It now takes 9-12 months to go from idea to launch date-and sometimes less.Īs we were working through this process, I told a few people what Zach and I were up to and they loved it. There are a million little things that make the difference between a professional book and a clearly self-published amateur book-internal layout, marketing, blurbs, copyright page, etc.Īfter the book was finished, we made sure Melissa owned all the royalties and rights to it unlike traditional publishers.įrom start to finish the whole process took 9 months. Do the rest of the professional publishing minutiae:.We worked with world-class book cover designer Erin Tyler (who is now our Director of Creative) to get Melissa a cool cover that she was proud of. Melissa took some time to go over the content to make sure it reflected her thoughts and vision for the book.īecause Melissa has a discerning eye, the cover had to look great. So we took the transcription and “translated” it by taking Melissa’s spoken words and ideas and making them flow on the page, while keeping it in her voice. If you have ever seen a raw audio transcription, you know it’s basically unreadable. “Translate” the transcription to a book manuscript:.He used REV.com to transcribe the recording. He asked her questions until he got all of her ideas, in her words, out of her head and into an audio recording. Zach then scheduled four two-hour calls with Melissa, where he interviewed her using the outline as a guide. From these conversations, he and I wrote an outline for her book. Zach did a few phone calls with Melissa, helped her clarify her book idea and figured out exactly what she wanted to say in her book. Here’s the basic step-by-step process we came up with: I brought Zach Obront, a former employee of mine, into the conversation and the three of us decided to test my idea and see what would happen.Īfter some trial and error, we found something that worked. But like Melissa said, entrepreneurship is about solving problems. My next problem was that I didn’t yet have a precise process to follow and, quite honestly, I wasn’t sure my idea was going to work. I want to do it but it has to be my words and my ideas.” Me: “What if I told you that I can take you from an idea to a professionally published, completely finished book for sale on Amazon and everywhere else, and all you have to do is talk?” I refined the idea in my head, and then called Melissa: In fact, talking is how Socrates, Jesus, Buddha and Malcolm X all got their words into books.Ĭan this work for Melissa, too? Of course it can! Is writing really a necessary part of creating books? Or is there a way to get Melissa’s ideas out of her head and into a book without her doing the actual writing? Of course, as soon as I’d stopped obsessing about it, the solution struck me like a bolt of lightning a few days later. That’s why it’s called writing a book.Įventually I gave up on finding a solution. I kept coming back to one simple truth: there is no way to write a book without putting in the time to actually write it. Too flustered in the moment to come up with a solution, I told her I would be in touch.īecause I was so clearly and embarrassingly wrong, I obsessed over her problem for weeks. I was ignoring a problem I was in a unique position to solve. Melissa was straight up calling me out and she was right. Can you solve my problem or are you just going to lecture me about hard work?” Melissa: “I’m an entrepreneur, too, and the most important thing I do is solve problems. When I gave my usual, canned response to Melissa, she rolled her eyes and interrupted: As founder of The Lionesque Group, she was a successful entrepreneur who’d achieved incredible things-all of which required hard work and commitment. “ Everyone wants to be a star, but no one wants to do the work,” I would snidely remark. After all, you can’t have something (a book) without doing the work necessary to create (write) it. I’d tell them sitting down to write a book is not an optional part of the process-in fact, it’s the very point of it. To be honest, I often answered in a disdainful tone, sneering at people who seemed to presume books were something they could just get without having to put in the time. Is there another way?”īecause I’d written four #1 New York Times Best Sellers, I was asked some version of that question on a nearly daily basis. “I want to author a book, but don’t have the time to write it and the normal publishing process is too frustrating. It all started with a simple question from Melissa Gonzalez.
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