What I Learned in Writing, Marketing, and Releasing my first book

This post originally appeared at petechristianbooks.com

Writing a book, getting it printed, and selling it is quite a process. This is what I learned in writing, marketing, and releasing my first book.

It is more than I ever imagined. It is in essence a job which must be worked as much as any other job. If not, it will take longer to complete and will not yield the results you expect.

To do things well, you need to have a process in place for developing and writing the book.

You should have a good idea what you are writing about and what you expect your readership to get out of it. Otherwise, if you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there. And it could be a long, circuitous one.

Once you know what you want to write about, you need to clarify the details and how it will be organized. I had many points I wanted to make about business successes and failures. There were stories for each area. I laid out what each one contained and then grouped them into one of three areas:

• Good — successes
• Bad — trouble
• Ugly — failures.

I then wrote my introduction for these sections and my wrap-up of the entire book. I followed the…