How to Write That Book

You don’t need a degree or license or permission to write a book. David and Blair share the steps they took and what they have learned from the writing process.

Links

The Fast-Track Course on How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal by Stephen Blake Mettee

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, this is the book podcast part two. We recently recorded, Should you Write that Book, and now we're following it up with How to Write a Book.

David C. Baker: Right, and who else are you going to ask that question other than-

Blair: [laughs]

David: Don't start laughing yet.

Blair: He's in 12 New York Times number one bestsellers.

David: Right. I've written five books, three of them are pretty good, two of them are really good. You've written two, how many would you say are good? [laughs]

Blair: I would say of the two I've written three of them are great.

David: [laughs] Yes. Of course, I should have anticipated this answer.

Blair: Oh, my God, sometimes I forget that people actually listen to this.

[laughter]

Man, you've got a lot of notes here on how to write a book, and I'm impressed there's so much material to cover, let's dive in a little bit. The first point you wanted to bring up was back to the reason of like why which we touched on earlier, why would you write a book, and you want to talk a little bit about attitude?

David: Yes. I don't want to regurgitate everything we talked about on Why to Write a Book but I don't know how you can separate part of the why from the how to write a book. I get probably one book a week that somebody will mail to me, this is somebody who's a client or somebody that I've talked with about writing a book and they're proud and want me to see that they went through with it, and you flip through it and you can tell right away what the purpose of the book was.

It's like somebody really wanted to wrestle with the subject and they're allowing us to accompany them on this public mission, or somebody else wrote a book because they feel like they've got a lot of really useful things to say and articulate point of view, and they want to help as many people as they can and they realize that they'll only be able to work for as in directly person to person with only a few hundred of those people and they want to help thousands. That's what you have in mind.

If the ultimate goal for you is to win new business, then I don't have a lot of advice for you because I don't want you to write that kind of book. What are you doing for people, do you really want to help people? That's the spirit of this before you actually start writing a book. Does that make sense?

Blair: Yes, and if you can embrace that spirit then you will be rewarded by helping improve your new business efforts. Is that the way to think about it?

David: Right, it'll happen. If you don't seek it, it's more likely to actually happen. You don't want it too badly.

Blair: Yes. This Scottish economist John Kay has written a book called Obliquity so he invented a word. Obliquity, why our goals are best achieved indirectly and he talks about that idea specifically, if your goal is to be rich don't pursue riches directly, pursue something else and the riches will come as a byproduct. You're saying the same thing about this book, if you can't tap into this higher mission of deepening your own knowledge or helping people, then it's not going to achieve this goal of building your brand, building your business.

David: Yes. It changes the whole way you read books too if you think about that, what drove the author to write this book? Gladwell, why did he write Blink or one of the other books or why did Seth Godin write a book? It wasn't about building their personal brand mainly although that obviously happened it was about helping people or intriguing them.

Blair: You've listened to the first episode Should you Write that Book and you've answered an affirmative, yes, I'm going to write that book. Now let's talk about the logistics that you need to address.

David: There's going to be a lot of disagreement from other authors who have a different perspective and that's fine. My perspective on this is that you need to decide on format first and most people would say, no you shouldn't. You should just write what needs to be said and then let it fall into the right format but I would write a book differently if it's not going to be an audiobook.

I wouldn't necessarily write differently with a Kindle but if the concept that you have depends on a lot of illustrations, and you think that Kindle is important, then you probably want to rethink it from the very beginning. At least get an idea of the format. Generally, I'd say you ought to just assume that you're going to release all three formats, print, electronic and audible. If you're going to do that you should probably release them all at once.

Blair: I think you said something that a lot of people not familiar with the publishing space don't recognize even if they read Kindle. There are significant limitations on the images in a Kindle format, correct?

David: Exactly.

