Episode 352: How I wrote my second book
In this episode, Fiona shares the challenges she faced while writing her second book. She also discusses the overwhelming pressure of deadlines and self-doubt she experienced during the writing process. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Struggles with time management and lack of internet access
Coping with imposter syndrome and self-doubt in the writing process
Managing expectations and the pressure to create a successful book
Overcoming creative hurdles and self-sabotage to complete the manuscript
Insights into the publishing process
The complexities of the book proposal and pitching process
Balancing personal challenges and responsibilities while writing a book
The impact of unexpected life events and how they influence the writing journey
The importance of creating a detailed plan and organization matrix for the book
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Whether you're an artist and you're putting on an exhibition or you're doing a screenplay, you can be proud of your work, but often, especially as creatives, we're still going to find things that should I have done it that way? Should I have said this? Should I have put this in? Should I have made more of that? I don't think that leaves. Even if you've written 20 books and they've all sold well, that idea of like, is this as good as it can be? It doesn't come up.
Welcome to episode 352 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is a coaching episode, and if you have ever wanted to work on something big in your business, whether that is creating an online course, creating a retreat, writing a book, or doing anything else that is going to involve quite a bit of work and work outside of your normal day-to-day business duties and activities, then today's episode is definitely for you. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the lands on which I work and record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that it is coming up to the end of the calendar year. We are booking in clients at the moment for early 2024, as well as late 2023. If you are keen to get a couple of things sorted in your business and you want to do one-on-one coaching, then please get in touch. We do work with people in the us, in Europe, in Asia, so don't feel like, I can only work with her if I'm in Australia. We do make it work with time zones. You can find all the information at mydailybusiness.com/shop, or you can just email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com and we can go from there. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
Today I'm going to talk about my second book, Passion Purpose Profit. It was published in 2020 September, and most people around the world were in lockdown. That book did incredibly well, way better than I had expected, and I think better than my publisher potentially had expected. I had been talking last year about what my second book would be, and I have just submitted the manuscript for that. Today I thought I'd talk you through how I got it done in a hectic year, and why the year was so hectic. But the actual process that I took to get a book done, because a book is nothing small, this one in particular is 70,000 words.
To get that done on top of my normal household duties, I want to call them household activities, not duties, and being a mom and being a partner, having a social life, working on my health and running this business, all of those things had to keep going. You can't just stop life because you're doing something extra like writing a book creating your first course creating a retreat or expanding into new territory. All of those things can feel overwhelming complex and hard at times. Today I thought I'd break down how I did it. The other reason that I put this onto the podcast tracker was as an incentive for myself as to you will get it done and then you'll record a podcast about it. Today I am talking you through that, but I also have not done this, I don't think on any other podcast episode I'm going to be adding in different voice memos that I made for myself throughout the process of writing this second book, because I knew that I'd do a podcast like this.
I think sometimes we can look back at a project or a big task in our business or in life and have these rose-coloured glasses on then it just happened. Or we just did this. I wanted to record myself during the process, and I'm going to put in a couple of those today to show you where my mindset was at, particularly when it was more of this never-going-to-get-done mindset. Scott, my lovely editor, is inputting those at various points in today's podcast because as I said, sometimes you can look back and it all feels very smooth and easy, even though it wasn't. I'm not at that stage to look back and think this was smooth and easy, but I'm at least at the stage where the big chunk of getting the manuscript done has been done and submitted.
Firstly, if you have never listened to this podcast before, I share business tips, insights and strategies. Previously when I wrote my first book, I did a whole episode on how I wrote it, and how I pitched it. I've also done an episode with my actual publisher. I worked on my first book with Roxy Ryan. Roxy came onto the podcast and talked about what is a publisher looking for when it comes to a book. What should be in your proposal? How does the whole process work? What are your expectations? Which ones are completely high in the sky, and which ones are more rational? We'll link to both of those in the show notes. But today, I'll give you some context as to this whole process of getting a second book. Now, firstly, the first book did pretty well, Passion Purpose Profit sold many copies.
It's in numerous reprints and that's amazing. If you haven't checked out that book, you can Google Passion Purpose Profit, it's available at lots of places. If you do choose to buy it, please try and buy it from a small business owner. Just help another small business owner while you are getting help through the book. But the book did well. I had been talking to the publisher about a second book, but I had a couple of ideas and not necessarily just books, I had ideas for other products. We went back and forth. The publisher that I worked with previously was away or on maternity leave, I think. I was given another publisher, Alice, who has been amazing. We worked together on this, and here are my ideas. We had a conversation, we went through a few things and then I pitched a couple of ideas.
