Book

STEP 7: Finishing My First Manuscript

November 17, 2018

Writing a book always has seemed like a daunting task. I am a slow reader and it takes me a while to read books (maybe I haven’t been reading the right kind of books), but in the back of my mind while reading, I think, “wow, this must have taken a long time to write.” And then I think that the process of writing a book is extremely time consuming.

But just like anything in life, if you break apart the parts of the process, the “daunting task” becomes much more manageable. If someone were to tell me earlier this year that I could write a book from concept to first, full draft in twelve weeks, I probably would have been thinking they were unreasonable.

However, now that I have gone through the process of writing my first book, several new learnings have emerged:

You can certainly write a book in twelve weeks. In fact, the actual writing portion only took me seven weeks. I spent the first five weeks brainstorming and narrowing down the correct topic to write about.
The experience of writing a book was extremely spiritual and healing. I feel like I have grown immensely as a human being as a result of the writing process.
I have found a new passion: writing. And now I want to write more books than just the first book. And I would love to speak to others about what I have written. I feel that I have a superpower to inspire others and I believe my books will have that ability. But I feel that being able to speak about my message live will be extremely inspiring for others to make brave choices in their lives.

I hired a book coach to get me to this point. And the goal with the book coach was to produce an initial first draft. Getting all the thoughts in your head and out on paper is probably the most time “intensive” part of the process. But there certainly is much more to finalizing your book once you are done with the initial draft. The draft is exactly how it sounds. It is a manuscript of words and stories without too much of flow. The next step of the process is to edit the book.

With the help of my book coach, I hired a developmental editor to review my book and help create more of a flow for the reader. After the editor, I will also need to hire a copyright editor to check for spelling, grammar and overall structure. And then I will need to create an eye-catching cover design combined with the pagination design. Lastly, I will need to launch my book! At this point, I am leaning for a January launch date! Much more to come so stay tuned!