How I Wrote My First Business Book?
By: Dawid Pacholczyk
Tags: Writing, Management, Improvement, Self Improvement, Life

I always liked to write. But for years I was working in the IT sector so I never thought that writing can be the “thing” in my life. However, I woke up one day and I knew that I want to write a book. I’m good at what I do so I decided that my first book will be a non-fiction business book about product management.

I must say. It was much harder than I thought and I want to share my story. A story of a simple manager that decided to write a book. Who knows, maybe you are or you will be in a similar situation as me and it will help you. T

Topic

The first thing you need to pick is the topic. You have to know what you want to write about. For some — like me — it’s a very simple task. For others, it may not be so obvious. It’s especially important in non-fiction books and I will tell you why.

Think about the good and bad books that you read in your life. What is the difference between them? When you’re reading a good book:

You know/feel that the author knows what he is writing about There is strong research behind the book

You can’t achieve these points if you don’t have a precise and clear vision of what you want to write about. Take me as an example. I knew that I wanted to write about product management. But what does it mean? Try to google “product management”. See how many results there are? A general topic is not enough, you need to KNOW what you want to write about.

So I narrowed it down. This part was backed by strong research. I analyzed the books about product management. I referred to my experiences. What books did I miss at the beginning of my career? All this helped me in that process.

Publisher

Publisher or self-publishing? That’s a very popular question. I won’t compare these two approaches. Sorry about that. I don’t think that I’m competent enough to do that. But don’t worry, there is a lot of great articles all over the internet.

I will tell you why I picked a solid publishing house. There is a couple of reasons.

I had direct access to the publisher thanks to my friends. It made the whole process much easier and I knew that my chances were better than the average person’s.

I wasn’t focused on earning money on my book. No no, I’m not the type of guy that will say that money aren’t important. I just know that my book is aimed at a specific niche that won’t make me a millionaire. That’s sad but at the same time, it is taking a lot of pressure from my shoulders. That’s why I wasn’t wondering which approach will give me more money.

I wanted to focus on writing and leave the rest to people that know what they are doing. Yeap, so simple. I didn’t want to learn the whole process. I didn’t want to invest my own money. I just wanted to write. Nothing more, nothing less.

To be perfectly clear. I’m not saying that self-publishing is bad. There is a big chance that I will along this path after translating my book to a different language. But for now, signing a contract with a publishing house was the best solution for me…at least I think so.

What is has to do with you? Well, it’s pretty simple. You can’t focus only on comparing those two approaches. For example. Let’s say that you have a bigger chance of earning good money when you self-publish your book. But money can’t be the only criteria. You need to ask yourself a question. Are you capable to deliver a high-quality product by yourself? If not then are you able to invest your own money?

For some people, self-publishing is just too much. I’m such a person at the moment. I decided to write my first book. I wanted to focus on writing. I don’t feel ready to do the rest by myself. Never think only about money. Writing and publishing books is much more complicated than just income vs cost.

Plan

I’m a manager so I started with a solid plan.

make a draft present it to publisher get feedback prepare an outline of the book start writing write an awesome book

Easy! To be honest? It was easy from points 1 to 4. But when I started the real writing, then…wooow. Suddenly the whole operation became very complicated. Let me just say that I was sure that I’ll write my book in 3 months. It took me 7 to finish it.

Having a plan is awesome. I would even say that it is a must-have. If you really want to write a book you need to have it. I didn’t make a mistake here. My mistake was that I didn’t consult it. I had no experience in writing a book so how could I prepare a good plan? Exactly! I couldn’t.

You probably wonder what was holding me back. A few things:

Overconfidence — I wrote a short draft without a problem and I received very good feedback. I was writing based on my experience and knowledge. It looked so easy!

— I wrote a short draft without a problem and I received very good feedback. I was writing based on my experience and knowledge. It looked so easy! First problems = procrastinations — When the first problems occurred I always had something more important to do.

— When the first problems occurred I always had something more important to do. Research — My goal was to deliver high quality so whenever there was a 1% uncertainty I made strong research. Thanks to that I’m sure that what I wrote is good. But I was writing a book. I felt responsible for the outcome so this 1% appeared more often than I expected.

— My goal was to deliver high quality so whenever there was a 1% uncertainty I made strong research. Thanks to that I’m sure that what I wrote is good. But I was writing a book. I felt responsible for the outcome so this 1% appeared more often than I expected. Writing — this might sound stupid but writing itself took me much more time than I expected. In my life, I wrote a massive amount of posts, articles, white papers. But this was a book. Over 170 pages long. The whole process just needs time.

this might sound stupid but writing itself took me much more time than I expected. In my life, I wrote a massive amount of posts, articles, white papers. But this was a book. Over 170 pages long. The whole process just needs time. Polishing — I read my book like 3 times. From A to Z. I was looking for errors, mistakes, incomprehensible sentences. That’s a lot of work.

Before you’ll start the writing process prepare a solid plan. But don’t be an optimist. Be a realist. Understand that the whole process is long, exhausting, and problems will occur.

Make it better

Every time I read a part that I already wrote I thought I can make it better. There were days when I sat down to write a new chapter and instead of that for a few hours I was making corrections to things that I’ve already written.

I wanted to make it perfect. But it never was perfect and will never be. You must understand this. Don’t allow yourself for eternal corrections. It will devastate the process and in most cases, won’t bring any new value. The only thing you can be sure of is that it will kill the enthusiasm and generate delays.

This book wasn’t ordered by anybody. I wasn’t told to write it. It was my idea. It was my creation. That was my biggest problem. I took it very personally. I wanted to make it the best of the best. It slowed me down. I would have done better if I had finished earlier and sent it to the publisher. I would receive honest feedback from a person that wasn’t so attached to this book.

Time organization

I hate all those articles about time management but this time its truth. You need to prepare some time when you can focus only on writing. Of course, if you’ve done your research, you have a plan for the chapter and you want to make a quick draft of it you can manage without it. Just type the words. But after that, you need to rewrite some parts and you need to be 100% focus on that assignment.

Like it or not it’s a must-have. For many — like for me — it’s no so easy. Work, family, “stuff”, there is a lot of distractions. But I can give you good advice. If you have a spare 30 minutes just start writing. I set myself a very specific goal. My goal was to write 100 (one hundred words). Yeap. Only 100. You know what? It was more than enough because in most cases I was writing at least one thousand.

The hardest part is to start writing. Before you start typing there is a ton of different distractions. You’ll think that you can’t write now because you won’t focus. Stop lying! You can focus, you can write. You just need to start.