Alice came back and was like, “I think this one is the best one.” You need to create your book proposal. A book proposal is, as it sounds, a proposal for your book. The first time I had my book, I Googled how to write a book proposal, even though I'd worked in book publishing and I had studied a postgrad in book publishing and editing, I still was like, I didn't even know the elements that should be in this. I looked through a couple and I amalgamated them and added a couple of other things that I thought should be in there. Your book proposal is an outline of what the book is all about. This should also include things like competitive analysis, looking at other books that are in the market, why yours is going to be better or different, and how it's going to be better or different.
You also want to put in information about yourself. Who are you as an author? What does your audience profile look like already? Looking at like social media handles, email lists, anything that's going to help the publisher go, they've already got a little bit of a community around them. I'm not saying that they wouldn't take on a book without a little bit of an audience from the author, but it can help potentially. You put in your author profile, you put in your, well, I put in an idea of marketing for this book. Which channels I would use, what types of connections or networks or community groups I'm already a part of, what workshops, what does the PR and media strategy look like? All of that was put into the book proposal. I also put in an elevator pitch plus a longer pitch.
I also put in the actual audiences and their profiles for this book. I think I put in quite a lot of information and I think that's better to put that in than to potentially lose your chance because you didn't put in enough information. I also put in the full chapter outline. That is something that is usually required for you to be saying, there are going to be 12 chapters, and here's a synopsis of each chapter. We started discussing all of this in probably March 2022. This gives you an idea of how long this entire process takes. In March 2022, we started talking about it. Then my father-in-law unfortunately and very sadly passed away in May of last year.
That was horribly heartbreaking and had a big impact on my family and still has an impact on my family. That happened. I missed the cutoff. This is an important thing with proposals, even though the publisher might love what you're doing and say, “This all sounds good,” they need to then take that proposal through to a sales and acquisition meeting. At that meeting, it's not just the publisher that's talked to you, it's a whole bunch of other people who are deciding, is worth taking a risk on. A publisher is always taking a risk. Even if you've had 17 books that have been bestsellers, they are still taking a risk that this book is not going to flop. I've only got one other book to go on.
It's not like I've got a whole suite of things. Who knows, that book might have done well. This book may not, but fingers crossed that it does. They had to then take it to an acquisition meeting that only happens once a month. If you miss the deadline for that meeting, you have to wait a whole other month for it to happen again. I had missed the deadline I talked to them and said, I'm not going to be able to make that. Then my back went out in June, I think it was in 2022. I had three herniated discs, I had to see all these neurosurgeons and physios and all these people. I still see a physio every single week about my back. I see an acupuncturist every so often and it's something that I work on every single day.
But that meant that I wasn't able to move for weeks. I was on all sorts of heavy medications. I wasn't able to finish it in the way that I wanted to. That got extended. I think it ended up going to their July meeting or August and we got some feedback that they were interested. But we're going back and forth. I then got Covid right after my back healed in October. I remember having COVID, and my publisher Alice sent me an email saying This may help with COVID. It was an offer and it was so exciting. In the offer, it can be just an email basically with, “Hey, we'd like to offer you a publishing deal. Here's all of the information.”
It's like how long the book will be, how many pages, the specs. Size of the book, because we'd already done Passion Purpose Profit, we'd all agreed that it should be a similar size and feel to that book in terms of design and the way that it was the soft cover, all of that. And then it has the working title and maybe a few other pieces from my proposal. And then they have the advance. The advance is the financial amount of money that the publisher will pay you in advance of the book. The way that they calculate that, and I think a lot of people don't know this, I know it because I studied it in 2007, 2008 when I went to RMIT and I studied this, but a lot of people don't understand that you have to earn out your advance.
By that, it means that let's say, for example, you were given a hundred thousand dollars and let's say you make $2 on each of your books. Your royalty, let's say it's 10% and we're just going to charge it as 10% of the full amount, not of net receipts or all the different ways that they calculate it, but let's say for the sake of sums, you get a hundred thousand dollars as an advance, you get $2 per copy of each book that's sold as your royalty. You would need to sell 50,000 copies in order to earn out your a hundred thousand dollars advance.
A lot of people don't understand that and a lot of people will never earn out the advance that they're given from a publisher, which is why the publisher is taking that risk of potentially paying you and they don't know that you're going to earn out that advance that they've paid you. Plus it's not just the advance, it's the cost of creating the book. All of the people involved, the copy editor, editor, designer, and typesetter, all of those people have to be paid as well as the marketing and sales team. They are taking a risk with that advance. When you see it, maybe some people don't know that you don't get paid. Let's say for example that a hundred thousand dollars, you don't get that in one lump sum. It's not like they give you a hundred thousand dollars to write the book, they will give you it in thirds.
