Behind the Scenes of Publishing Thriving Talent

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:01]:

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last while or it’s your first time to listen to the Happier at Work podcast, you’ll know that this week is publication week of the Thriving Talent book. I’m so excited to put it out into the world. Also, as you can imagine, slightly nervous about how it’s going to be received, although the feedback up to now has been incredible. I’m so grateful for the early readers who took time and left me an endorsement or a review of on the Book. So this episode specifically is going to answer some of the questions that I’ve had over the last few months about the publishing process specifically. So a little kind of behind the curtain, behind the scene. Because it’s not, it’s not really a transparent industry like people. Unless you you’re doing it, you don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes.

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:45]:

So I’m hoping to, you know, if you’re curious like me, if you’re a little bit nosy about what goes on, then this episode will help you to understand a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes. Slight side note, someone recommended the program the series Younger to me a few months ago, so I’m kind of binging on that. And that that shows a little bit about the behind the scenes from a publishing house perspective. So it’s interesting to see that side of things as well. Now, I suppose, putting this into context, I have wanted to write a book since I was very young and I thought that book was going to be a novel. Now it turns out it’s a business book. My first book is a business book. Whether I’ll ever get to the novel, that’s a whole other question entirely, maybe a whole other episode entirely.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:33]:

But I’ve wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember. I recently remembered that some of my college friends all the way back in 2006 gave me a book like it’s a how to writing guide from 2006, so 20 years ago now. And it’s only taken me 20 years to write the book. I suppose putting it into context, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a really, really long time, and I’m not really sure why I didn’t do it up to now. And maybe if you’re interested in writing a book, you’re coming up with all the excuses as well. I don’t have time, I don’t have energy. What would I say? Who will listen to me, all of those kinds of things. Because those kind of questions obviously went through my head as well.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:13]:

I wanted to start a little bit on the publishing process, which is different from the writing process. And so thankfully I was part of a writing sprint kind of early on in this writing journey and that really gave me the impetus. So if you can find a group of people who are interested in doing the same thing, I think that would really make a difference to you. So I had a group of people, we had a, you know, WhatsApp messages going on. People were sharing how many words they had written every day. So it was kind of a daily habit thing. And through that process, I wrote about 27,000 words. Again, to put this into context, normal business books have around 80,000 words.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:53]:

So if you can kind of imagine a book, it’s, I don’t know, maybe four hours, five hours to read, depending on your reading speed. I know I’ve read ones that have been much longer than that as well. So I think 80,000 is around the average. And it’s around four hours to read, I think. So putting that into context, I had 27,000 words written. And at that time I was highly encouraged to be writing at maybe around 35,000 to 40,000 words. So kind of half the size of a normal business book. And the reason for that was the group that I was working with were a group of entrepreneurs selling to other entrepreneurs.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:31]:

And the idea is you print as many books as you can and you kind of use it as a business card. So you’re handing that book out for free to people to get the word out there about your business. My business model is very different. I work with organizations. So again, bit of context here. So I wrote those 27,000 words. I was writing between October and December. I took about three weeks off at Christmas that year, you know, for a break.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:56]:

And I just couldn’t get back into the writing. And I think that’s a problem. That’s a learning for me. Like it’s. It’s about continuing to do it, it’s continuing with that consistency. So I did it in fits and bursts between January and say, May or June and got to around 37,000 words. I thought I was nearly finished writing and then I was approached by a publish about, you know, whether I was interested in writing a book or had I ever considered writing a book. And I was like, well, actually I’m nearly finished writing a book now.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:26]:

After a conversation with them, they really encouraged me to write more. They thought, I have so much more in me. I have more of a thought leadership book than a business book. As a Business card. And so I continued writing. I ended up working with them, which was a fantastic experience. And I’ll talk about the different publishing options in a second. But I started writing with them and I got to, you know, we were aiming for 70,000 words and as I went through, I chopped so much out that I was like, I don’t need this.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:57]:

