259. I Wrote & Published This Startup Book in 5 Weeks!

0:00I just published my first book, Startups for Outsiders. It was my first ever book. I did it in five weeks from the first words I put into a Word document to publishing and getting it out there. I'm going to show you exactly how I did that for a non-fiction book. So if you're thinking about writing a non-fiction book using your expertise, this is how I did it fast and hopefully to a high quality. The first thing you've got to start off with is what's the topic of the book and who are the ideal readers? So ideally you should be writing about something which you already know well, you're already deeply involved in that world, so that you understand the problems, you understand what's going to be happening, that transformation for the end readers.

0:44So if you think about this like a business, right, the book should be solving a problem for the buyers, and if you're solving the problem well, people are going to buy it and also recommend it to their friends. So what you want to be looking for is your own pain to begin with, right, where is it that you're trying to find a book and you can't find something which quite meets your needs. And it might be, in my case, for example, it's not that I need this book myself, but people often ask me, what book should I read? And I'm like, I can't quite think of the right book that I think you need. And this is what came about the idea, right?

1:17So I know lots of people who are trying to build startups who aren't from the startup ecosystem and lots of the books are very fluffy or they assume quite a lot of background information and tech jargon which maybe people don't know so i want to help out people in that particular niche now once you've got the general gist of the area you want to go into you now need to be talking to as many ideal readers as you can and this is a big mistake so many people make is they think they need to keep their content to themselves it's all about the execution not about the idea somebody else could write the same book as me they don't have the experience i have they don't have a passion for the subject i have they wouldn't be able to write it as well so what you're now doing is talking to all these readers, you're hearing about their problems, hearing about what things they don't understand, and you can do it from a perspective of not even talking about the book at all.

2:08You can just ask them, what do you hope to learn? What things don't you understand about this topic? Where do you wish there was better information available? And you can start to understand, okay, what's the gaps in their knowledge? And if you can solve those gaps in their knowledge and how to implement it in your book, you're onto a winner. And once you believe you're onto a winner, the next stage is to create a rough outline of this book. So when you think about this, don't go for perfection because mine was totally wrong. My first version of the contents page, like I don't think, I think maybe what three or four of the chapters made all the way through.

2:43So give yourself some grace. All the point of this first rough outline is to try to start to structure your thoughts. What's the flow of the book? What's the journey your readers are going on. What's the most important things they need to get into there? And to help you out on this, you can look up other similar books or you can look at courses. For example, I use courses as a good way to structure chapters too. So we already had a course teaching people at startups and each of those course chapters could kind of become book chapters. So get this rough outline together. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it just stops it from being so intimidating from a blank page.

3:25Next, you need to gather all your research together. So, at this point, you shouldn't be thinking about what's the word craft, right? Leave the word craft to the end. All you need to do is look at, get as much detail, everything you know about the topic into a document. And, for example, I use transcripts of workshops I've done. I use transcripts of podcasts I've done. I use the notes I've taken from other books I've read. I took notes from the workshops I've been to. I took notes from everywhere right and so many other things in my head when it's in your brain it just fires off and it's confusing when you put it down into paper and you have one document everything in there you start to feel like you're making progress so for me this information dump ended up being about 90 ,000 words so it's absolutely massive and that's what the first week of this project was spent doing you're just getting all the information together not think about how it flowed or anything like that it was getting everything I knew about the topic that I thought would help the reader into one place.

4:24Now the next phase is going from this nebulous document into something which fits into your structure and outline. And what you'll start to find is what I found, is that when I was taking bits from this 90 ,000 word document and trying to put it into my structure, it was starting to break. There's bits where I was like, okay, this is important, but I don't know which chapter it fits into. And this is a massive headache, but it's really useful because it makes you think and structure your thoughts better. So you go through chapter by chapter and you start putting in all the information into those different chapters until you're done and along the way you start to delete a repetition where you've got the same concept from both a workshop you did and from notes you made somewhere else and you can start to decrease the word count at this point.

5:13What you can also do is at the beginning of each chapter have a bullet point list of what are the major themes of this chapter, how do they flow into each other. Again, this was totally wrong at the beginning, but having a structure at the top of each chapter just helped me to get the idea of how things fit together. So now you've got, in my case, a Google document with tons and tons of volume in there broken down by chapter. Now it's time for the actual writing. So what I did here is I used the original document as a guide on one of my screens while I wrote on the other screen. So on the other screen I started with that outline, so by chapter, so the chapter, when I say the chapter outline, I mean like the subheadings, right?