You get a third upon signing a contract, you get a third sometimes it's a bit more, they might break it up slightly differently, but it's a third on signing the contract with the publisher. It's a third of the actual manuscript being delivered and then it's a third of the publication date. The publication can be a full year after the manuscript has been delivered and you may have a full year between the contract and the manuscript getting delivered. It's not like, you get that money and it's all done and dusted in a couple of months. It's not. It's a very long process to write a book, particularly with a traditional publisher. There are so many pros and cons to each. I 10000% think it's better to go with a traditional publisher because they're doing all the distribution, all of the costs, they are paying you to write the book and then you're going to make money through royalties once you earn out your full advance.
I just got a royalty check the other day. You get them twice a year and it's such a nice thing to come in and you're like, people that keep buying my book, it's lovely. She had the advance listed in that initial email as well. What happened then? That was the end of October, I went back and forth negotiating on the advance purely because I had already had a book out there and it had done well. If you are going for your second book or anything where you feel like, I'm going to stand my ground, I'm going to ask for my worth and all of that. I was able to get an amazing advance. The first advance was pretty amazing as well, but got a great advance and then we went back and forth until it's not just the advance you also want to be looking at all the other parts of the contract including things like permissions and licensing and you know how much percentage you'll get from eBooks and audiobooks and all of the other things.
We went through all of that back and forth. Didn't sign the contract until probably the end of January 2023. If you think about it, we have been talking about it since March 2022. That's almost a year until the contract is signed. I had a deadline of the 1st of August this year, so that was pretty full-on because I signed it and then had to get my first chapter in by the end of March. I guess it was like the 1st of April that it had to be in. We were going on a family trip to Fiji on the 1st of April and that happened to be our first family trip in years. Because of the lockdowns here in Melbourne and also because we had a baby in 2019 and went through IVF in 2018, we hadn't gone overseas for five years. I know that sounds very privileged, but for people who we were very used to like going overseas once a year travel is a huge important part of our family's values and what we put money towards.
I wanted to get it done before I went to Fiji because I was like, I did not want this hanging over me in Fiji. I just want to go and have a break. I submitted that at the end of March. We also decided randomly in March to sell our house. We'd been working with architects for about 18 months on a renovation and then realized that was not the path we wanted to go down. We found a beautiful house that fit everything we were trying to do with the renovation but was not going to have years and years of headaches and red tape and councils and all the things. We bought that house and then had to sell our other house. I understand we are in a horrible housing crisis at the moment, so I understand the privilege and fortune that I have to be able to be in that position at all.
It was still quite stressful though, like anyone who sold a house, even just when you're packing up a house that you've rented or that you've been staying out for some time, I mean, you have so much stuff and because we had not been planning to sell, we had to get the house ready and on the market in three weeks. That was full-on. And that happened in March. I was doing this chapter on top of my normal life and business and we always have a busy march. I often speak at a few events, often travelling in March and then I'm also running group coaching Marketing for Your Small Business around that time. It's a hectic time of year. The first chapter of the book plus selling a house and getting it all ready is just absolutely massive.
Anyone who sold a house knows that you also have to fix up things that maybe you've just let slide for a while. There were a lot of tradies and all these different people coming in and out all the time. It was hectic. We went to Fiji, it was amazing. We ended up selling the house, which was fantastic. But then we came back and there was a couple of months, like six weeks before I was going overseas again for work, partly to research this book to meet with people for the book and to visit a couple of people in my family that I hadn't seen for a long time. There were about six weeks since I started working on the book and pulled together my at that point my matrix. For the first book, I'm very much somebody who likes to pull together Excel Sheets or Google Sheets as a way of sorting out information and getting it out of my head.
I also like mind maps and I've talked about that at length on this podcast. I created a matrix and now the matrix for the book was I had the chapter outline because I'd done the book proposal I pulled that into an Excel Sheets, and a Google Sheet, and I put in chapter one, here's the synopsis, here's the topic, and chapter two. I wanted to do some brand profiles in between, much like I'd done in the first book where I interviewed small business owners. I put those in between and then I had to figure out how many words were going to be needed for each chapter in order to hit my word count, but also in order to give a decent amount of information on this particular topic. I worked all of that out in Excel and created it so that the total number of words was equivalent to the word count that had been in the contract with the publisher.
