Lesson #6 From Writing Our Book

Originally posted on Linked In April 2022

Javier and I discovered that there are SO many resources available for first time authors. This is the sixth in a series of posts about our lessons learned from writing our first book.

Lesson #6 - Invest the time to learn and outsource key items to professionals with more experience.

As I mentioned yesterday, we were somewhat clueless when we started our writing adventure. Certainly both Javier and I had done a lot of writing in our professional lives but drafting a report, proposal, business case or training presentation is quite different from writing a book. We consulted a number of online resources, read some books, listened to podcasts & webinars and watched tons of You Tube videos.

Through this process we learned that there are several tasks associated with publishing a book that are more effectively outsourced to professionals. In our case, we hired a professional editor, cover designer and someone to format the interior of our book. If you are working with a large publisher, they will do this for you, many of them with their in-house talent. If you are publishing more independently (as more than 90% of first time authors do), you will need to figure this out.

There are ways you can do all of this work yourself - you could design a cover on Canva, use online grammar checkers for editing/proofreading and upload and format your own manuscript with an online tool. We explored these options and decided that it was worth spending the money to hire experts.

We discovered several good services to find suitable professionals to help. If you are just getting started, companies like Book Launchers provide end-to-end author support. If you prefer an ala carte approach, companies such as Reedsy provide a marketplace of professionals to support many tasks throughout the process. We found our editor, book cover artist and formatter through Reedsy. Was it worth the money? ABSOLUTELY!