How To Self Publish Your Own Book – Day 3

Self publishing your book is a lot easier than it used to be. You can use dictation software to eliminate much of the actual writing, outsource the layout and design work over the internet, and use Amazon for worldwide distribution.

As a result of helping my coaching clients to write and self publish their own books over at www.YourBookInAMonth.com I’ve actually gotten better at this process myself. They say the teacher learns the most and I’ve found this to be true.

The book I’ve been writing and editing for the past couple of weeks, “Cruise Ship Speaking“,  has turned into a case study for these techniques. I’ve tracked how many days and how much time it actually took to write this book. And here are the results:

Writing: 20 hours over 7 days
Editing: 16 hours over 3 days

As you can see, the editing took almost as long as the writing.
I think this is because as I went though the printout of the first draft I noticed areas that:

• needed to be expanded

• were covered more than once

• were unclear

• were out of order

That first draft took about 12 hours to revise. Then I printed out the second draft and whizzed through it in about four hours. Mostly nit-picky stuff like typos. Now that the last day of editing is done it’s off to the proofreader’s and on to the layout artist’s.

I have been tracking all of this to help demystify the process of writing and self publishing your own book. Every speaker should have their own book. Unfortunately, there’s so much bad information out there about how to go about this process that it can get downright overwhelming and confusing. It doesn’t have to be that way. Stick with me throughout the rest of this self publishing process and you’ll see just how easy it can be.

In the next post I’ll show you two different concepts for the cover art and let you vote on which one you think should make it onto the book! Fun

Total time invested today: 4 hours

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