That was a bit of work in itself. Then I started creating the different tabs on my matrix, which has things like permissions, and who we're going to send copies to when the book comes out. A whole bunch of things like where all the photos are going to be kept, where all the images and diagrams are. I had to mock up all of those diagrams for the designer. There was a lot of work that went into a book outside of the actual just writing the book. That took on quite a few weeks and then it was time for me to go overseas. I naively thought it was a long way from Australia to America, Europe, the places that I was going. I was going by myself. I was like, I don't have the kids. I am going to have so much downtime on the flights at the airport. I'm going to have all this waiting around. I am going to write so much of my book. I like so much of it.
I have a good friend, Marre Smit, she lives in Amsterdam and we met in Mayorca in June. We WhatsApp each other all the time and I thought I would share a WhatsApp message that I sent to her. I think it was the morning that I was going overseas because I mentioned where my mindset was at with the book. You listen to it and see for yourself. “It's a leaving day. I'm so excited about this trip. I'm so excited to see my uncle, see you catch up with a bunch of people in London, and interview people for this book. But I was thinking about it. I am like feeling so behind, but I figure I've got so much travel time, there's so much waiting around at airports there's just been so much going on right now with the house and everything else that I feel like this might just be a perfect opportunity to get this book written. I don't know how long, I've got like 30 hours of travelling just to get to my uncle and then I'm probably not going to be with him 24/7. There'll be time to get some work done in London. There's some time. And then obviously Mayorca I can get some by the pool. I just am like, you can get it done. You can get a chunk of this done. But anyway, how are you?”
As you can tell, I thought that I was going to be able to write a chunk. I had already written a bit, but I thought I was going to finish this before I got to the us. I mean I've got 30 hours in the sky and I've got lots of waiting around. I'm going to smash this totally. It started that way. When I got to the airport, my flight was delayed by three and a half hours. I was like amazing. I went to a cafe and I did, I like to put on some focus music. I got so much written. I think I got all of chapter two done, which was like 6 or 7,000 words and I was on a roll. I put together notes and things so it wasn't like I was just starting from scratch, but I was like, I'm going to get on that flight and I'm just going to write for the whole flight and the book will be done.
I was naive. I got on the flight and straight away the guy in front of me put his seat right down. I was not flying anything fancy, I was in economy. He put his seat right down. It was pushing into my knees. I tried to put my laptop up and it wouldn't even go up. I couldn't even put the screen up because his seat was so far down. I asked him “Hey, I'm trying to write a book, could you please put your seat up a little bit?” He was quite annoyed by that. I did ask super nicely and it was just like “We're on a long-haul flight, I want to sleep.” I was like, “Okay.” And I said, well maybe you won't sleep for the whole thing.
He's like, “Okay.: He put it up for maybe 40 minutes and then he put it straight back down and he promptly fell asleep. I was not able to write. I started writing on my phone, not the greatest, they dimmed the lights quite quickly because I was trying to get onto the US time. I ended up watching a movie. I couldn't sleep. I'm not a good sleeper. I cannot sleep in cars. I can't sleep during the day. I was like, I'll just watch a couple of movies and then maybe this guy will move his seat. He didn't. But what happened was, whilst I was watching a movie, I was on the aisle seat and across from me, this guy stood up to get something out of his overhead locker. The next thing I knew, I thought someone had punched me in the face.
I was like, what is happening? The guy next to me managed to stop it. But basically what happened was this guy stood up to get something, he opened the locker and a metal helmet, like a fireman's old school metal helmet, flew out and smashed into my head and it flew out so fast. I was in absolute agony. I have to say that the flight attendant did absolutely nothing to help. They basically looked at me and were like, you're not bleeding. Also in general, that brand I have flown with them my whole life, I've always flown with them even though it's more expensive.The level of customer service was just diabolical on that whole flight. They were so rude to people. This guy next to me was nice. I just started crying.
I was like, it's so much pain. He was like, “I don't have Panadol, but I've got Neurofen.” He gave me some, I felt just basically this throbbing in my head for the rest of the flight. It was absolutely awful. Then it got to Dallas and thought, I'll try and write. We were late and delayed then. We were late getting in there. I had booked a co-working space, what I thought was a co-working space and I'd booked it, I'd paid for it. Once I got in there, my phone wouldn't work even though I had a team. I couldn't prove to them that I'd paid for it. Anyway, it went back and forth. It was like an hour of trying to sort this out. When I got in, it was like this tiny area where there were no desks, there was nothing.
