Gini Graham Scott's Blog
December 15, 2017
Producing and Publishing Your Book Quickly
Writing and publishing your book doesn’t have to be a long process. In fact, you can probably put together a short book of about 50-100 pages in 2 to 3 weeks. Here’s how.
Think Small
A good way to get your book out quickly is to divide it into smaller books, so you get something published, and later combine these together into a longer book. Once you have about 50-75 pages, that’s enough for a mini-book, and some people do even shorter books of 25-50 pages.
This mini-book approach works well for how-to, self-help, and popular business books, where you give out tips on how to do something. It is also an ideal approach if you plan to use the book to increase your credibility, visibility, authority, and branding to get more customers or clients or set up speaking engagements. But if you want your book to appeal to bookstores and libraries, your book should usually be about 150 pages or more.
But start small, so you can turn your ideas into a print and/or e-book quickly and have something to quickly show for your efforts. Then, you can start thinking about all the ways to publish your book in other formats and how to use your book to promote yourself and your business.
Recording, Transcribing, and Editing Your Book
Another way to quickly produce your book is if you record, transcribe, and edit your book.
If you record your book, you can talk into your phone or other recording device, do an interview, or record a workshop or seminar. Afterwards, however you do it, get it transcribed. Then, figure on editing the manuscript yourself or hire an editor, since you can’t normally go directly from a transcript to a finished book. There are some software programs to automatically turn your recording into text, such as Dragon software, but automated transcribing generally only works if you have a single clear voice. Otherwise, if you have a workshop with multiple voices or record in a noisy environment, the software can get confused, and you can end up with gibberish featuring short phrases, skips, and other mishaps, as I discovered in sending some workshop files to a couple of automated online voice-to-text services. So where you have multiple voices that sometimes talk over each other, you need a human transcriber, typically at $1 a minute from a service like Rev.com or a local transcriber.
Once you have the transcript, figure on about an hour for editing and rewriting for every 750-1000 words. Plus you may want to add other ideas suggested by the topics you cover briefly in your recording -- and some editors knowledgeable about your subject can add material for you if you don’t do this yourself. Aside from top of your head additions, Internet research is another source of additional material.
* * * * * *
GINI GRAHAM SCOTT, Ph.D., J.D., is a nationally known writer, consultant, speaker, and seminar leader, specializing in social trends, popular culture, business and work relationships, and professional and personal development. She has published over 50 books on diverse subjects with major publishers. She has worked with dozens of clients on memoirs, self-help, and popular business books, as well as film scripts. Her websites include http://www.changemakerspublishingandw... and http://www.ginigrahamscott.com.
Think Small
A good way to get your book out quickly is to divide it into smaller books, so you get something published, and later combine these together into a longer book. Once you have about 50-75 pages, that’s enough for a mini-book, and some people do even shorter books of 25-50 pages.
This mini-book approach works well for how-to, self-help, and popular business books, where you give out tips on how to do something. It is also an ideal approach if you plan to use the book to increase your credibility, visibility, authority, and branding to get more customers or clients or set up speaking engagements. But if you want your book to appeal to bookstores and libraries, your book should usually be about 150 pages or more.
But start small, so you can turn your ideas into a print and/or e-book quickly and have something to quickly show for your efforts. Then, you can start thinking about all the ways to publish your book in other formats and how to use your book to promote yourself and your business.
Recording, Transcribing, and Editing Your Book
Another way to quickly produce your book is if you record, transcribe, and edit your book.
If you record your book, you can talk into your phone or other recording device, do an interview, or record a workshop or seminar. Afterwards, however you do it, get it transcribed. Then, figure on editing the manuscript yourself or hire an editor, since you can’t normally go directly from a transcript to a finished book. There are some software programs to automatically turn your recording into text, such as Dragon software, but automated transcribing generally only works if you have a single clear voice. Otherwise, if you have a workshop with multiple voices or record in a noisy environment, the software can get confused, and you can end up with gibberish featuring short phrases, skips, and other mishaps, as I discovered in sending some workshop files to a couple of automated online voice-to-text services. So where you have multiple voices that sometimes talk over each other, you need a human transcriber, typically at $1 a minute from a service like Rev.com or a local transcriber.
Once you have the transcript, figure on about an hour for editing and rewriting for every 750-1000 words. Plus you may want to add other ideas suggested by the topics you cover briefly in your recording -- and some editors knowledgeable about your subject can add material for you if you don’t do this yourself. Aside from top of your head additions, Internet research is another source of additional material.
