I’ve finally made my mind up on what I want my first book to be. To be honest, I hadn’t even considered this particular topic because it’s so native to me. The tentative title for the book is “Fix The Plane While You’re Flying It: How To Handle Your Business After You’re In It.”
I’ve been using these frameworks, tools, and tips in my writing, speaking, and advising for years now, and, if you’ve heard me talk about productivity and business operations, you’ve probably heard me say something along the lines of “we have to fix the plane while we’re flying it.”
Aside: you know how I always tell you to start with the obvious and simple choices before you overcomplicate things? I share that bit of medicine because I fall into that same hole far too often. We’re all a work in progress.
This book will be written for you. Not the big corporations or medium enterprises with an entire workforce and scads of money to spend on operational efficiency programs. You, as in that entrepreneur or business-owner who’s trying to keep that smaller fire burning without constantly worrying that it’s going to go out without your constant care and tending.
I already have 16 chapters planned or partially written, ranging from pricing to how to take care of your customers to how to determine what’s making you money and what’s not. As books go, there’ll be some give and take, but it’ll be like most of my work in the sense that it’ll be accessible, thorough, and actionable. I might even work on making it entertaining, too. :p
I don’t have a book deal for this yet and am considering my options. If you know of a publisher who might be interested, please do send them my way.
Oh, and this is my first book. I have one other that I’m incubating but it’s a Big Idea book that’ll need some time to get right. I have a hunch of an idea that I’m still coaxing, although you’ll see that hunch in a post in the next few weeks.
Yes, I’m excited. It’s going to feel good to bring all of these ideas together in a more cohesive way.
I’d like to thank Janet Goldstein for helping me developing a doable book sequence and for her feedback on positioning. Knowing what not to do is sometimes the best knowledge you can have.
NICE. Looking forward to hearing more about this one!
Congrats, Charlie! I absolutely love the title. Hoping you’ll share with us the joys and lessons of birthing your first book…
Hooray for Fixing the Plane While You’re Flying It. Eager to watch and hear how this one gets born. Go Charlie!
Can’t wait to see how this evolves! I’ll be first in line to read it. 🙂
Yeah!!!
Seems like a very wordy long title, you sure you don’t wanna shorten it?
SO! EXCITED! 😀
Why am I not surprised, Charlie?
I had gazed into my crystal ball a long time ago, said the magic words, and lo and behold–you have a book now.
This gifted fortune-teller always knew this would happen, and now yours truly also predicts you will have a book deal.
However, there are going to be pinpricks along the road to being published, so be prepared. Patience is a virtue but go for it. Success will be yours, that’s for sure.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, Charlie’s a good writer, after all. Cheers to your life.
Awesome stuff, Charlie! Good luck with the writing, and getting it out to the world. Looking forward to reading it already 😀
Sounds like a terrific idea for a book Charlie. Please let me if I can help you by being an early proofreader and then later a promoter for it.
Alex
A great title, a simple but brilliant concept and one that will appeal to so so so many of us, great job Charlie – and oh, you WILL get a book deal. Just write it for now. Best of luck!
Congratulations Charlie. Sure to be a huge success. I know a bunch of people who need your book already. Cheers.
Rock on, O Sagacious One! Excellent news, glad to see it’s finally out here in public and manifesting even as we type.
But I must be contrapuntal. I’ve published both big publisher and small and recommend *small* publisher (they work harder for you) or self-published. Self-publishing is not the professional pariah it used to be. In fact, with sites like Amazon’s CreateSpace and Lulu.com, it’s become downright de rigeur.
My next book will be self-published, and there are plenty of reasons why. Here’s some mind shifts on the subject, hope they help:
1. Traditional publishing is dying. Given this, a traditional publisher nowadays has no money or department to publicize your book beyond getting it an ISBN (which you can easily do yourself ), getting it into the major bookstores (again, you can do this yourself) and printing up a one-page full color ad for your book such as you see available at bookstores. I was required by my publisher to supply all the copy for these items myself, or they wouldn’t play. My 14 point marketing plan literally sold Everyday Bliss For Busy Women to New Harbinger.
I was asked not only to come up with my own marketing plan but also my own text for the one-sheet. And the publisher does….what for you exactly? All my friends who have written books in the last 5 years with major publishers agree – not much. If I’m going to supply the ad & marketing copy plus pictures of the product…I might as well do it all myself.
And honestly, the mojo a traditional publisher has in the current marketplace is a few points under what you can do for yourself. You’ll experience a whole lot less B.S. as a self-publisher, and keep control of your brand and IP into the bargain.
2. You don’t sell books to make money, you create them to inform the public and act as marketing pieces for your work. But if you self-publish, you keep every cent of the profit. It’s mouse nuts compared to the rest of your product line, but it’s money in the bank and you can sell the rights anywhere you want without being restricted as with traditional contracts. Just sayin’
3. Buy stock in Rolaids for your edit process if you go with a traditional publisher. Roughly half of the two year process to get Everyday Bliss For Busy Women on the shelf was involved in cutthroat negotiations with editors addicted to the thrill of battle with an author, and who wanted to remove crucial portions of text, such as the middle part of a process.
My average editing run talk with them went like this: “It’s a seven step process. What do you mean I can keep steps 1 – 3 and Step 7, but you think 4, 5 and 6 don’t need to be there because we’re running up against space restrictions? Are you a therapist? Did you come up with this technique? Please.”
Save yourself this hassle. You know your stuff is good, just as it is. Get a friendly editor, one you hire, to go over the copy BEFORE you turn it in to any publisher, or before you publish yourself. You can prime that person with your agenda, and reject any untoward cuts. I urge you to listen to their advice though, it could save you some first-timer mishaps.
4. Boy oh boy do I wish I had my manuscript now, because as you know there was a redaction I would like to have made just after it was published and new material came to light. And a cool new technique, my ETHOS Method, that I would have loved to have replaced that material with.
Had I self-published, I could have done this easy as uploading a pdf. Any time you want to update a technique, or the whole book for a new year, as your planners would require, you’re just a pdf upload away.
If you choose to self-publish.
5) Some of the best in business books lately have been self-published. I know we’re not all Seth Godin, but you gotta look at why he’s now self-publishing. It’s easy to get your book in Amazon, it’s even easy to get it into Borders and Barnes & Noble self-published. You just have to know how. For which there are ample coaches out there who’ve been through the process to attend you. 😉
Ok, I’ll get down off my soapbox, and I hope this has been informative and saves you or someone else the waste of time and upset traditional publishing can be on an author.
Go Charlie! Either way you choose will rock the house down. 😉
My friend, I knew that it was only a matter of time. So glad to hear that it’s coming together for you. Look forward to catching up with you next month!
Awesome, Charlie! I can’t wait to read it. 🙂
You’re truly an amazing writer, so I wish nothing less than success with your new book. Publishing your very first book can definitely be a huge undertaking (I’m still working on my first eBook!), but I have no doubt in my mind that it will be useful to all entrepreneurs worldwide.
I also plan to buy myself a copy. 😉
Best of luck!
Christina
I really think you should up and finish this now 🙂 so I can buy it!
I’m in the deciding stages of my first book too. But that’s the most difficult part for me, always. Once I’m clear, I get moving very easily and I’ll finish it in weeks (hopefully i’m not jinxing myself by saying this).
Also, when you figure out all the publishing what -nots, please put an ebook together to sell too so I don’t have to wonder about all that stuff 🙂