Writing a book, what this journey has taught me?
If you have ever considered writing a blog or a book, you might want to take note of this article of mine, because I am sharing what I learned from writing both more than 50 blogposts and a book. This might be of benefit to you if you have a book or a few blogposts lurking inside.
It is important to just dive deep into the book. It will more or less write itself, even though some people will tell you that a book cannot write itself, however when you have something to share no matter what kind of subject you want to share something about, it may actually feel like it writes itself. I know it sounds strange, but that is what happened to me. I do not particularly like writing. Yet back in the day while I was studying the law, I did write more than 50 blogposts for my own blog! Bit of an achievement right there. I do not write this to toot my own horn, I am just stating a fact.
When I began writing my masters thesis, I learned that to be a perfectionist is not only a stumbling-block it can in fact instil a fear into you that makes you want to keep on keeping at it until it is perfect! The thing is perfect does not exist.
When I then began writing my book I just plunged right in. No safety net. Fortunately for me, the subject I write about is the wheel that then houses the smaller cogs that fit in there, so to speak.
When the book is written it is SO important to have someone edit it. I was lucky to have two very different people edit it. The first is my favourite professor from the University of Copenhagen who also ended up writing the foreword for the book. The second person is a lady who is my copywriter for my website. She edited the English language in there for me, because my mother tongue is Danish! It was written directly in English though. No translation needed for me.
It is also rather important that you have a program that is compatible with both you and the person editing’s computers! Fortunately my editor is doing her best to help me out. She used google docs and that has caused severe issues for me. At one point, actually more than one point, the formatting of the document went haywire. This lady though she managed to address the issue and to reformat it back, but the footnotes and the table of contents were both completely gone haywire.
We actually did a screen share session and have decided to move forward together with the edits she has sent me and all my footnotes & the table of contents and such. It was going to be HARD work and HOPEFULLY worth it.
Later I discovered that there were several sections of the book missing. How that happened only “God” will know. I noticed that there was a bit of a discrepancy in relation to the word counts in the two versions. As mentioned before the footnotes were also messed up rather badly, but fortunately I had kept a copy of the manuscript that my professor had edited for me, and so as I was going through the entire book I managed to find the missing sections add them into the book edited by my editor, and then tell her about it. Unfortunately I did not write all three sections into a message for her, I only put two in. I did manage to find the last section in question and have it edited. It is all now completely solved.
I have no idea what other ppl do when sending back and forth edits of their books. There was no issue btw me and my professor even though he uses a Microsoft based computer and I am a MacBook Pro user. Then when it came to my editor we had all sorts of issues. This is also the very first time she has edited a book that had footnotes in it and that must have been something of a learning curve for her.
I have also had help from a friend of mine who has helped me with the more technical side of things, such as getting the page number format to work how I wanted it to and hyperlinks look like plain text even though it is a hyperlink.
I have learned that to have not just people around me helping me, but people whom I can have faith in is imperative. People who are true to their promises and keep them. It has been a learning curve, however be that as it may I do not regret a single moment of it.
If you are wondering: how do I protect my work before I publish it feel free to with me here:
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