How to Write a Book: Part One
- Stephanie Partridge
- Sep 14, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 16, 2021
So, you're sitting there thinking, "I really want to tell my story, but where do I begin?" You have a story that needs to be told, and I'd love to walk you through my experience with answering that question for myself.
Swallowing an Elephant
I met another author who has several bestselling books on Amazon. In talking with her, she made it sound like writing a book was just like any other job. You just do it. After some consideration, I decided to start my writing adventure by organizing a group of women that were interested in sharing their stories. I thought that writing a single chapter of a book would be much easier than tackling my whole story, imagining "swallowing an elephant whole." I also felt like creating a project where others could share their stories would make me feel like, in a small way, I could help these other women release some of their pain. #writingtherapy #womenhelpwomen
The project was much more difficult than I expected. It took a lot of time and patience working with several women whom I had never met in person. After over a year of working with these amazing women, we finally had a book ready to publish. I researched publishing companies and wrote thirty query letters (I'll talk about what that is later) to go the traditional publishing route. After waiting out the required six-months for publishing companies to respond, we did not have a publisher. Over a dozen publishers had responded positively but just couldn't take an "unknown," or our specific genre wasn't something they could take on at the time. It was a bit dis-heartening, but we moved on. After months and months of work and research, I felt that I just didn't have it in me to learn how to self-publish. This is when I talked with Heather Choate, who also contributed a chapter to the book, and asked for her help. She was willing to take the manuscript and self publish for us. I gave her the book and she took over from there. We've sold several hundred copies, and made Amazon's #11 bestselling spot for that genre.
“I thought self-publishing would be too hard to learn on my own. I was so wrong!”
Going back several months while we were waiting out our traditional publisher's query responses: I started to work diligently on my own memoir (there was room in my life for an elephant then). I had been writing journal entries during my cancer treatments and I wanted to collect them and make them into a book. Seemed simple enough, right? Nope, it took months of weeding out information, re-writing things that didn't make sense without the picture attached to the entry, and filling in blanks that I somehow never recorded. After several months, I was excited to say that my journal entries were done. I found an editor, Bonnie Brien, who went over my journal entries and marked it up with a million grammar and sentence structure corrections. I was told that manuscripts should be reviewed by several people before you have it published. After I corrected everything, I asked friends and family to read and give input. (This process was completely backwards by the way, which is why I'm writing this post.) The input I got from the first handful of beta readers was not great. I took a break from my book for a couple of weeks to do some soul searching. The fact is, they were right in their assessments and I needed to go back to square one. I spent another couple of months re-writing, taking out big chunks of unnecessary information, and adding in chapters that were not conceived before. I'll talk more about swallowing my pride in a later post. #humblepie #editing #writingabook #selfpublishing #rewrite #amazonbestseller
In Conclusion
After a lot of work, and more beta readers, I sent the manuscript for another round of editing from the wonderful Bonnie. As soon as I sent her the new manuscript I started to spend every spare moment reading and researching how to self-publish. I'll tell you more about why I chose this route later. I learned about Amazon's analytics, marketing, KDP, coding a manuscript in HTML, and formatting corrections. I have come a long way and feel that the information I have gleaned can help someone like me, who knew nothing about writing a book or what to do when it was written. I will delve into what I have learned by study and also by trial and error. There will be step-by-step instructions, examples, and some free formatting elements and code I would be happy to share. You CAN do this and it's not as overwhelming as it seems if you just take one task at a time.
Here's where to go next:
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