Blair: Some formats just do not translate just like I'm often asked if price and creativity is available in an audiobook format I just feel like it doesn't translate to that format and I might be wrong, but that's my point of view on it but Kindle, you have to think about this if the number one audience for this is Kindle readers for whatever reason, then you're not going to want to make this a highly visual book. People say they're visual learners. I don't think of myself as a visual learner but I have to see the book in my mind before I can write it. I don't know how many other authors would share that perspective but I think this idea of arriving at the format first is vital.

David: If you want wide distribution, the most important thing you could do is have it in a Kindle format because then immediately, it's available in 60 plus countries overnight but if you want the notoriety that comes with it, that Kindle needs to be based on a printed book. The printed book is really critical. In fact, you cannot publish an audible version unless you have a printed book. All of those things are intertwined.

Blair: Okay. First logistical issue, decide on a format and then decide on a publisher or a publisher type.

David: Yes, because there's self-publishing, there's hybrid publishing, and then there's traditional publishing. There are valid reasons for this. If you decide that you're going to go with a traditional publisher, then you need to ignore most everything else in this episode because you're going to have to follow their procedures and you're not going to be able to vary from them, they're going to be very different from mine. I know what those are because I've had those deals offered to me and I have a lot of clients that have done it but it's very different. By publisher type, I mean, are you going to self-publish this? That opens up lots of gates for you.

Blair: If you are, then continue listening and if you're not, if you're going with a mainstream publisher, then just take the publisher's guidance on everything that we're talking about here.

David: Right, exactly. The next thing I'm suggesting, from a logistic standpoint, is just to ignore word count. Again, this is an illustration work. If you're working for a publisher, there's going to be a word count, you're going to have to write to it but I don't think you should have a word count in mind. You should let the book find its own place. Your first book was 20 some thousand, I don't know what the second was, maybe double that or something. Did you aim for a word count? What's your perspective on that?

Blair: First of all, I think this is really refreshing advice because we've all read really good 20-page books that were spread out over 240 pages. That's so common. Back to your first point on logistics, decide on the format, I decided on the format first. For some reason, I need to see the shape of the book. I took a book that was the right thickness, then I cut it down to what I thought was the right size, and then I reverse engineered the word count from there. Luckily, it arrived at somewhere around 24,000 words with some room to move.

I could have made the book a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, and it just rested at 24,000. That really gave me the freedom to write less than the standard 50, 000 or 60,000-word count that they talked about for a business book. I love that advice of pay no attention to the word count. I would rather pay the usual amount for a book that is shorter where the author did not feel the pressure to spread out the book by adding another 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 words. I think that's valuable advice. I think astute readers appreciate that.

David: They do. As a speaker, you have certainly run out of material early a couple of times, probably you've done the opposite or you've gone long and you get this feeling in your soul. It's like, okay. Let's preview this one more time, a little louder for the people in the back.

Blair: We've been there. What's next on the logistics issue?

David: Timing, deadlines. I have a very angry relationship with deadlines.

Blair: We've moved from logistics to timing and you've got some four points on timing. I feel like you were speaking to me on this one.

David: Blair, decide on a drop-dead deadline. Second, Blair, tell no one about it. Third, Blair, double that timing.

Blair: Double and add 30 to 2.

David: Then fourth, Blair, tell only your life partner, not your podcast partner when this date is.

Blair: I was publicly saying that price and creativity would come out in May, I think was the original date of 2016 and it finally came out in January of 2018. I've learned and I've been working on a book for a while and I've not publicly said anything about the title or the deadline. I have deadlines. They keep moving. I agree with this advice. Now, you and I are different. You're a very good and efficient writer of books. You seem to decide, oh, I'm going to write a book, you outline it, and then you write it in a way that seems so easy to me. You have no problem or you seem to have no problem hitting deadlines. What's the secret?

David: Well, that comes with the skill that's involved in writing like I do.

Blair: That you have and I don't. Okay. Fair enough. I walked into that.

