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Budgeting for Books

The internet can be wild and wonderful marketplace, but it can be wily and—let’s get real—wretched, especially for an emptor who is not expert at cavere. Evidently, scams flourish in a personless exchange.

Most prospective self-published authors know to exercise caution when vetting publishing, marketing, or promotional schemes. But most will (and should) spend relatively significant sums on hiring help to write, edit, design, format, convert, print, market, promote, and distribute a book.

According to a recent NetGalley Insights post, reporting on a joint NetGalley and Independent Book Publishers Association survey of author-publishers, “the majority of authors spent between $1,000 and $6,000 on their books”

Self-published authors may expect a front-end expense to actualize their ideas as books, but traditionally published authors can (and should) allocate funds for their books, too.

Traditionally published authors will receive an advance and/or royalties for their work, and these are more likely when an author has a finished (and excellent) manuscript in hand. Of course, completion takes time, and time, as discussed in a prior post, is discrete and therefore valuable.

While the advance (and/or royalties) can offset costs, it rarely compensates for time already spent, much less extras such as marketing and promotion beyond that offered by a traditional publishing house. That’s why traditional authors can benefit from building in a line item for marketing and promotion expenses, too.

Not all traditional authors will need or even want to spend money on a PR or other promotional plan, but quantifying the expense in a book budget can help make good on the time already invested.

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Time Is a Line Item: Budgeting for Books

pile of clocks

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Whether you subscribe to the manager’s lament that time is money or consider the matter more poetically, writing a book requires a budget—in terms of cash and commitment.

Most people know that writing a book takes a lot of time, but—ironically—foreknowledge doesn’t make reality less surprising. This is particularly true for authors who have been mulling over their ideas for years, have reached the now-or-never precipice of action, and are ready to work.

In the case of a book, the “work” is often slow and circuitous. It can take a long time to think of and test out ideas, outline and draft and revise and outline and draft and revise again, solicit readers and reviewers and editors, and efficiently integrate the best and most applicable feedback.

That’s why our nonfiction authors take nine months to two years to develop an idea into a book that can be pitched to and secured by a traditional publishing contract. On average, our nonfiction authors who begin with an idea but not a draft work sixteen months before they are ready to approach publishers.

For memoir writers, the timeline can be longer. This might be because memoir writers, although they frequently arrive with a draft in hand, must do strategic work to identify and understand their audience. Further, unlike argument-based nonfiction, the parameters of memoir writing are nowhere near fixed. An author must decide which of the almost infinite moments that make up a life will meaningfully move readers.

The point of this post is not a reality check, though, I swear! Whether or not authors keep their expectations realistic is a moot point: The difficulty of finding time to write and then actually writing makes reality almost impossible to avoid.

The point of the post is to develop your book with a plan that budgets not just money (which I’ll discuss next) but hours, days, weeks, maybe months, possibly years. When you enter a line item for time, you make a wise investment.

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More Tools for Tech: Communications Processes

Stack of PapersPartly because they’re team-based, partly because they’re
produced over an extended period of time, and partly because production is iterative, tech writing projects require rock-solid communications processes to ensure completion.

Communications processes refer to the ways that team members provide reviews, comments, revisions, approvals, and updates. Sounds (somewhat) simple, but a typical white paper often includes a client, a project lead, one or two writers, two or three subject-matter experts, and an SME liaison (sometimes affectionately called the “wrangler”). This 7- or 8-person team may start their project on the same page, but when a file is misnamed or misplaced, or an SME interview is missed or mis-scheduled, the project can easily run off track.

Wayward writing projects stretch scope, but they also stretch the patience of participants, which can be even more frustrating.

To help mitigate mishaps associated with files or individual schedules (because they can never be completely avoided), establish a sound communications process while setting the project scope. This means:

  • Making the project lead the communication lead
  • Building weekly team meetings into the project calendar
  • Creating a file-naming system to enable quick and easy referencing
  • Adhering to set schedules (and processes)

Next-level communications processes include ensuring team members cc the communication lead on all emails, putting Zoom or other conferencing info numbers and links in all project-specific emails, and sending out a weekly project calendar with relevant updates.

Implementing and practicing effective communications processes can be arduous, but by helping to navigate the pitfalls that throw projects off track, rock-solid communications ease the load and lead to quicker completion.

