Things You Should Know About Writing a Book - Our Journey (Part 2)

By: Stan Washington

Date: February 21, 2015

With project plan now complete and our topic solid we were ready to go! Or were we? When I sat down to write my part, there were some things I hadn't done in a while that I needed to look up. After a while I soon realized that other topics that I would discuss needed some research. 

Be Prepared Before You Write. Preparation of your topic, character or situation is important to your readers. They expect you to be the expert and want fresh new material, not tired retreads of the same old topics. Part of the preparation process is knowing when to use quotes and when to let those suckers go! 

We had quotes from various authors all over the place in our books. We then realized each quote needed to be sited properly and a random website isn't enough. After siting yet another source I thought to myself "We should have done this before we started!" 

After getting ourselves somewhat prepared, we began writing. 

Meet on a regular basis. We started off on fire. We wrote and wrote and exchanged what we wrote and reviewed each other's work. Then an emergency came up and then another and then another, soon we were dreadfully behind and were on the verge of not completing the book. We had to do something different. We changed the date and time of our weekly meeting. This enabled us to have a little bit of flexibility in our week. Even if you are not writing a book with someone, meet with someone to discuss your progress. 

Copyright as you go. We had a situation where two of our computers had to be repaired. This was the worst timing, but the best lesson! It made me think about the intellectual property I had on my hard drive. This made me do a little research. I found that I could copyright unfinished documents until the document is complete. I just assumed it had to be a complete work!

We uploaded images, ideas and finished chapters on a regular basis.  

Here is the link to the copyright office. The process is relatively easy barring a few hurdles we ran into with terminology <Click for:> Copyright Page . This is the first of MANY accounts we set up.

More to come in part 3!

Our books have been featured in Small Business Trends!

Blessings to you!