5:57So what are the subheadings for this chapter? And then I started to flesh it out. But the most important thing at this stage is that you're not even thinking about at all about how the words flow into each other. You're just getting the words down there, just getting something in there so that you start to fill it up right so it's just first draft it's not you don't need to overthink it and what you can start to is flesh out each part you'll also start to notice the gaps where each section doesn't quite flow into each other maybe you need to add more maybe something which you really like just doesn't really fit into a structure and you have to let it go and once you get to the end of this phase you can do a sentence check right how comfortable do you feel and what I did at this stage too is I then put out a call on my social media to ask for beta readers and I started to get a spreadsheet together of people who are willing to read the proper document once it was ready so this phase for me was about 12 days so from the day that I started the information dump to this phase we're about 17-18 days in now right so about three weeks and now some fun begins and this is where the real I think this is the hardest part of all of it so at this point because we've been quite lenient with ourselves that some of the sentences might just be a bit gobbledygook now the actual rewrite is where you go through each chapter by chapter and you're actually paying attention to how am I getting this idea across does this come across in a good way is this well structured and this is the really big mental part of is this valuable right?

7:30And you're going through bit by bit and making that work. And what I told myself here, so I did this in seven days. So each time I was taking on two chapters a day, so I spent 45 hours per chapter. Bear in mind, each chapter is about 2 ,000 to 4 ,000 words. And this was intense, but it was so important because what enabled me to do is you have the information dump, which is just whatever, the first draft, which is the key concepts are down, and then this one is where you actually are paying attention to make something which is hopefully valuable and closer to the end version of the book. And it's at the end of this phase where you now allow the base readers loose.

8:13So what you can do at this phase is you create a Google Doc or whichever word software you want to use and you give them all access but only to comment. So they can now start commenting on this document and what I'd suggest is you get twice as many beta readers as you think you actually need. So I got about 40 to 50 people who wanted to be beta readers and I think about 20 people actually read the book and actually got their names and their acknowledgements. And what you need to ask them in particular is pay attention to certain things. So I'll bring this up now. So and this is using so you've got write useful books here right really recommend this book by Rob Fitzpatrick and in here he tells you so the most useful feedback is where you get lost or confused where you disagree or have different experiences where you start to get bored or feel like skipping your head anything you find particularly helpful and one thing I added too from people is like where do you think I haven't given credit that I was meant to because a lot of my ideas I'm consuming so much content at a time sometimes i don't realize that something whether something is just a general concept or if there's somebody who came up with the idea that i need to make sure i give credit to and i want to be very cautious from my perspective i want to make sure i'm giving credit where credit is due so people now let loose right but the important thing is while beta users are giving their feedback you're not just sitting idle what you now do is your own edits too.

9:47So this is now the detailed edits, okay? So what I used here, and I think the best way to do this, is to read it out loud. When you read the chapters out loud, you start to notice mistakes because once you've been in this document for a while and you've been reading it, your eyes skim over things because you know what you mean. When you read it out loud, I spotted so many random extra there's or that's or things like that so reading out loud is very helpful and you can even get if you use google docs it's read out loud for you and then you're just sitting there listening for mistakes and that was really helpful for me to spot some of the mistakes that I had in mind another app I recommend is called the Hemingway app so what I And what it will tell you is a reading level.

10:42And it will showcase where you've used passive voices a lot, where you use very hard sentences, and these kind of things. And by using that, I could then say, okay, I need to make this flow better. This chapter is a bit too complicated. I need to simplify it. And what I'm doing is constantly doing updates in the live document where the beta readers are going through. And by doing this, they're constantly reading the most up-to-date version. and the reality is is that when you send the beta readers a document they're not going to read it straight away you've got a bit of time in between so if you're working quickly on this you can get ahead of them so if you're updating the first few chapters by the time they start reading it you've already updated it once you're through about 10 beta readers what i'd now suggest you use is grammarly pro and i made so many grammar errors that i i pay not to use commas when i write but by not using commas it allowed me to write faster and it's very easy for Grammarly to pick up these mistakes and you can fix them afterwards.

