notes on writing a book
Because process is everything
Dear Friend,
In this letter, I’m pretending I did a big book tour and you all asked me a bunch of questions and these are the ones that happened the most.
Book orders for print copies of NAME YOUR WORK are open until August 31st!
How did you know it was a book?
“The Ground Truth is a different project. And it’s in the way of your other book. How quickly can you write it and get it out of the way?”
It was my second or third meeting with Amanda Lewis, a developmental editor I’d hired to help me formulate A Very Different Project I wanted to create in response to much reading and ruminating on language in an abstract, thinky way.
But when we met, she seemed so confused about what the outline was going to be. What was the book for? What was its structure?
I was so annoyed. I felt like she was trying to pin down a flowy text that wasn’t ready to be pinned down.
Alas, she was provoking me into clarity I very much needed.
I thought I had said what needed to be said in some blog posts and newsletters. I gathered it up and put it in a doc to demonstrate the book I wasn’t going to write.
Well, maybe it would be an appendix to the Other Book.
But instead of resolving her questions, the materials I gave her provoked more. She wouldn't let it go! “How rude!” To be read like Bluey, ifykyk). She wanted to know the details and nuances of the work. We kept wandering off from the happy brain sparklers of bell hooks and rebecca solnit!
Even worse, her questions were ones I had been asked a lot over the years, especially in the work I did with clients. It made sense that I needed to write it all down, once and for all. Looking back, I think that’s especially true because it establishes my relationship with language.
At the time though? I agreed it wasn’t an appendix. It was something else, maybe a 50 page ebook (lol). And I was tired of explaining it.
“How long would it take you to write this?” Amanda asked.
I looked at her through that zoom screen and said “6 weeks. It’s all in my head. I can see it. Just have to write it.”
And now I was the one coming off completely audacious.
Sweet Amanda held her tongue and her facial expressions and didn’t let on how ridiculous I sounded.
But also. I did it. I drafted that damn thing in six weeks because I wanted it out of the way.
I wanted to finally put these ideas I’ve had to explain over and over again into one place that I could point to and say “Go read that.” I wanted to explain once and for all how this work was different from other people’s ideas. I wanted to make it so awkward when my work was plagiarized. I wanted it to be clear when my work influenced others.
And I wanted to wrap up this era. I wanted to conclude this season of thinking with something to show for it. Back in 2021 when I was pregnant with Pippin, Robbie described my time in business as a Phd in Myself. Now, I felt ready to write the dissertation and put this useful, acquired knowledge into the world without me. To start asking different questions.
Though of course the irony is that deciding to write this text first meant that I’ve said “yes” to spending more time talking about these ideas. It’s a dangerous thing writing a book. It can feel like a trap for growth and development. A crystallization of one season when life is never just one thing.
What did your writing time look like?
The initial drafting process was focused and intense.
We had childcare Mondays and Wednesdays 8am-5pm. A nanny came to our home. I wrote in focused chunks those days.
I also had 10am-2pm on Saturdays, a timeframe that Robbie committed to keeping Pippin away from me.
The timeframe given also included:
starting meditation
Eating
Bathroom
Breastfeeding every 2-3hrs which included supporting Pippin going to sleep. This took anywhere from 20 minutes to 45 minutes.
So not much time at all.
It is also important to say that breastfeeding can cause various hormonal reactions. One for me was that my bones literally hurt when I heard Pippin cry. And I could hear her cry through noise canceling headphones with music playing. It made it very difficult to not respond when she expressed any discomfort or distress with the nanny.
I had not found a rhythm with pumping (oversupply) and so never had back up milk to give her by bottle. We also had just gotten some solid diagnosis on food allergies and had not yet found a formula that wouldn’t upset her tummy and tasted good to her—for real though, the introduction of formula caused a 10 day constipation saga that included multiple trips to the doctor and phone calls each day.
I typically can only produce new text in two hour writing sessions. I can edit for longer.
What did it feel like to write?
I felt so good writing the first draft. I felt so focused each day when I sat down. I’d started a meditation course run by Kerri Twigg. I haven’t kept up with it but that first month really helped me show up when it was time to show up. There’s a forced focus that came with parenthood. I knew I had very little time and that I had to make the most of what was there. Meditation prepared me to be in peak state when I sat down, especially “feel flow” which took me into what I missed most from triyoga training days.