* * * * * *
GINI GRAHAM SCOTT, Ph.D., J.D., is a nationally known writer, consultant, speaker, and seminar leader, specializing in social trends, popular culture, business and work relationships, and professional and personal development. She has published over 50 books on diverse subjects with major publishers. She has worked with dozens of clients on memoirs, self-help, and popular business books, as well as film scripts. Her websites include http://www.changemakerspublishingandw... and http://www.ginigrahamscott.com.
November 28, 2017
Getting Started in Self-Publishing
Today, over 1 million books are self-published each year, nearly 500,000 by CreateSpace alone. And now electronic books on platforms like Kindle, ibooks, and Kobo represent about half of the market. Plus audiobooks distributed primarily by Audible are the fastest growing market segment, which I experienced myself after publishing 65 audiobooks which are vastly outselling most of my print books.
And now books have been turned into videos and online courses, while chapters have been turned into articles and blogs, which are often combined into books. In turn, books in different formats provide a great vehicle for anyone seeking to build their own brand or promote a company, product, or service.
Given all these possibilities, a question that many authors ask me is “How should I self-publish my book?”
Some prospective authors have been introduced to self-publishing by workshops, seminars, and online pitches that offer them an opportunity to write, publish, and distribute their book for anywhere from $1500 to $35,000, depending on how much advertising and promotion is included in the mix and whether the company offers workshops and boot camps. There are also hybrid publishing programs, some offshoots of established companies, which cost about $7,000 to $15,000, with mixed results.
But the process doesn’t have to be that complicated and expensive. In the following series of blogs, I’ll provide an A-Z of what you need to do to get self-published in different formats, and then I’ll discuss how to promote your book and use it to build your career or business.
Getting Started
Once you have a general idea of what your book is about, a good first step is to outline it into chapters and subsections of a chapter, and write or record those. While some people like to talk into a recording device, transcribe it, and organize everything later, this is a hit and miss process that can make the process of preparing a book for publication take much longer. Of course, anyone can publish anything these days. But if you want a good, well-organized, thought-out book, it’s good to start with an outline. You can even use this outline for creating a series of blogs on that topic, and then turn those into a book.
Perhaps you might need an hour or two of assistance to help you decide on your subject, create the outline, and record or write the chapters. But these expensive programs often make the steps more involved than necessary. As long as you work at your own pace and set aside some time to write, you can get it done.
GINI GRAHAM SCOTT, Ph.D., J.D., is a nationally known writer, consultant, speaker, and seminar leader, specializing in social trends, popular culture, business and work relationships, and professional and personal development. She has published over 50 books on diverse subjects with major publishers. She has worked with dozens of clients on memoirs, self-help, and popular business books, as well as film scripts. Her websites include www.changemakerspublishingandwriting.com and www.ginigrahamscott.com.
And now books have been turned into videos and online courses, while chapters have been turned into articles and blogs, which are often combined into books. In turn, books in different formats provide a great vehicle for anyone seeking to build their own brand or promote a company, product, or service.
Given all these possibilities, a question that many authors ask me is “How should I self-publish my book?”
Some prospective authors have been introduced to self-publishing by workshops, seminars, and online pitches that offer them an opportunity to write, publish, and distribute their book for anywhere from $1500 to $35,000, depending on how much advertising and promotion is included in the mix and whether the company offers workshops and boot camps. There are also hybrid publishing programs, some offshoots of established companies, which cost about $7,000 to $15,000, with mixed results.
But the process doesn’t have to be that complicated and expensive. In the following series of blogs, I’ll provide an A-Z of what you need to do to get self-published in different formats, and then I’ll discuss how to promote your book and use it to build your career or business.
Getting Started
Once you have a general idea of what your book is about, a good first step is to outline it into chapters and subsections of a chapter, and write or record those. While some people like to talk into a recording device, transcribe it, and organize everything later, this is a hit and miss process that can make the process of preparing a book for publication take much longer. Of course, anyone can publish anything these days. But if you want a good, well-organized, thought-out book, it’s good to start with an outline. You can even use this outline for creating a series of blogs on that topic, and then turn those into a book.
Perhaps you might need an hour or two of assistance to help you decide on your subject, create the outline, and record or write the chapters. But these expensive programs often make the steps more involved than necessary. As long as you work at your own pace and set aside some time to write, you can get it done.
GINI GRAHAM SCOTT, Ph.D., J.D., is a nationally known writer, consultant, speaker, and seminar leader, specializing in social trends, popular culture, business and work relationships, and professional and personal development. She has published over 50 books on diverse subjects with major publishers. She has worked with dozens of clients on memoirs, self-help, and popular business books, as well as film scripts. Her websites include www.changemakerspublishingandwriting.com and www.ginigrahamscott.com.
