Cianna is a resilience coach, creator of the Happiness Exercises, and author of the upcoming book, Complaining Won't Change the Weather. She's dedicated to helping people bounce back when things get tough and giving them tools to live life fully. http://changepath.org/
Check out my amazing book cover design by the insanely talented R. Black!
I am immersing myself in trainings by Brendan Burchard - the first guy to build trainings around the comprehensive world of being an author/speaker/trainer/coach/etc. He calls this the "expert industry."
I love how straightforward he is about laying out the basics of how to turn a message into a business (hint: it's far more than just writing a book), and how he also drills home thinking of it as a business in order to get our messages out there more widely and also have an income to support that work. His mantra about being in service definitely resonates with me. It's also getting me around my resistance to thinking about the money side of this work.
It does take work to do all this writing and speaking (not to mention coming up with the ideas and structures in the first place). Yes, it is really fun work that I happily do without getting paid (clearly). But a lack of funds leads to a lack of time and flexibility, definitely limiting my options. Bottom line: I need to take seriously the fact that this is a business (not a hobby) if I want to help more people.
In one training for authors, Brendan reviews the points he learned from his literary agent, Scott Hoffman, about whether or not to self-publish. Some highlights:
Authors should at least try to get a major publisher.
Full disclosure: I have not tried. No stories of rejection here. Just launched headlong towards self-publishing for all kinds of reasons and a host of impulses.
Going the traditional publishing route means that once your book is accepted, it's still 18-24 months until it comes out.
I heard that and immediately balked. I knew about the long timespan of finding a publisher but hadn't considered how long it would be after acceptance.
For a while now I'd been thinking about using self-publishing to circumvent the slowness of the traditional route, based on the idea that I could publish quickly, promote it, and use the results to demonstrate maket demand. Then I was thinking that I would use that evidence to approach traditional publishers in the hopes of having them pick it up for wider distribution.
This plan received a new challenge when I heard Brendan quote Scott:
If you're eventually planning on approaching a major publisher, do not self-publish unless you're sure you can sell 10,000 copies.
He went on to explain that less than 10,000 sold actually undermines the argument that you have a market which would be worth the publisher's time and effort. As a first-time author my book would be a gamble, one where the publisher would have to assess the riskiness of their investment based on whether or not they believed in the book and in me. But as a self-published author with book sales they can see, I have suddenly given out information about how good/bad a risk they would be taking.
To be sure, this gave me pause, but it didn't make me think self-publishing was an automatic "No." It gave me a solid number around which I will have to create a plan to help me evaluate which route to take. If I can figure out how to hit 10,000 copies sold in a year, then I'll go with self-publishing. If I can't, I may need to re-evaluate my internal measures of success. Either way, I think I'll spend a little time in January getting set up to approach major publishing houses and see if there's any interest at all.
I should at least try.
I am very pleased to report that I found a book jacket designer! He's just amazing and easy to work with. In fact, after just one conversation he cranked out a beautiful design that blew my mind. Seeing it, I thought, "This is really happening! My book is going to be real!" At the same time, I knew that it wasn't quite right and would need some tweaks before it was done.
I showed the design to a handful of trusted friends for their feedback. Most were completely in line with what I was thinking. Then one said something that made the designer and me decide to start over: "That's really beautiful. And really feminine. I can't see a guy picking up that book in the bookstore and thinking it's for him."
Pow. Insightful and spot on. We toyed with the idea of creating two jackets with the same interior (it will be digital publishing after all) but have decided instead to scrap it altogether and find the right design.
I felt a little momentum slide as a result, but it's the right decision. And it will be amazing to have the right cover once we find it!
I just printed out 10 copies of the book so I can show them to people and watch how they interact with them. I've tested out several titles, shown the table of contents, and a couple of people have seen the introduction. I've also been concurrently running a 30-day online course that uses the main content of the book for its structure and getting feedback from that. Now it's time for the real deal with the full book.
It's still a limited and biased test since I'm initially showing it only to friends and family, but even these little tests have been really informative. I've radically restructured the entire book 4 times, changed the voice, and questioned my thinking. In these initial tests I learned a lot about what assumptions I was making and what leaps of understanding I had buried in too-short sentences.
It's scary to show something before it's finished but every time I do it I end up making it stronger and better. I'm learning a lot about what people want and how to get my thoughts out of my head an onto paper.