I had my laptop on me trying to work, but I was on a bench with three other people just talking and eating and everything else and it was just, it was horrible. Also, I hadn't slept the whole time, so I was trying to write, not getting much done, and didn't have internet access for most of the time. Then they changed my flight to a different part of the airport. That took forever to get to anyway, complaint first world problems. The point was I got to my uncle's after 30-something hours of travel having written not much more than I had done at the Melbourne airport when my plane was delayed. Then I got to my uncle's. I assumed that I would have a bit of time to myself there I was in my own apartment.
He lives in a beautiful retirement village place, but my lovely uncle is very social he had booked us breakfast, lunch, and dinner meetings with all these different people the whole time, which was great, but meant that there was no time to write. Then I got to London and I thought, I'm going to have some time in the hotel. I will write, it'll be amazing. But it didn't happen. I had set up a couple of interviews for this book and did those. Went to have a look at a couple of places that I was featuring in the book that all took time. Met up with a couple of people and the weekend was gone. Then I went to visit another family member for 24 hours in a different country and then met up with my friend Marre in Mayorca.
That was amazing and definitely that is also where I did a bit chunk more of the writing. That is where I did a lot of contacting PR agencies about different people that I wanted to profile. It was where I was chasing copyright, researching things, trying to get to it. The actual writing of the book didn't happen that much in Mayorca. I got home from this trip, which was amazing. It was a lot. It was like four countries in two weeks got back exhausted but went straight into packing up the house because we'd sold it, but we had a long settlement period. I packed that house up and was out of that house about 10 days after I got back. Then we had to stay at a family member's house before moving into our house.
Then we moved into our new house and as lots of people will know, you don't have internet access, you don't have things set up. There were lots of issues in that this is a mud brick home. The internet does not go through the walls very easily. There were just lots of things that needed to be fixed. This is getting into July. I'd written a chunk and I said to my publisher, “I can submit something on the 1st of August, but it's not going to be my best work. Is there any way that we could delay this?” They very kindly went to their sales team, looked at it all and said, “We can delay, but we can only delay until mid to late September. If we delay any further, it will be pushed out to publication in 2025.”
It's already not going to come out for another year from now. I didn't want it to be pushed there. I had to knuckle down and be like, “Okay.” I looked at my calendar, I talked to my assistant Yricka. We went through what can be moved, and what can we say no to because this has to get done. I also carved out a couple of hours twice a week in the evening to work on this and to make sure that I got it done. But what came up for me then was a huge amount of imposter syndrome and a huge amount of like, is this book going to sell? Will anyone like it? There's so much to say on the particular topic of this next book that it was hard to figure out what to include and what not to include.
I'm a very visual person. There were more and more diagrams and frameworks I wanted to include. I was just thinking, do I include too much? Am I including too little? Around this same time, I saw a negative review of my book and this is human nature. We focus on the negative instead of all the wonderful reviews that we get the wonderful DM's and the wonderful sharing of that first book. I have so many emails from people saying how much this book has helped them. Instead of focusing on that, I focused hard on that negative review and then it came into my mind writing the next book, like, are they going to think this? I got caught up with external stuff instead of coming back to why am I writing this, what is the objective here?
What am I trying to do? Which is just to help people with the knowledge that I have. Also around the same time, signed up with a new coach for myself. I'm somebody who walks the walk. I have my own business coaches and different people that I have worked with over the years. I found this guy and he is in his seventies, just interesting. I had my first session with him and he said, you know what? What's the main problem at the moment? I said, “This is it. It's a mindset.” I know what to write. I've been doing this work for 20-something years. I have the knowledge, and I want to share it, but I'm getting in my own way. He gave me such good feedback. One of the things that he said was, to stop trying to be the expert.
Stop trying to be okay, this book has to cover every single thing because it won't and it just can't. And he's like, the topic you're choosing is very difficult to fully explain. He was like, stop trying to be the expert and just be a knowledge sharer. I'm sharing the knowledge that I have. If it helps you, great. If it doesn't, great there will be other places that you can get education knowledge from. That was massive in changing my mindset. It seems so simple and I see it all the time in my own coaching where I'll say something just off the cuff or I'll say something someone will get so much from it because quite often we can be so close to the problem that it's almost like we can't stand back and see a simple solution to it.
That was amazing and from that point on, I was like, I'm just sharing knowledge. This doesn't have to be the book to rival any book out there. It just has to be a book that I think is full of quality information that people will learn from and can be useful for them, which is exactly what I think I've created. From that point on, I had calculated how many tens of thousands of words had to be written and there was a chunk to write every single week. Instead of thinking, okay, well I've got Wednesday or I've got a Friday to write, I sat down and was like, every day I'm going to show up for this book. Every day Monday to Friday I'm going to show up for this book. That's what I did. I just put it in, I put dates against everything in my tracker and I just looked at the date and was like, today this much from chapter six needs to get done.
