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.

After copying each chapter over to Google Docs, I was able to finally include images. But this was a long process as LeanPub’s Google Docs plugin was rough around the edges to put it lightly.

How it works is that you have a folder and each file is its own chapter. The tool allows you to organize how the chapters appear in the book with a visual editor and then you hit ‘preview’ where the tool creates a PDF, ePub, and Mobi file. The problem was that this rendering process was rolling the dice every time with the outcomes being bizarrely mixed.

With each press of ‘preview’, the following issues may occur: chapters are out of order, images may not show up, images may be out of order, captions may be placed on the wrong images, captions may not be centered, and captions may not be correctly formatted. There were times where I would have to create previews up to 10 times to get a ‘clean’ copy.

With a lot of email to their support staff, most, but not all of these issues have now been resolved. The only remaining issue is that images frequently appear out of order, on average two exports will create a ‘clean’ copy that can be used. As frustrating as this is, I was able to make it eventually work to finish the book.

The convenience of LeanPub is that once you do have a clean copy, they make it easy to export it in multiple formats. With a click of a button, you get PDF, ePub, and Mobi files. And there are additional options like a ‘branding free’ version that doesn’t have LeanPub’s name on it and crucially, a ‘print ready’ PDF which you can use to send to printing services.

While writing this book, this was my first deep dive into using Google Docs. And it works fine. It’s not a perfect solution but I understand why smaller companies flock to this platform instead of Office 365. With Paul editing each chapter, I would then review it; we used Google’s version of ‘track changes’ which is not as good as what is included in Word.

The remaining logistics are quite easy, upload a file to Amazon for distribution on Kindle, use the ‘print ready PDF’ to send to printers, and then figure out where else you want to sell the book. And this is where ‘paying’ can make life easier.

Getting setup on multiple platforms takes time and by paying a distributor, they do all the heavy lifting. But it’s not cheap and they take a cut of each sale; I’d rather figure this out for myself to 1) be better educated on the process 2) not give away my hard work to a middleman. The primary reason that my book is not in the Microsoft store is that they only accept publications from third-party distributors, they won’t let me self publish.

One of the other big decisions was if I wanted to go to a larger publisher to get the book widely distributed in physical form (digital is easy) but candidly, the deals that were presented were awful. For a modest upfront payment for the rights to the book, I would then earn a royalty on each book sold but it could be as little as $1 per $15.00 book sold; it didn’t make sense. Also, getting my book, as a first time author, into large bookstores was unlikely and besides, when was the last time you went into a bookstore? The holy grail of book sales is to get your book into airports…and that wasn’t going to happen.

The other ‘value’ these companies pitch is helping with promotion at time of release. But this service was of little value to me as I already knew what needed to happen.

Thanks to more than a decade in the industry, I knew that if I could land a huge scoop and let other publications write about it and link back to the book, this would hopefully generate sales. With the Surface 2019 and 2020 roadmap, I had the ticket to coverage from The Verge, Gizmodo, Geekwire, VentureBeat, and many others covering the info and pushing a lot of traffic back to my domain, beneathasurface.com – on the day of release the domain saw around 25,000 organic page views.

Now that it is released, there is little else to do than to occasionally promote the book and talk about its contents as readers begin to unravel the secrets behind building the brand. This is by far my favorite part, talking about the book with readers is a lot more fun than trying to publish it.

My wife has already asked when I am writing my next book and while I won’t rule out doing it again, this past weekend was the first in about 8 months where I had not worked on it. There are many other stories to be told about Microsoft but for now, I’m going to sit back and relax a bit.