The ultimate guide to writing an amazing business book

This article is a shorter version of an epic blog post that I wrote on everything you need to know when writing your first business book. You can read the full blog post on my site if you want to dig more into the details: https://www.harbott.com/ultimate-guide-to-writing-a-business-book/.

I've just finished the five-year process of writing my first book The HERO Transformation Playbook with Cuan Mulligan. I wanted to document all of the hard lessons, pain, frustration and creativity, we’ve had along the way. Hopefully, this guide will help to you write your business book more effectively and efficiently than we did!

Step 1: Understand your motives for writing a book

If you are writing a book to make money - then don’t bother! You might as well go and play the lottery, as your odds of getting rich might be higher!

Luckily, making money was not our motivation! We wanted to create something creative to help organisations transform and reach their full potential. A secondary motivation was to position us as experts and to have a calling card when approaching new clients.

If you do not have aligned motives with your co-author, then that is likely to spell disaster down the road when things get tough

There are many other reasons you might want to write a book: to channel your creativity; because you like writing; to leave a legacy for your children; for use as a business development tool; to help you sell other services or products; or, simply, because you want to write a book for the heck of it.

Step 2: Decide on your book topic

Next you need to choose a subject to write about. You are going to spend hundreds of hours on this topic, so choose carefully!

When we were thinking about the potential topics to write about, we used the following criteria: 

1. A topic we we both loved to discuss and debate,
2. 2. An area we were deep experts in,
3. 3. A subject growing in importance in the industry.

This left us with a very short list, so it didn’t take us long to decide on the topic of transformation.

If you already know what you want to write your book on then great, move to the next step. If not, then creating a criteria to decide on a topic is a worthwhile use of time.

Step 3: Pick a book style

Before you start writing, you need to think about what your book will look like.

A design heavy book is much harder to create, more expensive to print and more expensive to develop. It means that your book will have a much higher retail price as the cost to print it is much higher if there are a lot of colour images. 

Any amount of colour in a book quadruples the printing cost

A predominantly text-based book is MUCH easier to develop and will be a lot faster to write. This is why most people choose this format.

We decided to go against convention and create a beautifully visual book. We have over 150 images that we designed with seven different designers. This was a big reason why our book took much longer to create than a text-based book.

Step 4: Choose your publishing mechanism 

There are three main types of publishing options:

Option 1: Traditional Publishing: Handles all of the editing, production, and marketing of your book. The downside is that if the book does well, then the publisher has the most to gain, and you have little control over the book process and timelines.

Option 2: Self Publishing: You retain ownership of your book, but are responsible for managing and paying for everything from writing, to editing, marketing and distribution.

Option 3: Hybrid Publishing: This option combines the benefits of self-publishing, like control and ownership, with the distribution power and quality of traditional publishing. It usually requires authors to pay up-front costs, but affords authors a more collaborative experience and a much higher royalty structure.

We choose hybrid publishing as it gave us the best combination of control and help with book distribution. We used the superb team at Practical Inspiration Publishing and would highly recommend them. 

Step 5: Purposefully choose your audience

You are writing for your readers, not yourself. This seems so obvious but, in reality, it is really hard to keep focused on your target audience.

You need to know who your target reader is: What problems do they have? What is their level of knowledge of your topic? Why is your book worthwhile to them and why would they spend money on your book?

You can choose to write a book for a very large group of people with wide appeal, or you can target a niche audience.

We opted for a niche audience, so our book is never going to be a best-seller. But remember, that was not our motivation for writing the book.

Our audience is primarily: Change management leaders e.g. transformation leads, programme managers, board sponsors, change consultants, and project managers responsible for delivering large-scale change.

Step 6: Write the book

Yep that’s it – start writing – sounds simple…right?

Initially, the book writing process was completely alien to us. What we know now is that it takes a lot longer than you think, unless you commit to writing full time.

If you are trying to write, work and raise a family, then accept that it's going to be a multi-year process, if you want to keep your sanity… and your relationships intact!

1. The dirty first draft - this should be really raw: don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, or format. Just keep writing until you have nothing left, get all of your ideas out and get the rough content for each chapter.
2. The endless re-writes - we must have re-written the book at least five times, honing it, softening the edges and padding it out. Get it to the stage where you can start getting people to read the draft and give you feedback.
3. Development editing - a development editor will help you with the structure, story and flow of the book. The dev editor challenged our structure, called out areas that did not make sense and added a fresh set of eyes into the process.
4. Beta readers - now you're ready to unleash the draft on friends and family. We improved the draft every time someone left us comments on what to change. We are grateful to all of the people who took the time to give us feedback.
5. Copy editing - a copy editor will correct spelling, grammar and content issues, but not make material changes to your draft; it is cleaning up the final mistakes.
6. Typesetting - this takes your manuscript into the final print book format. This is where your hard work pays off, and where all of your creativity finally comes to life.
7. Proofreading - one final review to check for obvious mistakes. It may seem like overkill but this is your last chance to make changes before printing.

And there you have it, your book was now ready to publish!

The final phase is marketing your book, which can read about in the full article on my site.

10 things I wish I had known before I started

1. From idea to published book takes around two years, unless you're writing full time.
2. You need to take ownership of writing your book - it's unlikely a ghost writer can write a non-fiction book for you.
3. Find a co-author - it is a lot more fun to share the highs and lows with someone.
4. Start the process with a contents page - this will allow you to structure the story of the book early on and save a lot of rework later on.
5. Create pragmatic deadlines - to keep you focused on moving through the process and not letting the daily grind get in the way of progress.
6. Make sure your development editor is well versed in your subject matter - this will save you a ton of time.
7. Choose your book title as early as you can - if not, this is going be a huge mental and time drain later on.
8. Ensure your book cover reflects your vision - the cover is such an emotive decision. Listen to your gut and back yourself to make the right decision.
9. Promote your book asap - it’s never too early to start talking about your book.
10. Writing is a skill - you get better at it with practice and the more you learn about the mechanics of writing.

If you are interested in learning more about our book, you can check it out here: The HERO Transformation Playbook - The step by step guide for delivering large-scale change using the HERO Transformation Framework

Finally, a huge thanks to everyone who helped us during the writing process. Without your support and generosity, we would not have been able to publish a book that we are incredibly proud of.

If you want to find the full in-depth version of this article you can find it here : https://www.harbott.com/ultimate-guide-to-writing-a-business-book/