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Tech Writing: Tools of the Trade

If you’ve ever looked to produce a yearly report, a white paper, a series of tech sheets, or any other project that falls under the broad and rather complicated category of “tech writing,” you’ve probably felt overwhelmed and unsure about where to start. This post can help.

telescope

Approaching and efficiently delivering any tech writing project is a big job. However, it’s a job worth learning more about because it can encompass many different projects, can be enormously beneficial across a range of business, and can resonate with a variety of audiences.

In this post, I’ll discuss some of the best approaches to effective and efficient tech writing. In posts to follow, I’ll identify useful tools to aid execution and completion.

Starting and finishing tech writing projects depends on setting scope, communicating progress, soliciting feedback, and submitting or publishing the final work.

Setting a rigorous scope constitutes the first step, and it is key. When you set a scope for a tech writing project, you determine:

  • Marketing objectives
  • Topic and style
  • Content team
  • Calendar and schedule

Although tech writing projects are built to suit, with a prefigured topic and audience, it’s still important to explicitly identify every project’s topic and readership.

The identification is necessary because most tech writing projects are produced by a team, often with an outside writer. Ensuring that every team member knows what they’re writing about (and for whom) ensures consistency. It also helps project leads get as specific as possible about their marketing objectives: After all, a tech-based Q&A offered as a download on a business’s website reaches a different audience than the same content published through a trade organization.

Setting scope also requires identifying subject matter experts (SMEs) who can contribute objective and evidence-based material. Designating SMEs before a project begins—and often bringing them into the process of setting scope—can gain their timely and invested participation.

Finally, setting scope requires a calendar and schedule. There’s really no way around the fact that tech writing is an iterative process, and each iteration requires review. Identifying the team and gaining their early buy-in can help manage touchpoint fatigue (aka, “You need me to look at this again?”). Creating a granular schedule can ensure maximum efficiency. When SMEs and others can anticipate the commitment required from the jump, they can better rise to their role.

Setting scope is the most important step in completing tech writing projects. Sharing the scope ensures that objectives are met, that SMEs understand and anticipate their commitment, and that the project moves along as efficiently as possible.

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Is It A Book, or Is It A Powerpoint?

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Business owners and consultants frequently solicit our services for turning their content into a book. Niche business books can do excellent work in the world, but they often don’t because business-owning writers habitually mistake their primary audience.

A primary audience is the audience most likely to receive value from reading your book. These readers need your book because it has answers to their most-frequently-asked questions and offers them relevant and usable information.

Primary readers are not just inherently attracted to your book’s title; they also intuitively know where in the bookstore your book is likely to be shelved—usually because they read (or know the titles of) the other books with which your book is in conversation.

This means that your primary audience never has to work too hard to find and make use of your book’s value: Your book is written for—and to—them. You determine your book’s content, but your primary audience determines everything else, from the voice and style you adopt, to the types of evidence you use for support and persuasion.

Because the primary audience determines so much, correctly identifying it is crucial to your book’s success and should be completed in the foundational stages of strategizing your work.

This is not always easy to do. In fact, business owners often misidentify their primary audience as prospective rather than current clients. The difference may sound irrelevant, but the designation results in two very different books.

Books written for prospective clients have value, of course, but the value is usually narrowed to sales. Perhaps surprisingly, “capturing sales” is too-general a foundation: It may require comprehensive knowledge of your pitch, but it requires little to no knowledge of real readers. Without understanding them, writers will find it painfully difficult to meaningfully answer questions related to argument, voice, style, and even design and publication strategy. 

Mistaking prospective clients as a book’s primary audience will result in a bad book. But it’s a hard mistake to avoid because prospective clients are precisely the audience to whom business presentations are pitched.

In a follow-up post, I’ll discuss how to specifically identify your book’s primary audience so as to safeguard yourself from negative reactions, like, “This could’ve been a PowerPoint.” I’ll also show you how early identification of your audience makes the work of developing every other element of the book easier and more clear.

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Take Tiny Breaks

Most of us intuitively welcome sleep as one of the best and most important things in life. Its depth and duration redound not just in the quantity of our years but in the quality of those years, too. When National Geographic took an in-depth look at the benefits of sleep, it found that during sleep, spindles stimulate the cortex and help categorize new info according to the old info we’ve already acquired. And in episode two of its third season, Radio Lab showed how certain tasks can be better completed (or completed in the first place) after a good night’s—or even a good nap’s—sleep.