Now I'm going to try to hold off on rewriting things for at least a couple of days and focus instead on gathering feedback. After writing every day I think that's actually going to be a little tough. At least I know I still have plenty to do: Get the cover designed, get the site ready to go, confirm my publishing route. Oh - and do my other non-book work, too.
Update: Couldn't help myself this morning. Flipped through the book to read it. Found typos and a couple forgotten words. And one unfinished thought. I need a real editor to get this thing really finished.
We Grow Media published this fascinating article detailing the steps Eric Ries took to get his book on bestseller lists: How to Become a Bestselling Author - Lessons from Eric Ries
Tomorrow night my startup, 8foldlabs, is hosting a Meetup for people interested in Lean Startup Principles.
This morning I realized that I've been using the same kind of thinking throughout the process of getting this book done. I started off by discovering that there was a need (in response to my blog post) and testing out different ways to respond to that need. At different points I created MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) in the form of a follow up blog posts, individual coaching, and a 30-day group. I've been testing the language and the structure all along with different people, and doing "customer development" in a range of communities. I've been developing entirely in public through talking about it and in this blog.
This is without a doubt a lean startup and I've been quite entrepreneurial about the whole thing. Ha!
It's nice to realize this because it's helping me be even more conscious about trying to stay "minimum" on getting this book out. It also reminds me to continue the process of validated learning that has been serving me so well up to this point. To this end, I may return to some earlier ideas from before I got distracted with Kickstarter and thinking about what it would take to get the paper version of the book out.
I was attracted to Lean from the moment I first heard about it because it seemed so logical and natural to me. It's fun to realize that I've been living it on my biggest project for a couple of years already.
My thoughts on the writing/designing/publishing/fundraising schedule are becoming a jumble. I'm now reconsidering diving headfirst into the Kickstarter effort. At a minimum, I've decided not to do that until I feel solid on the first draft of this manuscript. And it may be that I'll send it out for feedback and be working on the second draft before or in conjunction with the fundraising campaign to get the book to its final stages.
So that means that I redouble my efforts to focus on finishing the writing (duh, right?). It certainly means that this will not get done in time for Christmas this year - a deadline that didn't feel all that realistic to me anyway.
But it does mean that maybe I'll be focusing on getting an electronic draft out to friends and other early readers to get feedback. I'll have to figure out the right way to do that.
So many moving parts!
OK, back to writing.
Just found this amazing article by Nathaniel Hansen, "7 Things to Consider BEFORE You Launch Your Kickstarter Project." If you're considering doing a Kickstarter Project, this is a must read.
Yesterday I did something I rarely do: I took an entire day off.
You see, this book isn't even close to the only thing in my world. I'm writing it in the mornings and evenings, squeezing in time around my full-time job. I'm also co-founder of a startup which I've been mostly neglecting for the last 3 weeks while the writing bug gripped me. And my family owns a business which takes some of my attention and energy.
But yesterday I looked outside and saw that it was a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco. And I knew that several friends were going to be at an art fair that another friend produced. So I jotted down brief notes on the thoughts I had upon waking and then hopped on my bike.
I spent the entire day looking at art, talking with artists and other friends. I ended the day enjoying a tasty home-cooked meal and then going dancing.
Over dinner one of the topics of conversation was recovery from burnout - and preventing it - by being sure to get creative input and relaxation while working hard on producing something.
So I thought I'd write a little note here to remind you of that part of the process of creating a book (or anything) - the part where you nourish yourself, where you seek out sources of joy and inspiration and let yourself take them in. If you don't do it, your creative self (and perhaps your overall mental state) will starve.
Last night I felt well fed both literally and figuratively, and today I have the energy to do much more!
So the result of a lot of that research yesterday was that I became more clear about the costs involved in self-publishing. Given that I want the book to feel pretty professional (and that I'm a bit of a book lover/snob), I am not ok with going for the cheapest option.
I have learned that the costs of the type of paper, whether it's hardback or paperback, etc, will all affect the final price of the book, but they're not really something that I have to pay for to get it published in the first place.
The minimum up-front costs of the book will include:
Depending on what kind of marketing, etc, I decide to do, I loosely estimate this will cost somewhere between $10,000-20,000. Yikes. There is no way I can pull this kind of cash together on my own at this point.
A friend of mine who's a musician suggests that I do a Kickstarter campaign to cover this. This is a great idea because it will both help spread the word about it and (most importantly) would enable me to actually get it done.
So... next research project: Kickstarter & what tips I can uncover about successful campaigns.