I just worked it methodically. The other thing that I talked about with my coach, and I think this can come up a lot when you're doing something different or creative, more creative maybe than your normal day-to-day work or feels that way. At least one of the things that I said to him was, I'm finding this challenging. He said, you got paid, this is work. He has written 50, I think 55 books himself. He understands how these things work. He said you've gotta remember that this is work. It's not going to feel amazing. And like, it's so blissful. Here I am in my Tuscan villa writing my book. It's not going to feel like that every day. Sometimes it's going to be enjoyable, but sometimes it's just going to feel like work and you're turning up and doing the thing and finishing.
I think that was also another massive point to me that I'd been resisting some of the Ted of writing a book, which I know can feel like what isn't a book so glamorous? It's like photo shoots and everything else that people think is so amazing all the time. They can be. But when you're writing a 70,000-word book and you are having to chase permissions and chase PR agencies and all of it, there are parts that are tedious and annoying and frustrating. Also when you just can't get the words out in a way that you want them to come out, that can also be frustrating. That was a massive mindset shift. And it got to about the five-week mark, and it was that moment where I was like, how is this going to get done?
I'm going to input another voice note that I sent myself at that point. “I know at some point. I'm going to do a podcast on how I wrote my book because I put that into the podcast Tracker. And I'm recording this a month out, five weeks out from my deadline. Honestly, I feel sick. I feel like this is never going to get done. I just sat on the ground crying and then I pulled out my Oracle cards because of course, they're going to help. But they did. The one that I pulled, I started laughing because it said, you are very close to achieving your goal. I am very close and I've gotta remember that this is when resistance hits hardest. That whole Steven Pressfield quote of resistance is the hardest at the finish line. It is. I feel like resistance is showing up as this gigantic self-sabotaging person who is just like, don't do the work.”
“There's some new show on Netflix, don't do the work. Scroll through Instagram, don't do the work. Doesn't your desk need to be cleaned? Your whole office needs to be cleaned right now. Every other thing that is not important is coming up as more important than getting this book done. I just want to record this moment because I am feeling so stressed and I am hoping that I will play this back to myself even if I don't use it for the podcast and remind myself that even though it is so hard right now and it feels like how is this going to get done? It will get done. What did they say if you haven't finished or something, it's not the end. I'm completely stuffing that up, but I'm feeling, what am I feeling right now feeling?”
“I'm feeling excited in a way that it's almost there. I know from a word count perspective it will get there, but I'm also being like, I've got all these ideas and all these plans and all these notes and all these tables and Excel Sheets and yet that doesn't make you do the work. I'm trying to figure out how many hours I have between now and the 25th of September and how I can get this done when I'm also doing my normal work, normal childcare, and normal school stuff. There's just so much. But it'll get done. It will get done, it always does. It'll get done. I will put this into a podcast where I'm telling you how I did it and I'll be able to think it got done. Even though right this minute previous me, which is the current me, is not able to see the future me that will have it done and this will be a thing of the past. On that note, let's get back into it. ”
As you can hear in that, I was in this like, is this going to get done? I had moments where I said to my husband, maybe I will refund the first payment of the advance because it's just too hard, it's not going to get done. I mentioned that resistance is hardest at the finish line and it is so much when you have months to go, that you can fool yourself into being like, it'll get done. When that deadline comes closer and closer, it's like, it just has to get done. But around that point, I was questioning if I would get it done and how I would get it done. I felt like I was overwhelmed, to be honest. I knew I had the information in my head, but it was like, is it all coming out right? Does it make any sense? Am I just like crapping on? Is this going to help people? I know deep down that it will and it will for sure, and it has in the past when I've shared these different things with different clients or even in my corporate roles. But it's another thing to put that into a book. I think the first time I had no idea if the book would sell, I was like if it sells 10 copies, awesome.
I just had no idea if it would sell. I never thought it would sell 12, 13, 14 thousand. I just had no idea. I was hopeful anything over 5,000 copies is a bestseller in Australia. I was talking to somebody in the US and they said, it's around about the same. I was like, you've got like a gigantic population. But people think that books sell a lot more than they do. I think I read something once that said something like 80% of books don't quote me. Because I don't know exactly where I read these, but it was like 80% of books will sell like a hundred copies and that's it. We think because we see people all the time New York Times bestsellers or we see these giant names like Leanne Moriarty and other people who get things made into movies, but the average person doesn't sell that many copies of their books.