I listened most often to Taylor Swift or the soundtrack from the Witcher. Something about it just worked for me. I didn’t even hear it after a while.
You know how some writers have a thing that gets them into gear? My friend Rebecca has a cardigan that is her Writer Cardigan. Others have a candle they light. I’ve tried different things on purpose but the thing that happened on accident is the one that worked the best: apple headphones in my ears. Not airpods, the wired ones. I don’t even need music playing. Just that feeling gets me into work mode like nothing else. I can be anywhere and the feeling in my ear takes me away from the external world and into the process.
How long did it take to write?
Six weeks. Five years. Both are true.
I started early explorations in September 2022. I started drafting in earnest October 2022. I finished the first draft on November 9, 2023, the necessary deadline before my brother’s wedding.
But I also went through the notes app on my computer and phone recently. Deleted all those old grocery lists and to do lists and “back of napkin” budget calculations. What I found as I did that was early versions of the book. I found paragraph after paragraph of trial and error ways of talking about these ideas. I found versions of sentences I later wrote again as I drafted the book. I found quotations.
Every time I wrote a blog post or an email newsletter or an instagram post, I was really in the drafting process for the book. Every time I gave a workshop or put together a talk, I was working on the book. Every time I joined a workshop or course or community and practiced talking about my ideas, I was writing the book. The vocabulary, the sentences, the structure itself is littered in little fragments all over my business life.
So writing it down seemed more like science writing than creative writing. The research was done, the data analyzed, the results established. It was there and ready to be written. I just had to get it down.
What was the revision process like?
The book grew rather than got smaller. I swore this was going to be an appendix in a different book. A free pdf on my website. A blog post. And I’d tried to write that multiple times. But what was clear here is that I had more to say each time I came back to the text. I knew more about the process than I even realized. Had more to say about how language worked. I even got through the early readers' feedback and realized I’d neglected to include a key piece of the puzzle.
When I’m doing creative writing like an essay, it tends to go long and then be cut back into sharp, clear language. But here, the documentation process just took more than I anticipated. Very little of the heft was lost in the revision process. Rather, things were added to round out the usefulness of the text.
After a first solid revision on my own in response to Amanda’s first feedback, I sought feedback from early readers.
My two most invested early readers were Taylor Harrington and Chris Danilo. They have never met in person but do hold some wild things in common that also made them my dream early readers:
Chris was the first person to tell me about Seth Godin. Taylor Harrington worked for Seth Godin.
I met Chris at New Leaf Initiative, a coworking space. I met Taylor at New Leaf Initiative as well.
They both went to Penn State.
They are both entrepreneurial in spirit and savvy about marketing and community building.
Neither had worked with me 1-1 on their Ground Truths. It was important to me that my deepest readers had not hired me as a consultant. I wanted the book to exist as a useful text for people who weren’t already familiar with how the process worked with me.
They are both invested in my success in a way that makes no sense.
They got deep in the text and asked a million questions and pointed out big gaps. They had this beautiful ability to tell me what was singing and perfect and blowing their minds–and where it was falling flat or confusing or conflicted with other ideas they’d believed or needed more nuance.
One particularly lovely evening was when they were in the google doc at the same time adding comments and talking to each other in real time as they worked through it all.
This book wouldn’t be the same without them. It was their encouragement, challenges, and questions that shaped it all into its final form. I remembered more of what I knew about the Ground Truth because of their insight.
You’re self publishing. How does that work?
Self-publishing can be as simple as putting a pdf on Amazon. Or as complicated as hiring a printer, cover the cost of the first print run, and providing those books to a warehouse for distribution.
I’m somewhere between these two poles.
At first, I was just going to sell it as a pdf on my website. But it became clear pretty quickly that people wanted the physical book. And that if it was going to be used in classrooms, it needed to be available through a traditional retailer option.
The other option is print-on-demand (POD). This is where a book file is submitted to a print-on-demand business and when that business receives an order, it prints the book. The cost for printing is therefore much higher per item than when, say, Penguin prints a book in the thousands to supply to bookstores. But the cost of that printing is handed to the person buying the book–and any remaining “profit” goes directly to the writer, not the publisher or the printer.
But because there is no upfront cash investment, print-on-demand services offer no customer service at all. There is no phone number to call. Emails get form responses. I had a massive problem getting the cover to align correctly with no option to discuss with someone on the inside. This problem went on for months and the only guidance they gave me was “use our template”. DUDE, I’M USING YOUR TEMPLATE. YOUR TEMPLATE IS THE PROBLEM.
