session with pen and paper, creating a mindmap of the chapter (or section) I was planning on writing. There’s something about holding a pen in your hand that enables the creativity to flow more easily than with a keyboard—I find it much easier to draw out rough concepts this way than to just try and type on a blank page (this blog post started as a mindmap too).

I began writing chapters in plain old Microsoft Word. As the book got longer however, I needed to be able to quickly flick between chapters, to easily rearrange sections within a chapter, and to reference other parts of the book while writing—all of which were really slow and painful in Word. After doing some research, I came across Scrivener, a writing app which gives a huge amount of power to do all of these things. It actually made managing the book structure fun instead of just painful.

I managed to keep up my writing schedule consistently, and after about 10 weeks, I had finished the first draft. It was a really exciting feeling—I was almost done!

Step three: editing

I was proud of finishing up the manuscript so quickly. Before I sent out the manuscript to Chris to edit, I printed the whole thing out to do a first review myself. As soon as I started reading the draft on paper, I was aghast: there were typos, grammatical mistakes, or just confusing sentences in almost every paragraph. I went through the whole book in painstaking detail, then went back and rewrote a whole new version before sending it over. I also sent some individual chapters to different people for feedback.

It’s essential you print out your writing to review on paper—you’ll pick up a lot more than you will on the screen. I’m not entirely sure why—it’s possible that we’ve just trained ourselves to skim everything we read online. But it makes a big difference.

A couple of weeks later, I got the first edited version back. The whole thing was covered in markup. I assimilated all the feedback into a new version, printed the version out, and again spotted a load of things I wasn’t happy with (‘this sentence could be clearer’, or ‘this description could be simpler’). I repeated the cycle with Chris, then again, and again, before we finally had a manuscript that we were both happy with.

At this point, six months had passed since I finished the first draft! Doing so many review cycles felt frustrating at times, but the end result was a book much clearer and easier to read than my first draft.

“Phew!” I thought, “we’re almost done!”

Stage four: design

We made the decision to bypass a traditional publisher and publish directly through BookBaby. This would still get it up on Amazon (hardcover and kindle), and would allow us to get as many physical copies of the book as we wanted, which would enable us to send it to important clients and prospects.

There are two elements to a book design: the cover, and the page layout. The cover was designed by Phil James, Head of Visual Design at Conversocial, who did a really incredible job (his first pass made it to the final book almost unchanged). 

We then turned to BookBaby’s internal design team to handle the internal page layout. After a first pass, we went through several cycles of review as I went through in painstaking detail to ensure that every page break, highlight, and spacing was right.

Finalizing the designs took a couple of months, but we were then ready to get the first physical proof printed! This took, you guessed it, another couple of weeks—physical book printing just isn’t that fast.

I was in San Francisco when the proof was finally ready, and had it couriered to my hotel. I opened the envelope, took out the book… and realized instantly that there was a slight issue layout of some of the text on the cover. Another round of revisions (design + printing) took a few weeks, and in the end we had to do yet another cycle before we were finally finished!

Step five: launch

I was excited to get the book out into the world. First though we had to figure out pricing. We’d designed the book in color, which really made the graphs and images stand out. However, with the length of the book (over 150 pages), the purchase price for a color hardcover was way too high. So, while the Kindle edition is in full color, the hardcover had to be printed in black and white (we did nonetheless manage to get a few special edition copies printed in color that I could send out personally).

By this point, over a year had passed since I had actually finished writing the first draft, way longer than I originally estimated. With the book up on Amazon, we threw launch parties in New York and London, where I was really proud and humbled to have amazing friends and industry leaders join to celebrate the launch.

Signing books at the NYC launch party

Key lessons I learned

• Writing the book took much longer than I thought, at every stage
• The writing process couldn’t really happen until I was in a position to commit large blocks of time, multiple times a week
• Using a professional writing app (Scrivener) made it much easier to manage the manuscript
• Reviewing and editing the book took twice as long as writing it
• Printing out chapters to review and edit with a pen is essential
• A good editor will pick up on a lot that you missed, and suggest many useful improvements
• Color looks great but is expensive to print, so plan for both color and black and white from the start

Overall, writing Message Me was a truly amazing experience. It gave me clarity on how to communicate my vision and advice effectively, and has lead to a lot of incredible speaking and press opportunities. If your industry is changing rapidly, you have a unique perspective on the future, and you can commit the time, then writing a book is definitely a worthwhile endeavor.

If you want to chat more about the process (or the future of customer service!), feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @joshuamarch.

And of course, Message Me is available on Amazon here!