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Old research has frequently spoken to the brain benefits of this kind of “offline learning,” but new research argues that even tiny breaks are important to achieving new tasks. When we combine the ameliorating effects of resting and the incremental achievements gained through micro-ambition, we gain a better picture of “micro-offline gains”: the very small but very necessary work that enables skill acquisition.

Micro-offline gains suggest that skill acquisition depends not (or not just) on the active effort to learn a new skill or to complete a task but in the periods of rest we offer our brain to consolidate the information it’s working so hard to acquire. Ultimately, when we tax our brains with learning a new skill or staying focused on a big, integrated project, we accomplish more when we offer our brain more, very short, breaks.

Even when they’re just seconds long, these tiny breaks can aid our completion of the task at hand (or at least can aid our accomplishment in the steepest part of the learning curve). Unfortunately, the breaks aren’t the kind that include Instagram or other semi-conscious scrolling; rather, they’re micro-moments that mimic the consolidating effects of sleep.

Summer is a time for downshifting. Although I’ve already contributed to this cause by advocating for aiming lower, I’m now also arguing for interrupting your project with more guiltfree breaktime. This is especially true for my clients who struggle to make summer the most productive season of writing. It turns out that scheduling many opportunities for micro-offline gains can help with making connections and building arguments. The season requires it, and your brain will thank you by becoming smarter, faster.

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Friendly Accountability

call now!

In my work with book development, authors who finish their books often differ from authors who don’t finish in just one respect: Those who don’t finish don’t feel accountable—for a variety of (sometimes complex) reasons–to completion.

Creating flow charts, using editorial calendars, adhering to timelines, tracking time, soliciting beta reader feedback: These tools help foster a willingness to take responsibility for a project. Appropriately deployed—and routinely used—they can encourage someone to feel more accountable for a project than they might otherwise feel inclined to do.

I rely on the tricky quality of these types of tools to produce posts. My editorial calendar works as an impassive disciplinarian, coldly reminding me that I’ve set out to but have yet to complete a task.

Coaches and others know that there are all kinds of ways to foster accountability. One of the simplest is to articulate your goal. Go further by writing it down. Go all the way by writing it down and regularly reporting your progress to a friend.

The efficacy of this method was tested in 2014 by Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University, who wanted to test the premise of the never-conducted-though-frequently-cited 1953 “Yale Study of Goals.” The latter was used (spuriously, it turned out) as evidence that people who wrote down their goals had a much higher chance of reaching them.

When Matthews created her study, she found that among her 267 participants, 76 percent of those who had been instructed to write down their goal and send their weekly progress to a friend accomplished their goal or felt they were “at least halfway there.”

Matthews’s sample size may be too small to draw big conclusions, but I will add my anecdotal evidence in support: Authors whose work requires routine progress reports almost always progress. Those who do not make use of progress reports may progress, but who can tell? They don’t report.

Whether you manage teams or just yourself, research suggests that there are some very basic ways to foster the accountability that can lead to success. Write it down and phone a friend to get at least halfway there.

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Buy Independent

A map of twin cities bookstores by illustrator Kevin Cannon

A map of twin cities bookstores by illustrator Kevin Cannon

The weekend is coming! The weekend is coming! And while that news alone is a source of joy and wonder, it’s doubly so this weekend because Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day!

Where will you visit and what will you buy? If you’re in the Minneapolis area, you might try The Wild Rumpus for a belated copy of The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, or maybe the Red Balloon in anticipation of the newest Wings of Fire? How about Birchbark for Killers of the Flower Moon, or Once Upon a Crime for the creepy classic, Rebecca? Or maybe you’ll head to Magers and Quinn for a newer classic, The Great Believers?

Or maybe you’re working, or digging in the (muddy [snowy?]) dirt, or riding the bleachers at a child’s doubleheader. If you can’t get out and about in your neighborhood, there’s always the internet’s busy streets. Specifically, you might try Belt Publishing for the Minneapolis-superfan’s Under Purple Skies.

Buying independent is an excellent way to make manifest your belief in the restorative value of books and the invigorating power of independent bookstores.

It’s true that books are expensive and can be borrowed—for free—from the library (libraries!). But good books are forever: You read them once or twice or more. You read them aloud to those you love. You lend them to those you trust. You gush over them with acquaintances and hate on them with strangers. You revisit the phrases, the characters, the scenes, the stories—and the images and feelings they invoke—over the years of your life. And good books make those years so much better.