And yet, without a significant set of cash upfront, it’s impossible to go another route.
This is why crowdsourced funding is so great. Ex. this wildly successful kickstarter. But that would take a level of marketing I’m not able to do in one big push. And I’m definitely even less interested in fulfilling orders myself or supplying a run to a warehouse that would supply it to bookstores/libraries etc.
A lesser experience for myself and a mediocre book product would have to do.
These POD businesses also supply the book to the major distributors of which there are two: Amazon and Ingram. If you buy a book from a local bookstore or get a book from your library, they likely acquired that book from Ingram who provides extensive catalogues for libraries and bookstores to choose from. Bookshop.org also uses their warehouse inventory. Amazon does its own thing with its own warehouses.
On the back end of a POD process, the author chooses which of these distribution routes they want their book to go. I am choosing to not put the book on amazon. I’m a small fish and unlikely to make most of my sales via a finicky algorithm. Amazon cares not-at-all for writers and has done nothing to crack down on book pirating.
I chose to make the book available through Ingram and then market it myself to bookstores and libraries.
Which… well you can read all about that saga in a letter I sent a few weeks ago.
In summary: I gave up on PrintOnDemand. I thought for a while I’d never have the strength of energy to release it beyond an e-book.
But two years later, I’m here, releasing a very different book container than what I had in 2023. A new name. A new cover. No print on demand, just a micro print from a lovely press in Philadelphia.
How’d you design the book if you self-published it?
Self publishing means you have to get design files for both the interior and the exterior. Some people go to a discount supplier like fiver. Others make it by hand in canva. I am tragically too aesthetically bougie about book covers to do that.
Entre Lisa Lotito—except she can’t exactly enter if she’s been designing my branding since 2018.
Lisa Lotito was the obvious design choice. I wanted to put a container around my IP. So the design coming from the same source made sense.
laid out the book interior.Originally, I was using a print-on-demand service that only offered shiny covers. This was universally disliked so I switched providers because the matte finish provided a much better experience to the people who wanted physical books.
The size (5x8, a bit smaller than many first releases) ended up being an important choice. I wanted the book to feel friendly and accessible. I didn’t want it to feel like a hardback tome or workbook. I imagined it tucked into a bag for the metro, easy to pull out and read and put away. A companion that you’d want to carry with you places.
Same reasoning for not releasing a hardback. No need to. It’s an ego situation with publishers to release a hardback first and delay a release of paperbacks. Plus I love a good floppy paperback and how companionable it feels.
Wait. You changed the book’s name?
Yep.
Original title:
THE GROUND TRUTH PROCESS: Name Your Work to Lead with Intention and Conviction
Which fit my goals at the time. The first impulse was to do this work to draw a line around my intellectual property and say “This is mine. I did this work.”
But as time passed, and delays turned to years, my goal changed.
Lisa Lotito dragged this out of me. How I was shifting career identities to BEING A WRITER rather than BEING A STRATEGIST (though I still do some of that). And the business was going to evolve/go away in response to that.
The thread from the past to the future?
Naming.
It is right there in my personal Ground Truth:
Naming so we can be less alone in life’s beauty and meaning.
So. If this book were to set up both my new present and my future, it needed to emphasize the Naming thread. Any work I make in the future will have context even when I switch genres.
Plus it’s just a better name. “Stickier” as we say in the marketing world.
NAME YOUR WORK: Language to Lead with Intention and Conviction
OMG what does it feel like to have written a BOOK?!
I’ve had two life goals: being a parent and writing a book. Now I’ve done both.
And in both, the feeling was super weird, somewhat disassociative. What was this elegant little book in my hand? Where did those lovely little page numbers come from?
It didn’t feel like I wrote a book. In my head, I’d written a google document. A long google doc to be sure, but still a long computer file rather than something with pages and a spine.
I’ve also done a number of other projects that had release days that were totally anticlimactic. This felt the same! Like turning in an essay for school and being done with the semester. Worth a good party but not registering much past that.
Though, it is also nothing like submitting a final essay for school because more than one person reads it! It’s been wild to get a few notes from people who enjoyed reading it. Because I’ve fought so long with the printing process, I’d forgotten that people would actually read it! And say things about it!
Hope you’ll grab a copy while it’s still around.
Love,
Dana