3 Lessons from Writing a Book

On Wednesday I finished the first draft of a book I’ve been writing, intended to take audio professionals from zero coding experience to 3+ finished scripts.

The working title is Begin Audio Scripting in Reaper with Lua and Reascript. The content is an overhauled update, reorganization, and adaptation of what you’ll find in my Reascript posts.

While I don’t have an exact release date yet (but it’s likely to be soon), I want to share 3 insights from the process of writing it.

You have the ability to write a book, today, without much difficulty
Quality measures aside, if you can blog, you can write a book. I used Microsoft Publisher to organize, layout, and write the book. Now if you know anything about book writing – you’ll laugh or scoff at that. Publisher isn’t exactly a book writing tool.

Despite that, I turned a handful of blog posts into a nearly 50 page book. It’s complete with graphics, reference, and a fancy layout to boot! I had no idea that all of those posts amassed to that much content. It was a pretty mind blowing thing to learn.

Now when I’m done with the edits I can simply save the file to PDF and release it myself. I certainly could’ve spent time researching how to get it ready for Kindle or what have you – but for now I wanted to start small and just get it done.

It takes way longer than you’d think
Writing those blog posts was fairly simple – each one took me a day or so to put together and publish. I started this project with the plan to re-type all of the content, which would allow me to edit while I wrote.

That strategy worked, however it took quite a few weeks. Additionally, I had to concern myself with the layout of the content. Making sure everything fits on the page well simply isn’t often a part of web content.

I expected to be done with the book in about double the time it took me to make the original content. Instead it took me at least 4-8 times as long to get it all together.

Writing a book gets you recognized
Despite not having released this book, I’ve already garnered attention from people. Instead of saying “I’m thinking about writing a book” I’ve been able to say “I’m 30-40 pages into this book” and go into the target audience and why I’m writing it.

When you do that, people take you seriously because they realize you’re serious. Multiple opportunities have even opened up from it that I didn’t have before. I’ve been recommended to pitch the idea to a legitimate publisher, identified as “the guy to go to for Reaper scripting”, and suggestions for other book content.

So I’m excited to tell you that my new book exists (I’m staring at a paper copy of the draft right now). It will be in your hands very soon. You should think about writing one of your own too – it’s way less difficult, but more time consuming, than you may think!