Do you have a book inside, dying to get out?

Those of you who have hung around this blog for awhile know that I have been in the process of working on a book for quite some time.  I have since discovered that for me, to loosely paraphrase Hilary Clinton, "it takes a village to write a book." 

I suspect that I am not alone in my quest to understand both a good process to conceptualize, outline and write a book as well as sell and market it. So I invited my very wise and experienced friend Sophfronia Scott to be a guest on my radio show to talk about how to get a book from inside your head to the hands of eager readers.

Sophfronia is a former journalist who worked for Time and People Magazines, is the author of the award-winning novel All I Need to Get By and the owner of a multi-faceted coaching business for writers called The Book Sistah.  She has a great short flash presentation called "Your Story Movie" that illustrates her philosophy that we all have a story within us.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• The advantages of writing a book for business owners
• Critical things you must attend to before you start writing, including creating a good writing environment, structuring your time and defining the values you want to express through your book
• A specific, efficient process you can use to write a non-fiction book
• The importance of building platform before you even begin to write your book
• Creative ways to market and sell your book

Show details:

Date:  Friday, May 18
Time:  11am-12pm Pacific Standard Time
Topic:  Do you have a book inside, dying to get out?
To listen:  Click here

If you miss the live show, you can always listen later, through the link above.  To download as an Mp3, you will have to click on the title of the show, which will bring up the "download as Mp3" option.

Comments

[Jef]

Hey Pam, very interesting stuff! If you would ever look for (volunteer) reviewers of your book, I'd be glad! I've amongst others reviewed the HF series of Kathy Sierra and love the process of writing and working on a book...

Good luck with it !!

[Matthew Moran]

Pam,

My most recent post on my personal blog (the one linked to below) has a little rant about writing and wanting to write. In it, I talk about Stephen King's book, On Writing, which is an excellent autobiography and imparts some great advice on the pragmatics.

To a large degree he debunks the "finding inspiration/finding your muse" to a show up at the same time, same place, every day so your muse knows where to find you. And expect that he/she won't show up anyway and you will have to do the heavy lifting.

Thanks for the post and the interview.

[Roger Anderson]

Pam, once again a great interview. The funny thing about being an author is that as soon as you have a few books everyone thinks you did something different and wants to know your secret. The secret is: Write it, have people you know read it and tell you the truth about it. Then fix it, bind it begin selling it. With a little work (ISBN registration being the most expensive ~$250 for 10 numbers) and a printer that is willing to work with you, you can have books in your hand for as little as $5 each (quantity of 100 or so) depending on the size.

Selling them is another matter, but then we are all Modern Magellans (entrepreneurs) aren't we? We know how to develop new products, markets and promote. It's not really that much different. Except that people will think you are some how different. Let them for awhile and then share the secret.

[Grant Boston]

Have a look at how Clark Ching is writing his first book "Rolling Rocks Downhill" (http://www.rollingrocksdownhill.com/)

Basically he puts chapters on the web as he writes and then listens to feedback from his readers

[Carla]

Thanks for a great interview, Pam. It's very relevant for me since I, too, have been working on a book (memoir) now for over two years. I've heard people compare it to giving birth and that seems appropriate to me. You're probably the best person to comment on that, having done both.

[MuchTooLonginPR]

Writing a book is a lot of fun, and the publishing world would be a lot better if more people let their inner author out of the box. Next time around, I think I'm going to write a fiction piece, however - with non-fiction, you have to keep it updated, and even with the benefit of electronic technology, it still takes time. With fiction, however, you don't have to stay so true to current events and developments.