Lesson #4 From Writing Our Book

Originally posted on Linked In March 2022

Javier and I learned SO MUCH as we wrote our first book. This post is the fourth in a series of some of our key lessons learned.

Lesson #4 - Find trusted people to read and provide feedback on your book while it is in progress.

The feedback we received as we were writing different sections of the book was extremely useful. It was a great way to test how we positioned ideas and helped us identify and fill gaps before we sent the manuscript off for professional editing.

After we got our edits back and made changes to the manuscript, we immediately sent it out to be professionally formatted and at the same time, shared our edited manuscript with several people who agreed to write reviews for our back cover. A couple of our reviewers had useful feedback that we could not integrate into our first edition because the book was already in the final formatting step.

From this experience we learned that it is best to block out time in the project plan for feedback from a few trusted advisors at each stage: (1) research (2) writing and (3) post-editing before the final stage of formatting. This allows the author(s) to make changes before the book is in the final formatting stage.