David: No, I think there's no right way to do that. In fact, I think some people write a book like I do where, okay, I'm going to start at 6:00, right till 11:00, 3 days in a row, and that's it and then I'm going to do that for 5, 6 weeks in a row and then I'm done. There's other people where they just get completely lost in it and they can't do anything else and they're in this for three or four or five days, and nobody dares bother them because genius is happening. That's just as legitimate to me. I think it's more about recognizing your style and then applying discipline.

Discipline is the only really big reason why books don't get written. It's not quality of thinking. It's not the ability to collect organized information. It's simply discipline, so you got to figure that out for yourself. I love these books that purport to give you the absolute secret to it, and I just think, " Ah, it works for some people. For some people, it doesn't." You got to figure out for yourself. This is where a book forces you to think more longer-term than anything else you do in your business and that's why it's so easy to put off because it's never urgent, but it is always way at the top of the thing.

If you want to think about getting the really good, important work done in the world, and a book is part of that equation for you in your particular case, then that puts a little bit different spin on it. Then a half an hour here, writing over coffee is probably better use of my time than trying to calm down some client that's going to keep whining anyway.

Blair: We're talking a little bit about pacing here, which is a little bit different from timing. The key takeaway that I'm taking away from you on timing is your second point, "Tell nobody about it," have your deadline, don't go public about it, don't create some anticipation in the marketplace that then you're going to have to delay by the year, two years, et cetera? I think that's really good advice but then just skipping ahead to pacing a little bit. My heart was aching as you talked about, I'm paraphrasing here, you said, "There's two ways to write a book in terms of the pacing. You can commit to doing a little bit every day, or you can devote solid chunks of time to it where you're deeply immersed in it."

I have done both, and I never know. I've tried to do one and end up doing the other or end up doing nothing, et cetera. I have still not arrived at the answer to this question, how do you write a book? All I know is, at some point, it's done and the previous 24 months, in my case, was just a blur of pain that I've tried to block out of my mind, and then when it comes time to do it again, I don't remember how I did it.

Everybody has to be better at this than I am. It takes too long. It's so painful. It's so disorganized. Sometimes I'm able to establish routine-- This is turning into my therapy session, but I'll keep going. Sometimes I need to get on a plane and go lock myself away in a beautiful location for a while. I still don't know. I'm reading your notes here, yes, routine or big chunks of time. Okay, that doesn't help me.

David: You're quite the motivational speaker for authorship by the way. I'm sure a lot of people are running mad to sign up for this, you made it so exciting. I think that's an argument for going with a traditional publisher because you're going to feel a lot more pressure and some people work better with a deadline and you can't really give yourself deadlines without realizing you're winking it so that would be an argument to work with a traditional publisher.

You're going to have three months to come up with the outline and two sample chapters, and then you'll have another 15 months to come up with the first draft and you'd better do it and they'll be checking in with you every two weeks so that'd be a good argument for it.

Blair: How do you do it?

David: I do the three days in a row, six weeks, eight weeks in a row. The odd thing is that I already have the six book written. It's pretty much ready to go, and I have not been able to dive back into it for some psychological reason. I don't know. We don't do enough of these things. We're not like novelists that writes 80 books. We don't do enough of these things and each topic is so different and we think so differently.

What I'm really hoping when people listen to this particular episode is it's a messy process, you've got to help yourself enjoy the process, even though it's still painful, just like a really tough workout. There are some things that we can suggest together that I think apply in every case and other things don't. One of the things that I think applies in every case for a business book, that is a nonfiction book is that you should outline it first. That way, as you write out the pros, you know exactly where you are in the argument.

I think those are the best business books, not necessarily for a drama book or a novel or something like that, so I would gather information, I would have ways to do it ubiquitously so as you think of something, you can quickly capture that thought, then a way to organize it, outline it, and then start writing and this is where sometimes you can blog a book like we talked about in the last episode, where people don't even know you're doing it but there's this chunk of content that could easily be addressed in 1200 words or 2000 words and you write that and then you can either modify it, weave it into the book, has to be done really, really well or you can hire somebody else to weave it in for you without your eye on it.