If you ask a lot of self-published people, they'll often end up with thousands of copies that they paid for, or even 800 copies that they paid for. And they'll do things like free shipping or they'll put it at 99 cents on Kindle or free on Kindle so that they get people to at least read the work that they've pulled together. This was a point where I was like, what am I doing? You start thinking about all these negative things. It was, important for me to work on my mindset. Then I did a lot of meditations I did a lot of chatting with friends, a lot of chatting to my husband about things and I was like, this just has to get done. Like there isn't another option. This has to get done.
I have to submit it and I want to submit something good. Where can I call in my calendar? Where can I make more room? Where can I say I need this time on Saturday to do it? I did that. I talked to my husband, I was like, this needs to get done. My mother-in-law also stepped in and looked after my son for a couple of days so that I could get it done. But the last week or so, maybe the last two weeks of it were school holidays. That was not a great timing on my part and I didn't look at that when I was looking at the extension because I'm the primary caregiver for my two children. Having somebody home was like, as much as I love my children, I do so much and they are the light of my life.
It was difficult to try and get this all done knowing that I also had school holidays and school holiday activities and sleepovers and taking people to bounce and all the other things. I recorded this last input, I think it was about a week or a few days, maybe a week before it was due. You'll hear that even though I'm more positive, there's still that apprehension. Also, this is the point I think that a lot of people forget as well that there's a whole lot of editing that has to be done. This was the point that I had finished the actual manuscript, but I was editing, checking things, changing things, reading it all, making sure it made sense, making sure that if I referenced something in chapter two, that was in chapter nine, it was in chapter nine, all of that had to be done.
As well as making sure that all the diagrams had been mocked up. I'd already had to mock up a bunch of diagrams for the designer to get a sense of pulling the book design together early on. But you don't know all the diagrams you need until you've finished the book or all the quotes or all the other things that you're going to use. All of that work had to be done before I submitted it. It's not just submitting the actual Google Doc or the Word doc, it's all the other stuff that has to be submitted at the same time. This is where I was at in my mindset, about a week out. “It is about six days until this book is due and I'm at that just hard part where you can see the finish line, but there's still so much to do and I'm marking it up.”
“I used to be a book editor, this is a good skill to have. I'm just marking it up and then I'm questioning things. I read the whole lot in one go on the weekend, which was amazing to be able to do that and to just sit down and be like, how does it all sound together? Because I hadn't been doing that. I know I'll get it done and I just keep telling myself it'll get done, everything gets done. But I'm still in that part where I'm like, should I have written this? Should I have included this? I think that's just part of it. I don't think anyone puts out a book where they're 120% thrilled and thinking that they couldn't have done a better job at all.”
“It's the best possible thing that they've ever done. I think I would imagine that most people when you're doing anything that's big, like if you've done a runway or if you're doing your first photo shoot, you're going to like enjoy it and have fun, but you're also probably still going to be like, I wish I'd just done that part. Or and I think that's just part, like I'm happy. It's not like, I'm just picking it apart or anything. I think it's good. I think it'll help people, but it's just this last bit where I'm like, after I've edited it all, I'm going to go and then create all the graphics for the designer, but I'm going to create a bunch more because there are more things that I wanted to include in it. There are a lot of graphics, I'm worried that potentially the publisher is going to take out a whole bunch of them, but I'm such a visual learner, I'm just flicking through it now.”
But it'll get done. I'm feeling a lot more positive and I feel like it just has to get done. There's no other option. It just has to get done.” As you can hear, even though I'm more positive, even though I know that the work has been done, it's still hard at the end, it is still hard. As I said in that clip, whether you're an artist and you're putting on an exhibition or you're doing a screenplay, you can be proud of your work, but often, especially as creatives, we're still going to find things that, ah should I have done it that way? Should I have said this? Should I have put this in? Should I have made more of that? I don't think that leaves, I don't think even if you've written 20 books and they've all sold well, that that idea of like, is this as good as it can be, doesn't come up.
I'm sure that it must come up for people even I even, I remember hearing an interview with Beyonce and she said, I still get nervous before shows. I mean, she is Beyonce, she could put out absolute crap, and she could make literally the worst concert of all time. I mean, I don't think she ever would, but people would still come, people would still pay. She's got to that point in her career that like, it's almost like she can do no wrong. Even she feels nervous and filled with adrenaline and like, am I doing this the best that I can at all times? I don't think it ever leaves you, I'm not at all trying to compare myself to Beyonce, but I wanted to put that in because even when it's finished, it's still like, “Oh my gosh.”