It was just kind of filler. So I chopped a lot of stuff. As we went through, I got to 80 something thousand words and then we chopped some more out of it. So Final edit was about 77,000 words. So it’s, it’s a lot. It is still a lot thinking about, you know, how does that compare to what I had originally seen, set out to do and when I was looking at it originally, like let’s say 30,000 words, 40,000 words, this may still sound like a lot, but if you focus on doing a 1000 word blog, for example, and if you’re writing blogs on a regular basis, how can you turn what you’ve already written into something that is a bit more expanded? Like this was how we were encouraged to think about the writing process. Another thing that really helped me before I even thought about the writing was structuring what the book was going to be about. So if you’ve been listening to previous episodes, you will understand how the book is laid out.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:58]:

It’s all based around my thriving talent framework. So looking at psychological safety first. So there’s an entire chapter about that. Then there are three pillars of workplace culture, drivers or motivators and capabilities. And each one of those is a section and they each have three chapters. And then the final chapter is about leadership, about leading ourselves first and also about leading other people. And so when I had that structure, the writing became so much easier. And that’s not to say that things didn’t change.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:32]:

And, you know, there weren’t questions about where to place what sections. For example, imposter syndrome, does that go in the capability section? Or does that belong more readily in the leadership section, for example? So lots of kind of questions like that as we went along. So back to the kind of different publishing options. I suppose a lot of people opt for self publishing and it’s a really good idea if you want to be the one to hold on to the royalties. One of the reasons I didn’t want to go with self publishing was because I know that there are so many different moving parts to the publishing industry. There are so many different parts that you don’t even think about. So not only is it about writing it’s about developing the ideas in your book. It’s about the grammar.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:20]:

It’s about. There’s so many, so many different aspects to the editing of the book and so many different people that need to be involved that you may end up paying quite a lot of money if you want to get that level of expertise. And if you don’t get that level of expertise is your book. You know, how professional actually is your book and how well will it sell if the ideas aren’t developed, if it’s not edited properly? And here’s the other thing, typesetting. So that’s putting it literally where it needs to go on the page. And that requires again, a really high level of expertise that I certainly don’t have. So I would have to pay someone else to do that. Another option, and this is the one I was going to go with, is hybrid publishing.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:00]:

And that’s where you pay a publisher and they take care of all of that stuff that I talked about, like the developmental side of the editing. You know, what goes where and what does the flow of the book actually look like. The line editing. And I get confused. There’s content editing, there’s line editing, but essentially looking at very, you know, minuscule, the, the kind of the grammar stuff picking up. There’s the proofreading, there’s the typesetting that I mentioned, which is another high level of expertise. There’s also cover design. And you know, when it came to cover design, that was nearly as hard as writing the book itself as well.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:34]:

You need to obviously work with a professional designer to get the COVID designed as well. So there’s loads of different aspects that you probably don’t even think of. You’re not really aware of. There are so many different aspects. But a hybrid publisher will take care of all of that stuff for you. You have to pay them and you get a higher level of royalties from the book sales than you would if you were with a traditional publisher. Now I ended up going with the traditional publisher. My experience with them has been really fantastic.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:03]:

I would highly recommend. But it’s not easy to get a traditional publisher. And that’s why a lot of people either go self publishing or hybrid publishing route, because to get a publishing contract is actually quite difficult. But I know it’s. Things are a little bit easier now with there’s a print on demand, which means that you don’t have to print a whole. You know, you don’t have to print thousands and thousands of books up front in the hope of selling them. You can do more of a print on demand model, which makes things a little bit cheaper and easier for both authors and publishers. So that hopefully gives you a little bit of a flavor, a little bit of the background into the writing process and kind of how I found it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:41]:

I will continue with this series in the run up to episode 300 of the podcast, which I will be, I won’t say broadcasting live. It will be broadcast onto YouTube live. I will be recording it live. I will be releasing it as a podcast episode about a week later and that will be recorded, recorded live in New York. So I’m really looking forward. I’m really excited to do that because I’ve been talking about doing that for a few years. If you haven’t checked out the book yet, definitely head over to thrivingtalentbook.com and go and check out the book and see what people are saying already. See if it’s something that is of benefit to you, which if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m sure it is.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:22]:

But go and check out that book and let me know what you think.