How to Write a Book – What I Learned and The Tools Used to Write Beneath a Surface (premium)

With Beneath a Surface now (mostly) behind me, one thing I was asked during the process of writing the book was to write up how I wrote the book. Seeing as I'm more of a 'define your own path' type of person, rather than pay someone to do all the hard work for me, here's how the book was created.

Shameless plug, if you haven't read it yet, you can find it in paperback, Kindle, DRM-Free ePub, and yes, an audiobook should hopefully be available next month.

It was sometime in the early spring that I decided I would write the story of Surface. With a blind eye to the ignorance involved with the overhead of actually writing the book, I began jotting down notes and ideas of how I wanted to align the content.

For this, I used OneNote. This is where I began gathering all the stories and to roughly organize them, I created high-level topics. For years, I had taken diligent notes at every Surface event I had attended and by digging back into those documents, I had the foundation for the book.

One of the first challenges I had to overcome was what was the proper order for organizing the story. It may sound easy, just use chronological, but that presented a number of hurdles. For the 'first' announcements of each type of device, this works, but for a second, third, and so on, this wasn't as easy; trying to write a thousand or more words about the Surface Laptop 2 or Surface Studio 2 would have added unnecessary fluff to the book.

What I ended up doing was grouping many of the second generation devices around a common topic, USB-C. Even though this did break some of the chronological order of how the devices were released, I think this approach worked out well in the end.

The hardest part of writing the book was not actually writing, but organization. With nearly two dozen interviews, I had to parse each conversation into buckets of products. Bringing all this content together to where I could see it in a single view to write a chapter is what took the most amount of time; OneNote was used for this aggregation.

I initially started writing my book in OneNote as well but quickly stopped. One of the primary reasons is that the creation of a book is a very delicate process. I needed to use a tool designed for this and started working with LeanPub about two chapters into writing the story.

I have a love/hate relationship with LeanPub. The tools worked as I needed them too but it took a lot of fighting to get to the end result.

When I set up my account on LeanPub, they offered several ways of writing including in the browser, DropBox, and in beta, Google Docs. I started writing the book in the browser and actually completed the first draft, all 26 chapters of the book, purely in the browser with the occasional export to PDF for backup.

The first problem I had was that the browser writing tool doesn't allow you to include images in your book. After emailing LeanPub about how I should proceed, they recommended using Google Docs.
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