This book, right now, I'm recording this in October. It is not finished until it goes to print, which will be early next year. There's still going to be rounds of changes, there's still going to be things that obviously the editor, the copy editor takes out or wants to change. And those will be conversations that we have over the next couple of months. If you're reading this and you're just interested in the process, the way that it works now is I've submitted my manuscript and I've submitted the diagrams and mockups of all of those. I'm now working as well as my editor at Hardie Grant on getting the permissions for various things. You have to get permission, especially if you're a traditional publisher. I think a lot of self-published people don't necessarily go through the whole copyright to get copyright permissions for all sorts of things.
For example, one diagram that we're using comes from a 19, I think 1980s book that was put out on this particular topic. That one diagram to use in the book is about $600 Australian to have the rights to be able to use it. If you think about 30, or 40 diagrams that are in there, you also don't have a large budget from the publisher to be able to spend on permissions sometimes you don't have a budget at all to spend on permissions. It's a case of like, checking things, making sure that you need permission. There are some instances where you don't need permission for certain things. That is what I'll be doing predominantly for the next couple of months chasing all of those. There are also interviews, there are people who pulled out of interviews at the very last minute, which is annoying.
There are other people that I'd love to interview for profiles here. There's still lots of work to be done. I haven't seen the cover options yet. Those will be sent over I'm sure shortly for feedback. What happens is that the editor goes through it and does structural and looks at overall how the book sounds. Do we need to move things? Should things from chapter six be in chapter one? All of those things, does it make sense to somebody who's reading it, particularly someone who maybe doesn't have experience in this particular theme or this topic? It goes to an external copy editor who will go through it for grammar sense checks, fact checks, and all of those kinds of things. Then it'll come back in-house, it'll go into a typesetter who will put it into the designer's frame in terms of these are the chapter openers, these are the graphics that we use in different parts.
Then once it's type set, it'll go back, I think to the copy editor. They will work on it again, once it's in the actual type set and how it looks as a book, then it will come to me, I will make my changes, and then it goes back. There's quite a bit of back and forth and then it'll be completely signed off I think in January and go to print at the end of January or early February. It's a long process. If you think about it, I started talking to the publisher in March 2022. It won't go to print until February 2024 and it won't come out until nine months later. There's so much involved in a book, and I just want to say a massive thank you to anyone reading the first book, who sent me a DM about Passion Purpose Profit or sending an email.
I've had such an overwhelming response to that book from people all over the world. Honestly. We've seen images of people in New Jersey on the beach with the book. We've seen people in a Tuscan vineyard, we've seen people in New Caledonia. I've seen people in mountain areas in Peru who have travelled with my book. It's just incredible to see it. I want to say thank you because it was those messages that spurred me on when I felt challenged by the second book and writing the second book, will I ever get it done and will anyone think it's worthwhile? All of those things that can come up. I just wanted to share this journey with you in case you are thinking of writing a book, creating something new, doing something different in your business, branching out, or creating a business for the first time.
These are big things and we should celebrate them, but also we shouldn't underestimate the rollercoaster of emotions that these things can lead us on. I also want to say that I've had a lot of people who have reached out since the first book came out in 2020 to ask me about writing their own book. In 2024, I'm thinking of pulling this together in some course or retreat or class on how to pitch yourself to publishers, how to work with publishers, how to get it done, what a writing matrix looks like, how you get over some of these mindset challenges and be able to do the thing. If you are interested in that, I would love to hear from you because I'm thinking of creating it first with a beta group going through that together and then working with those people.
If that is of interest to you, please get in touch. This would be people all over the world. You can just email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com and be in that beta testing group that we do in early 2024. If you're interested in hearing about it, feel free to just let us know and we'll make sure that you are on a waitlist or an early information list. Thank you so much for reading. I should have said this earlier, thank you to anyone who stocks the book, we've had so many people say that they were recommended it buy a bookshop or buy somebody in a gift shop. It's just all these small businesses out there that are promoting my book that are taking a risk on buying it and not knowing for sure if it will sell. Thank you.
Without you the book definitely wouldn't have done as well as it has, so I just want to say a massive thank you and I hope you love the second book. I can't wait to share it with you once we're a bit further along and can't wait to just see what people think what they take from it and how they change their business based on it. Thank you so much for reading. If you found this useful at all, please leave a review and you can look through all of this in text format over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/352. Thanks, I'll see you next time. Bye.
