Words Written Down Book Process

Now that I've actually finished writing and publishing the thing, it seems high time to note the process I went through with the book.

Writing a book has for quite a while has been of interest, but more in the "gee, wouldn't that be great to some day write a book about, I don't know... something" type of way. In October of last year, though, I came across a blog post from Brandon Sneed titled "Why You Should Write A Book" which got me thinking more of the idea and then what really triggered action on the book was reading in December the James Altucher book I Was Blind But Now I See.

There were a number of things that struck me from Altucher's book and in relation to my actually writing one, I noted his mention of having self-published using CreateSpace from Amazon. Related to this, I found interesting that that book didn't seem to have been closely edited (grammatical errors and odd layouts in places), but this didn't take away from a lot of interesting ideas and content from Altucher. Really, it was kind of inspiring to think of just getting words on the page and not letting a need for perfection stop or prevent the book process from beginning.

I began listing out ideas for the book by mid-January and then was further inspired to write the book after reading two pieces that trumpeted self-publishing. Also linked to in this blog post, they were Chris Dessi comes of age by Jeff Pearlman and Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card from Altucher yet again.

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Back to my own process of book writing... my initial idea had the book as a sort of autobiographical rambling around my writing background that would also include significant work from my blog. As I began working with the blog content (copied over into Word via Paste Special with formatted text) I realized that I was doing more of a book compilation project using writing already done rather than something completely new... and was totally fine with that. While getting further into the cleanup (for grammar, layout and to remove content no longer interesting to me) of 150,000 or so words, I fairly easily decided on the book sections and then part of the editing process was including each relevant post into that given section.

As this editing continued, I assumed/hoped that the CreateSpace process would go fairly smoothly once I was ready to submit early March... and was happy to find that it did. Steps involved taking my Word document, saving it as a PDF file and then uploading it, picking a cover design from the CreateSpace library and then waiting a day or two for CreateSpace to complete the acceptance and (cursory, I'm sure) review process so that I could order a proof. I received the paperback proof copy less than a week later and in reviewing it saw that I had basically the finished product book I wanted, but still a few modifications were needed. This mean going back to the original Word document and changing a few words, moving a few sections and going through what I found to be the cumbersome process of adding to each page a header that varied by section. I eventually was able to get the Word doc as desired and then save as a PDF for resubmission to CreateSpace, but it required quite a bit of looking online and then following steps in an exact fashion to get the section headings and page numbers as I wanted them.

Once the new PDF was submitted to CreateSpace and second proof ordered, I worked on figuring out how to have a PDF download available from the blog. I found mention of both Google Docs and Scribd for the purpose, but it seemed to me the interface just nicer via Scribd... which also included the ability to actually embed the book into a blog post.

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So, all this said... I took 3 1/2 years of blog posts, cleaned them up, cut out the ones of less interest now, organized the posts into sections, added introductory text and wound up with a book. Pretty happy with both the end result and that the process took only around two months. Not too bad.

Words Written Down Book

Yep, I wrote a book.



It can be found via both the Amazon & Scribd links below... with Scribd providing the ability to download a PDF version containing all the links referenced in the book (yea, I know the huge royalties don't come to me if the book simply downloaded).

Amazon Words Written Down page

Scribd Words Written Down page - and Scibd file also at bottom of this post

Intent of writing the book was to take much of the blog content I've written over the past few years, compile and edit it down a touch, group it into the categories noted below and... call it it a book (many more details on my blog post Words Written Down Book Process) and myself an author (with "self-published" in tiny little font).

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Below taken from the book front and back covers as well as content section of introduction...


Back cover / Overview

Words Written Down is a compilation book project that came out of the blog www.wordswrittendown.com and an appreciation of words put down on a page in a meaningful order.

The blog itself was begun some 3 ½ years ago and contains the following top of page description: Blog is all about words because... they matter, they influence, they entertain and when you take 'em and put them down on a page in a meaningful order, they acquire permanence. Contained here are a bunch of written words in the form of book reviews, magazine and web article links & summaries and other stuff I like to write about.

Links noted throughout the book can be found at the referenced blog post and criterion for inclusion of each revolves around the concept of Interesting. If writing was deemed interesting, it‘s noted along with my ruminations on the topic and view of what makes that particular set of words grouped together into a book or story be so good that they acquire permanence.

The goal of Words Written Down is to highlight and pay homage to this permanence of words. Why? Cause I like words.


Content areas

- Writing – includes content from others on writing, my ruminations on it and a soliloquy post on the topic of Social Media.

- Work – posts on both links to career related content and my writing around work.

- Sports – lots of extremely entertaining content linked to and written about in this category… love me some great sports writing. Also, it’s a bit of an obvious statement but excellent sports writing is about more than just sports. Pieces referenced came from Sports Illustrated more than any other source.

- Business – includes companies, profiles and lots of other business related content written on and linked to. Some of the specific areas of business covered (and noted in the blog tag cloud) include customer service, social media and cloud computing. Content referenced as interesting came from a variety of sources, with Businessweek and Fast Company fairly heavily represented.

- Everything else – perhaps could have been named better, but really is… everything else (life, current events, history, politics, money, profiles, etc) in terms of non-book content written on and linked to. A fair amount of the content noted came from both writing in and writers for Time or Esquire.

- Book reviews – Not all the books were great, but definitely quite a few excellent ones I’ve read and posted reviews on here.


Scribd book page - can either view book online or download as a PDF file (from both the Scribd site hyperlinked and below)

Words Written Down Book

The Teaching in Public Schools - from Time Magazine

Very interesting cover topic in the latest issue of Time Magazine.



There's actually two different stories featured... one about teaching in public schools and the upcoming movie Waiting for Superman and one about how to get better teachers in our school.

The lead piece is "What Makes a School Great" by Amanda Ripley, but the link to the story won't provide a lot since Time has made the decision to make much of their magazine content unavailable online. What I will say is it sounds a really compelling movie about an important topic... with the trailer below as evidence of that.



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Two other short pieces from this issue of Time about companies doing interesting things... Scribd that works in the mobile publishing space and Layar that provides augmented reality information for mobile phones.