Blair: On the subject of outlining, I'd like to recommend a book. It's called How to Write a Non-Fiction Book Proposal and the author's name escapes me. We'll find it and link to it in the show notes. It's a really slim book, great guidance on how to write a book proposal to sell to a publisher, but I think it's a great reference guide for how to outline a book, whether or not you're going to mainstream publisher or not, and how to sell it to yourself and convince yourself that, "Okay, I've got this all mapped out. I've identified the target market. I've identified what's different about it."

Blair: I want to back up a little bit. I want to get you to rely on the coach. You said your sixth book is done. It's been done since before the pandemic. It's been done for 18 months.

David C. Baker: Right.

Blair: What's up? Why are you stuck at this point, it's written?

David: It's partly because I'm not positive that I should be releasing this topic. It's about how to do consulting. It's not the same audience, because I don't work with other consultants. That's part of it. Just kind of rethinking that.

Blair: You're wondering if you're giving away your trade secrets?

David: A little bit of that. Not too much, because I tend to do that all the time. It's the ugly side of how sausage is made, and I don't know if people want to know that stuff on the receiving side of it. Then when in the pandemic hit, it wasn't the time to release things. Amazon quit shipping books and started shipping toilet paper, so that wasn't the time to do it. Then COVID is lingering emotionally wise [chuckles].

Blair: Okay, that's your story. You stick to it. Let's get back to our podcast [laughs].

David: Hey, I've got a question back to The Big Steps thing. I want to draw a distinction between when you need read all kinds of other things that have been written about the topic of your book. If your book is primarily your point of view, in other words, you already have enough notoriety that they already know how you think and it peaks their interest and they would like to know how you think about this. They want to be challenged.

Then don't read all that stuff until you've written all of yours down. Then decide if it prompts something that, "Oh, why didn't I talk about that? That's really good." Or, "Oh my goodness, I didn't know I stole that from him. I need to reference him in this footnote or whatever," but if you're more of a reporter, or a researcher, or an academic style writer, then you want to read all that stuff ahead of time, but there's a big distinction. It's a big mistake to read that stuff ahead of time, if you're writing a point of view book.

Blair: I think you can't make this point forcefully enough. I really believe that. I'll talk about four books here, two of which I've written. The third I'm writing now, and the fourth is the one to follow number three.

David: Oh, really?

Blair: I'm not going to give details here.

David: Oh, shoot.

Blair: I'm just going to say in this point of read everything. The first book on selling, I own dozens of books on selling. I don't think I've ever read any of them cover a cover. In fact, I just skimmed through them. My point of view on selling is that, I know what good selling is. I know what bad selling is from buying. I don't want to fill my head with a bunch of the standard tropes on a topic on which I'm trying to provide a contrary and point of view. The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, I didn't read anything.

I avoided and continue to avoid a lot of the published works on the topic. When it came to my next book Pricing, I read the canon of literature to be able to write this book. I see that book as standing on the shoulders of other pricing authors and then taking all of that work that's come before me and bending it towards a very specific audience.

The third book I'm working on on right now without saying it again, I'm not reading anything on this topic. The fourth book that I intend to write and plans change, there's going to be so much reading and gathering required.

I'm expecting that I'm going to have to hire a person or a team to help me with all the research. Your point that, you really have to think about this book. Is it a strong point of view as an ideological book for which maybe you should avoid drinking the Kool-Aid of your competitors or being too conventional? Or is it a book that builds on a canon of literature or bends a canon of literature to a specific audience? Maybe even through a civic ideological lens. You do have to answer that question to decide if research is vitally important to this book, or if research should be avoided.

David: Maybe just buy the books ahead, because I want to know what's been written on this. Is there a market for another book? I'm not going to read ream yet, but then at the end, it's still like I don't want to head out on a trip and forgot my phone at home. Is there something I really should have addressed here? I'm not necessarily looking for their point of view.

Blair: Did you miss something obvious?

David: Yes. What are the things I should be talking about and forgot to talk about this?

