Writing Books is an Odd Thing

Writing books is an odd thing. I’ve now just published my third, as regular readers of this blog will know, and my co-author Silvia Cambie and I have been busy over the summer doing all the related publicity for it - writing articles, giving interviews and presentations. Now that we’ve had the big launch party, I feel that I can relax a bit now and get some of my life back.

Because when you write a book, whether it’s fiction like my two novels or non-fiction like this latest book, the whole process of each book dominates your life for several years. In the case of International Communications Strategy, it took about 18 months to 2 years from the point that Silvia and I first talked about it to publication in July this year.

She had been commissioned by Kogan Page to write a book on international PR and communications and invited me to co-author the social media aspects. We needed to beat out a strong concept and the main themes of the book to present to our editor so that the publishing house new what the produce would be when they got the final manuscript. We evolved the book together over several months, discussing the hot topics in global corporate communications as well as developments in online communications and drafting several versions of the proposal. Annika Knight, our editor, then took it through Kogan Page’s rigourous internal processes - while we were not privvy to these discussions, from what I know of the publishing process, this would most likely have involved getting the Kogan Page team behind the book ie the sales team, the publicity team, the international team and ultimately the senior management, such as Helen Kogan herself.

When we heard back that we had the green light, the next step was to negotiate the contract and agree a timetable for delivery of the manuscript and a deadline for publication. All of which takes time and forward planning.

And finally - we were good to go.

In the meantime, of course, Silvia and I had been collecting case studies, following up on leads and doing background research. This process, for me, continued for a little while longer before I felt confident to sit down and actually start writing. I had never written non-fiction before and was feeling a bit nervous about it all - so my solution was to put off the writing and to carry on doing the research! As a fiction writer, you can make things up and change the scenario if you find that your story is not working out as you had hoped. Or you can fudge some facts if they prove difficult for your narrative thrust. You are after all the god of the universe you’ve created. But non-fiction! You have to back up everything you say with real evidence and hard facts. You have to reference and footnote everything. Your opinions and extrapolations must be derived from reality.

Eeks.

But once I finally sat down to write up my research, I found it was not as scary or difficult as I had feared. It was actually rather like writing a blog post. Where I normally would put links to items I was referencing, I just inserted a footnote. In some ways, writing non-fiction is easier than writing fiction. I could always cross-check the facts or double check something with a respondent I had interviewed. I could quote their very words. The case studies were real, existing in this universe so I didn’t have to make up a world that I needed to convince my readers to believe in. I was still telling stories - but it was the stories of real people in the real world.

And I really loved it!

And then came the tedious part. Once we finished the manuscript, we had to make it lovely and tidy to submit to Kogan Page. Silvia had used a different font and layout from me and had set out her footnotes differently. So we had to amend the formatting to make it all match and sort out a contents page and pagination. We submitted it via Box.net in true Web 2.0 fashion (rather than on a CD as requested in the Kogan Page Author Guidelines). Next came the editing process where an editor and copy-editor went through the text line by line making amendments, raising queries, checking for errors and inconsistencies - and engaging us as authors in the process. So we went through the manuscript yet again - and again, and again!

When the final text was signed off, there was still the blurb and author bios to do. There was the author questionnaire from the marketing and sales department so that they would have all the information they needed to hand to do their jobs of selling and marketing the book. We also had a long discussion about the book title - should it have the word “PR” in it? “Cross cultural”? “Strategy” or “Strategies”? and so on - and after several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing settled on the current title. Whew!

But no, it’s not done yet. In the lead up to the time of publication and in the few months afterwards, we’ve been talking and writing endlessly about the book and its key concepts as part of the publicity process. Don’t get me wrong - it’s very exciting and satisfying when other people (the media, bloggers, business people and professionals) are interested in our book and it makes all the hard work worthwhile. But for me, I finished writing the book last year so in my mind, it’s a completed project - so the whole publicity process feels strange. I know from speaking to a number of writers that many of us feel this same sense of disorientation.

So, now that our book launch went off with such a bang, I feel finally the sense of having achieved a wonderful thing together with Silvia. I guess I just needed the big party to celebrate and put a marker down, like planting a flag at the top of Everest or on the moon. Aaah, the long journey is done!

And I can now move onwards to my next project….

Photo: thanks to Marc Wright