My book writing process

Yep, leave it to me to write about writing. But hey, it’s happening, roll with it :)

As I mentioned last week, I’m in the process of writing a book. I’ve had ideas before about books I wanted to write, but this book (currently titled, Thrive, though I’m not married to that name) needs to be written now.

I’ll talk more soon about what the book is about, but I thought I’d share the process I’ve been going through to get to this point.

First, I started by creating an outline and refined that over and over again for a few weeks. And then I used post-its on a wall at Dragon Army and rearranged those for a while. Then I decided to try to use Evernote to organize my thoughts, so I started creating individual notes for each part of the book. And then I realized…

I was procrastinating by faking myself out to think I was actually working on the book. I was making empty progress.

That’s when I decided to just start writing. So I gave myself a goal to write a page a day. And I asked a few friends to check up on me each day to hold me accountable.

And it worked! After the first month I had 31 pages done. By the time I got to about 50 pages I was rolling. But then I talked to a few people in the book industry (and another friend that is writing her own book) and found out that I needed to see if I could get a publisher. To get a publisher you need to get an agent. To get an agent, you need a book proposal.

So…I asked some friends and did some research and came up with a proposal template, and I shifted my “write a page a day” focus to creating the proposal. I’ve been working on the proposal for about three weeks, and I hope to have my first draft of it completed by the end of this coming weekend. It includes things like a competitive analysis, audience description, sample content, the table of contents, about the author, etc. Enough for an agent to look at it and get a “feel” to decide if it’s worthy of putting in front of a publisher.

I’m guessing it will probably be about 30 pages when it’s all said and done.

So that’s the process. I use Dropbox + Microsoft Word on my iPad Pro to actually do the writing and organizing. I jot down notes in the car when I think of them or send myself an email with notes if I just have a quick minute. And I use my friends and colleagues to bounce ideas off of and get advice.

Whether an agent will find any of what I write interesting, that remains to be seen. But I’m enjoying the process so far.