I am delighted to announce the publication of my new book, Business Matters: A Freelancer's Guide to Business Success in Any Economy by XML Press. If you want to become a freelancer or an independent contractor or are new to being self-employed, why not learn from all the mistakes that I made in my 23 years in business?
I am actually an accidental author rather than an intentional author. I always wanted to publish a book, but for various reasons I let my brain talk me out of it (not the right time in my life; I need to keep my billing hours up; no one will want to read what I write).
I have no trouble writing short texts: I had written my “Business Matters” column in Intercom for nine years but felt the need to open this opportunity to others so I could move on to other opportunities myself. Somehow, I began to think about making those columns into a book. I intended to take all the articles in PDF form, slap a front and back cover on it, and call it “published.”
Right around this time, I was following Marcia Riefer Johnston, whose wonderful book Word Up!: How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build From Them) was born from her blog posts over the years. I told her my plan for quick-and-easy publishing, and she responded in an email:
I set out to bundle up my blog posts and call the compilation good. I planned to put out a little book that I could sell online and stuff into stockings for Christmas. Some of the feedback I did not want to hear, including the following from my wise, loving husband: “Honey, why don't you rethink your goals? You have more in you than that. What you have right now won't hit anything out of the park.” It took me a few days to let his words in. Boy, am I glad I did. Whether the resulting effort blasts anything over any walls remains to be seen, but I'm content in knowing that I've given it my best swing.
And then I found Richard Hamilton of XML Press, who agreed to publish the book but urged me to revise and update the columns and add several new chapters. Richard was wonderful to work with—a real prince—and I’m glad that he talked me into polishing and revising my columns—the end product is much better than my early, easy publishing plan. And it took only about 200 hours out of my life!
I’m sharing all of this with you because, of course, I want you to buy my book, but I also want you to know that you, too, could publish a book by writing just a blog post or chapter at a time. If I can do it, stumbling around as I did, you can too. And I’m already at work on polishing past blog posts into my next book, Marketing Bingo.
Business Matters is available at Amazon in print and Kindle versions and also on Barnes and Noble. Even better, save 50% until Friday, 13 December, on all XML Press ebooks through O'Reilly Media (DRM-free ePub, Kindle, and PDF) with discount code XMLPR5.
Let me know how you like the book!