And bad books? They’re the worst. But even bad books deserve a second life in more appreciative hands. So sell back A Little Life and The Flamethrowers to the used bookstore, and try to remember that the books we hate also give us something to think over and question, and that’s a lot.

Find your Minnesota-specific guide to Independent Bookstore Day at Rain Taxi or Twin Cities Geek. And reserve Saturday for spending money on the booksellers, bookstores, book publishers, book printers, and, of course, the authors that entertain, educate, delight, and, sometimes, astound us.

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Working Together

It’s hard to find the time for in-depth project review. It’s harder to adopt the can-do attitude necessary for efficiently editing a project. But it’s hardest of all to realize that in the time you’ve taken to review and edit, your collaborator has changed your working version of a project draft.

Collaboration is a fact of life. Like all worthwhile (group) work, it requires time, energy, and the wherewithal to relocate your personal sense of value away from effort and onto the project itself.

Whether it’s a team of two cowriting a book or a team of eight running a nonprofit, effective project collaboration requires open communication, adherence to work flow, and the right tools for the work.

Zoho and Github, which are but a few comprehensive integrative solutions for small businesses, are fine. But they’re not necessary for good project-specific collaboration. Google Docs and Dropbox Paper speak to this purpose, but not as persuasively as Microsoft 365.

Google Docs is free, accessible, and has many text-based and formatting features. But it requires good, stable internet access, and although it offers excellent note-taking features, it can be frustrating to use when working with others on high-stakes docs.

Dropbox Paper is also free and accessible, with a simple modern interface and superior media integration (making it a great option for collaborative design). But its simplicity means it lacks all but the most basic text and formatting features.

Docs and Paper include tools for collaboration (edits, suggestions, comments, chat), but these tools are so integral to the apps that they sometimes cause new problems. Google Docs, in particular, can cause maddening frustrations when various contributors actively edit and comment at the same time.

To solve some of these problems, consider Microsoft 365. It’s a hypercapable version of Word that offers the same collaborative tools as Docs and Paper, including tools for real-time collaboration (“coauthoring” in Word terminology), but as a supportive feature, not a main function.

Tools for efficient collaboration are meant to streamline group work and laborious back-and-forth exchanges. Sometimes, though, collaboration is overvalued. When it’s too easy to invite in contributors, too necessary to chat about inconsequential details, and too typical to duplicate work, it’s time to try something else. In these cases, consider using an app that fosters (and rewards) a clear and clearly communicated work flow, builds in the space for engaged work, and creates the distance in which everyone can take a project-first approach.

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Back to Basics: Calendars and Timelines

​Although the push for efficient productivity seems to be waning, the desire to discover a new app, method, or model to spur a project to completion will always wax. We’ve read lots of books and implemented lots of models, and—lucky for you!—we’ve discovered the secret.

The best way to finish a project is also the simplest: First, define your audience, your message, and your method. Then, create a shared calendar or timeline. Third, stick to it.

Project completion is often obstructed by too many people knowing too little. This is a variation on the old too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen trope. Typically, the issue is not that there are too many bodies working over one stove, it’s that few of these bodies can be considered “cooks,” and none of them are working with a recipe.

Do better by designating yourself the chef and creating a recipe that anyone can follow. In terms of a project, this means straightforwardly defining—but then recording and sharing—your specific audience, your message to them, and the most efficient, most welcome form of delivery.

For a nonprofit communications project, this might mean that after you determine a fundraising goal, you identify your supporters most likely to contribute to that goal, and then develop a social media-based fundraising campaign and marketing collateral that will reach and reward them. For a coauthored book project, this might mean that after you determine a self-help-book goal, you determine readers most likely to be moved by your message, and then develop an organization scheme that will reach and resonate with them.

If you want to finish a project with a minimum of detours, it’s necessary to do this relatively low-effort work. If also necessary to create—and to record and share—a calendar or timeline.

We’ve frequently discussed calendars in terms of editorial calendars—and those are great. However, our nonprofit and book-making clients are often overwhelmed by the inputs required by the editorial-calendar format. For these clients—and for you—a calendar can be as simple as an auto-formatted Google Sheet that breaks down the calendar you’re already using in a more granular, more accountability-fostering way.

Ultimately, project completion requires getting back to basics: Defining and sharing your audience, your message, and your method ensures everyone is on the same page. Putting together a project calendar will provoke participation, and sticking to it promises completion.

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