11:47I used a Grammarly Pro trial because I only needed it for a short amount of time but obviously it's a great product and you can support it if you want to. This isn't sponsored. The other thing now to pay attention to is they're going to start having the comments from the base readers and this is where it gets interesting because everybody's going to have their own opinions and because you're asking them for their opinions they're going to share them and what you need to be conscious of is where does that person represent the ideal reader profile because if they don't and they're asking for something is that actually what your end audience wants and are they the right fit or not and I had different levels of readers right in my beta readers some of them were the people who are the target readers other people more expert level and he was as expert level readers to make sure that what I was saying was actually correct.

12:36So they were fact-checking me while other readers were more going through the process and they could better tell me if something didn't make sense or if I was explaining something in a way it was too complicated. What you shouldn't be afraid of is challenging the feedback because sometimes what a lot of people ask me for example was oh you should put more examples into the book. Now if you look at the book here so this is 160-ish pages this is the first draft of the book. Well, this is the first version of the book. But what I noticed is that the text is a bit small. So I'm going to make the text bigger.

13:13And that's going to make the book about 180 to 190 pages. What a key element for me and my audience is to make the book sharp and effective. And because of the other things I do, if people want examples, I've done 250 podcasts, they can very easily find examples to help them through my ecosystem. It didn't need to be in the book because if the book was another 100 pages or 200 pages what you then start to get is that slowing down element for the people who don't need the examples whereas I'd rather empower the people who wanted examples to find them elsewhere. At the same time of course is don't be arrogant about it right you've got to understand if you're asking people feedback you should respect their opinions and also if they say something which maybe you're not sure where we should implement ask other people to ask other beta readers because if some beta readers think oh this section is amazing and one person says oh I'm not sure I understand it you can probably go the majority there.

14:11So at this stage now you've got your finished manuscript okay you've done all of the grammar issues using Grammarly Pro you've had about 20 people read the book you've implemented all of the different feedback examples now what you want to do is put it into a software to do the formatting. So you can hire somebody for this but it's not that difficult to do it yourself. So I personally used a program called Atticus and Vellum is another one which is very popular but it's more for Macs. So what I just did, uploaded the document into Atticus, it does all the typesetting, you can play around the different settings, it's very intuitive.

14:52I did the whole formatting in maybe three to four hours and that was very easy right? So there's all different limitations when you're doing self-publishing in this way but compared to spending hundreds or even thousands of pounds by doing it the other way I thought this was a good trade-off. Once all that formatting is done you now will know the final number of pages in your book and this is really important because in order to get the front cover ready you need to know how big the spine is going to be right and you can only work out the spine size when you know how many pages there are so what you do is you go to amazon and amazon has a calculator which will tell you the dimensions of your front cover now i designed mine in canva and i'll mention a moment a few mistakes i made but amazon will basically give you a template use that template and you set it up and then you get end up with something like this right okay so you now have a formatted book you have your front cover and you're ready to roll so what you now do is you log into amazon kdp which is kinder direct publishing you create your account and when you go through it you just need to upload the pdf document which you can get from atticus or vellum or wherever you are and it will allow you to preview it and you can also put in your front cover like so and in the preview it will start to notice if there's any errors or issues.

16:26Now one thing I've got to do now so this is the process right but one thing I didn't realize is that the Kindle is available almost instantly but the payback takes a bit of time to become available and if you haven't realized by now from my accent is that I'm London based and UK based and weirdly my book is available in the US and Europe before it's available here. So when you're planning your launch date, make sure you're paying attention to that because you don't want to say, like I did, that books can be available in a certain day and actually it's not available because Amazon takes its time with different reasons for distribution.

17:04So for my own book, by the time this comes out, you should be able to buy the actual final version at startupsforoutsiders.com. For one thing I'm changing tonight, before this video comes out is the front cover. So one thing that happens is you might notice it's quite a dark cover but it wasn't intentional it's meant to be a lot more brighter and I'm also going to put this two lines this line here across two lines but by seeing in person in the flesh I can work that out. So one thing to pay attention to when you're picking colors for your front cover is make sure you're looking at colors which are also available in CMYK.

17:46Now this might sound like gobbledygook and I won't go through it now because I'm not an expert in it and I'm learning it myself but just be paying attention to the colors you're using and you find other tutorials to help you with that. So this video has shown you how I did this process from beginning to end and obviously it's a short video I can't show you every single thing I did step by step so hopefully that was helpful and that was my speed run of me speed running writing a book in five weeks. Hope you enjoy and check out the rest of the content and buy the book.