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Personal Branding

How I Wrote And Published My First Book In Three Months: “Why”

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Decide Why You Are Writing Your Book.

If it’s to get rich, you better look elsewhere. Sure, you might become the next Tim Ferris. But, it ain’t that easy.  Bowker, the company that issues ISBN numbers, more on this later, estimates that they will issue 15,000,000 ISBN numbers for individual books in 2012.

Your odds? 15,000,000 : 1. Maybe less as many books are simply garbage.

OK, so despite this competitive headwind, I decided to write a book. Why? Two reasons.

First:

I did some my-life scenario planning. I considered what I’d like to be doing in a couple of years and thought that it would be great to maintain my home-base in Portland but be able to have a very portable means of generating income while traveling around the world. Writing, combined with the growing ease of self-publishing and expanding eBook market, looked like a plausible path. Now, I am not oblivious to the fact that this won’t be easy. But, I think that if I apply my marketing background to writing books I should succeed.

Second: I think that I have a very compelling proposition for my first book. I am going to commit suicide to help add some control to my financial planning; I’ve picked the date and how to do it. My book, Boomercide: From Woodstock To Suicide, covers this journey, my view that I am not going to be the only Baby Boomer to do this (Baby Boomer have the highest suicide rates) and the details of the subject of suicide. Additionally, I am a 30-year marketer and know how to do my research and apply it to a rich subject. My smartest friends, strangers and some book editors have vetted the book’s premise.  All think that Boomercide is a powerful subject.

Now you:

Why DO you want to write? I recommend really getting this objective-driven rationale down so you can really focus. Hey, writing can just be for fun. Maybe you’ve had that idea in your head for years and want to get it down on ePaper. Maybe you really want to launch a writing career. Maybe you want to leave something for your kids and grand-kids. Maybe you see the value in writing a book to polish your personal brand to help your career. There are lots of reasons. But, be clear about this and then just start typing.

Everyone is going to approach the act of writing differently. People with full-time jobs have to go to work; dads and moms have to take care of the kids. Finding the time is hard. That said, find it and get going. It feels great. And, your friends will envy you.

There is lots of advice on the web — start here at Joanna Penn’s site The Creative Penn — about how to attack a writing project. Go Google and drive yourself crazy. But, just start and devote whatever time you can. Maybe its time to give up the NFL or Ellen or even Yoga for awhile. Yes, stop and feed the kids but get going on your eBook.

Introduction: How I Wrote And Published My First Book In Three Months

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I am going to do a series of posts about my experience writing my first eBook. It has been, so far, a very fulfilling experience.  The eBook and a print-on-demand paperback will be published using Amazon’s digital platform in the next couple of weeks. I started in late June. So, it’s been about three months from idea to birth. The book is 21,000 words. Research shows that this is a good length for ADD-type people like me (it seems, according to Kindle research, that most people do not finish non-fiction books.) I didn’t want to write one of those 75,000 word books (think 250 pages) that repeats itself in order to deliver a “marketable” page count.

During this process, I’ve learned that I have a big idea for the book; that I am a fairly good writer; that writing takes real effort, concentration and time; that I needed partners (editor, cover and book designers, supportive wife); lots of coffee; that there are costs involved; that I need a very smart marketing plan (critical, more on this later); that there is a huge growing world of digital publishing (I kinda knew this but actually getting down to business showed me that its booming.)

The book:

I had been thinking about the concept of committing what I call rational suicide as soon as I left my financial planner’s office. His advice that I had three variables to consider when planning my financial future didn’t sit right. After all, as he said, I could control my income (to a certain extent) and my budget but not how long I would live. This one variable, a significant one, as in longevity, “what if I lived to 95, how could I support myself?” was simply too variable. That idea was the genesis of the book. As I began writing, the book morphed into adding a detailed discussion of the act of suicide, the world of physician-assisted suicide and the retirement saving deficit – a major issue for all of us.

Stay tuned.

eBooks Are Booming: New Study [Where Is Your Book?]

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eBooks are booming. But you knew that.

You also knew or could suss out some of the findings from Revealing the Business of eBooks: 2009-2012, the 4th eBook survey of publishers by Aptara and Publisher’s Weekly.

Some more eBook facts:

Amazon rules: 68% of eBook publishers sell via Amazon. Apple’s iBookstore is used by 58 percent of eBook publishers.

80% of publishers now publish eBooks.

According to the report, 36% of eBook publishers are “realizing double-digit annual eBook revenues” This is up 100% year over year. 100% is big.

Digital or print? As in last year’s survey, this year’s response was not either/or but both. In 2011, 85%of publishers said they were producing digital editions of their print titles rather than producing digital editions in lieu of print. The same numbers held strong, rising a single point this year to 86%

Here is a link to the study.

Visualize.me Adds Colors and Charts To Resumes For Personal Branding

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Vizualize.me is a new web-based tool that easily creates a graphical resume by pulling data from your LinkedIn profile. Its kind of cool and helps add a bit of style and infographic (infographics are hot these days) power to your resume facts. I’m not sure that its a stand-alone tool but it can do a good job of adding additional support to your LinkedIn page and standard resume. Which also brings up the idea that resumes alone ain’t what they used to be. Any reason not to do a personal video? More on personal branding coming up in future posts.

Oh, here is my visual.me/peterlevitan page.