Blair: We're talking about how to write a book here. We're talking about the steps and you've got step one in parenthesis read everything first or don't. You have to make that decision. Step two is to gather information.

David: Your own perspectives, not necessarily gather what other people think but gather your thoughts.

Blair: Then step three is to outline or shape it. Do you have any specific guidance on that you want to talk about?

David: You really want to pick a great outlining program that makes it so easy just to grab and move things and so on. I think most business writers think and outline so whatever tool you have make sure it's available everywhere so that if you're waiting in a doctor's office and you think of something you can go to your iPhone and just pops up in there. I tend to use Workflowy but there's lots of good tools out there.

Blair: Step four is write easily said.

[laughter]

David: The easiest part of all this. Yes, right.

Blair: Then we talked about pacing and writing. It's try to develop a routine around it, or do it in chunks. You keep saying six weeks, eight weeks and I'm thinking, "My God, how can a human being write a book in six or eight weeks." I know people do it all the time, I just can't, that's just not enough suffering for me. I need to drag it on for months and years.

David: To me, I'm writing a book way before I start writing the book. I'm doing the pre-writing five years ahead of time. I didn't even realize this could take the shape of something, and all of a sudden, oh, I started to see a path here. Then for a moment you're trying to coax things out of your brain and they're not coming fast enough and then there's this rush of stuff where you're just panicky because if you don't start writing it down now, it may never come to you in the same order and it's a beautiful creation process.

Blair: Wonderful. We're on big steps. Read everything first or don't, that's number one. Two, gather info or your perspective. Three is outline or shape the material. Four is write. Five, ruthlessly reshape/identify gaps so this is editing.

David: This is the first deep temptation you'll have to shortcut the process because it's hurt so much to get it to this point and because you'll just be second-guessing. You won't know for sure whether, "Oh, you know what, it's like this section should be here or I need to add or I need to shape." This is where you really have to be courageous after you put all this work in and it starts to look and feel like a book, and you realize you need to unwind some of it.

Blair: Editors talk about three levels of editing. The first level is what you just talked about, I think the term is structural editing like moving chunks around getting rid of big sections, honing in certain places. Then there's copy editing then there's proofreading. This is the first big structural edit. You dump it all out in what Anne Lamott would call the shitty first draft. Then you start moving things around to make sure that the shape of it is right.

David: The tension is throwing away something that took a lot of effort to write, and you're not really throwing it away but you're saying, "Oh, now I have 6000 words less than I did a minute ago, and that was really hard to write but it shouldn't be in the book." This is where those hard decisions come.

Blair: The next step on your list of big steps is to read everything last. This isn't parenthesis, you're either reading everything first and then writing, or you're avoiding all the literature on the subject, writing, and then once you have it structurally edited, then you would review that can in the literature to make sure that you haven't missed anything obvious. Okay. Then final read through.

David: Final read through in writing and then you want to actually read the book out loud. You'll find a lot of structural challenges and you'll find way more typos than you ever would because you look at the words differently when you're reading them aloud. It's also good practice for an audiobook recording too.

Blair: Then you've got copy editing and proofreading. I just want to say here that I know lots of people who have written books and I would say when it comes to self-publishing the most common mistake that I see is somebody thinks because they are a good writer that they can self-edit. The biggest watch out that I would offer is, it doesn't matter how good of a writer you are, you need to use an external editor.

David: An external editor who gets you and your personality, doesn't let you make stupid mistakes but let you be yourself.

Blair: Doesn't change your voice. That's copy editing is step number eight, and then the final proofreading and the lesson when it comes to proofreading, you need to send your manuscript to my wife Collette-

David: [laughs]

Blair: because she will catch the typos that even a professional proofreader missed. I have a friend who's written multiple books, and he used to be a publisher and he talks about getting this beautiful book printed, he opens up the box opens up the book, there it is with his name on the cover, flips it open to a random page and immediately reads a duplicate sentence, or the sentence is there twice, one after another, close the book never opened it again.

David: You'll notice tons of typos when you go to read your book for the audible recording that nobody ever caught that's why you read it out loud before you send it off to the manuscript.

