There’s a New Book on the Way!

Yes, a new book!

The working title is Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done. It’s a step-by-step approach to help creative workers turn their ideas into projects, weave multiple projects into their schedule, and start finishing the things that matter most, even as their lives and to-do lists are fuller than ever. Yes, it’s the same systemic, root-cause focused, and solution-rich work you’re used to seeing from me, but there’s quite a bit that you haven’t seen yet that pulls it all together nicely. (Tweet this.)

It’ll be published in Fall 2019 by Sounds True, who you might be familiar with because of their long history publishing multimedia projects with a heavily spiritual bent. Over the last few years, their catalog has expanded into the areas of conscious business, parenting and relationships, health and wellness, and lifestyle; they’ve grown from 15 titles in 2012 to 40+ in 2017.

What convinced me that Sounds True is the right publisher for this book was the holistic resonance I felt with my editor (Haven) and the marketing director (Kira) there. Since I’ve been a part of the book publishing rodeo with friends and clients since 2009, I know that the relationships with your editor and marketing team are much, much more important than most first-time authors account for; you want to want to write and talk to them, and I’ve already had to curb my enthusiasm to start sending ideas and pestering them about what we’re making and how we’re going to start sharing it. I also felt like they understood the broader vision of what I’m doing — it’s not just about getting stuff done, but about living lives that matter and making the most of the limited time you have on the planet. That they blew the bigger, more mainstream houses out of the water with their offer went a long way towards sealing the deal, too.

I spent last week running victory laps with Angela, David Fugate (my agent), the team, my close friends, and the book advisory team that got me here rather than just jumping into “get it done” mode. This is a big deal, on so many dimensions. “Sell the book” has been on my strategic project list for years now, and, as I mentioned in What’s Been Going on Behind the Scenes at PF, there have been a lot of other priority projects that have taken my focus pretty much since we moved to Portland, OR. But we kept building and growing the business, as well as incubating, testing, and honing the ideas in Start Finishing. While I’m prone to verbosity, it’s hard to describe how it felt to cross off that item and not carry it into yet another year.

I used to think that the hard part was the book proposal and selling process because that’s what was true for me then. I now know it’s but one of the hard parts. The next hard part is writing a book that matters, that’s worth reading, and, importantly, that’s worth sharing. You now know what I’ll be working on for the next few quarters. (No pressure or anything.)

If you want to follow along on my book-writing journey, you can sign up below. I’ll be sharing the table of contents, sneaky-peeky content, routines, and tech setup stuff along the way since seeing the process as I create and ship Start Finishing may also help you start finishing your work, too.

Let’s do this! :)

PRODUCTIVE FLOURISHING