Blair: That's occurred to me recently, and I was thinking you should record the audio version before you send the print version.

David: You're right. Exactly.

Blair: Okay, so those are the nine big steps, read everything first, or don't gather, outline, write, ruthlessly, reshape, read everything last. Again, these two it's pick one of those, when it comes to reading everything, are you going to read it first, are you going to read it after the structural edit. Then your own final read-through and a great idea is to read it out loud and do the audio version before you send it to print, then copy editing, then proofreading. We've talked about pacing. There are a lot of points left to cover here. Let's just cherry-pick some specifics and some truisms, where do you want to go with the five minutes we have left here?

David: I'll pick one, then you pick one that strikes you. One for me is that there's a real diminishing return at a certain point, this is very strange curve, the last 30% of time you spend on this project is only a 5% improvement. This thing is not going to be perfect, you're going to be mildly embarrassed three years from now, it's like just get over it, you're writing a book, at some point, you got to walk away from it. Don't walk away because you're lazy, but walk away because you're a little bit more honest with yourself about how it doesn't need to be perfect.

Blair: It's a low return on investment, the last 30% of your time, but I think back to my story of my friend who opens the book and sees a typo and closes the book and never opens it again, I think it's worth it.

David: This is why it's so much harder for you to do it, I just don't care as much.

[laughter]

Blair: Okay, you have a point in here about case studies.

David: Oh, no are you going to crucify me over this?

Blair: No, this has never occurred to me but I think for most topics, especially the topics that our listeners would write on, this is probably vital.

David: If you can't write this without case studies, then you shouldn't write it.

Blair: Why is that?

David: People don't really care that much about case studies. There's been some really interesting research around that. The other is, how are you going to do case studies without talking about yourself all the time?

Blair: Or referring to Apple?

David: I'm not saying you shouldn't use case studies, I'm just saying that's the default lazy approach and it's not interesting to the reader and it's self aggrandizing.

Blair: What do you think about the common trope of starting every chapter with a story, which is effectively a case study, and then using the remainder of the chapter to explain the story?

David: If it's pulled off really well, I think it's a great plan. One of the things I love about books is that they take such different formats, like I printed a prologue in the last one that wasn't really a prologue it's like, "Well, who can fire me for that?" If that works, then I think it's great. Here's the crazy thing about writing the book, we talked about this, like it's some massive accomplishment, but you don't need a degree.

You don't need a license, there's no permission you have to get from some government authority to do your book. It doesn't even cost a single penny and some have even been written in jail. It's so easy to do and if this is a part of your possible future, you should experiment with it, even if you don't ever tell anybody about it, because it's one of those things that it is like climbing a mountain or learning to fly or doing a triathlon. It's pretty amazing. If this is something that intrigues you, you owe it to yourself to at least play with the concept more.

Blair: I'm going to finish this thought looking at your notes here, writing a book is like climbing a famous mountain or learning to fly or completing a triathlon, you did it, you should be proud. You'll never regret it and now your criticism of authors will be more planted than the criticisms you'll hear about this book, fuck them you wrote a book and they didn't.

David: Amen.

Blair: Marcus will put the exploitive tag on this episode but that's a great way to end it. In the end, this thing came out of it, you gave birth to this thing.

David: Right.

Blair: You listed all the reasons why it's like, well, anybody can do this, and hardly anybody does, even though are lots of people writing books these days, the vast majority of your competitors of your colleagues of your peers, they are not writing books and once you get this thing out of you, and you put it out into the world, it's a fantastic feeling like giving birth to a child and some of our children are little angels and some are devils tables that cost us all kinds of conservation but we're still proud.

We're still proud of what we're creating you will be too. I think you've already decided to write the book go ahead and do it and we've just shared some advice with you on how to do it and you can throw it all out and do it your way. It's your baby. It's your call.

David: Send me a copy unless it has case studies and don't bother.

Blair: All right, David, thanks for this. Great