I am looking for a book-writing c...

[Irene Erin Aslin]

I’m not a book writing couch or marketing expert, although have my book published and in a desperate need of a marketing specialist as I personally simply don’t have any bandwidth for that nor am I familiar with all the marketing “secrets.” Now, to your question – there is a bestselling author, Alessandra Torre. I took one of her free marketing workshops, and I liked it as she gave away many tricks & tips about marketing. She offers more in depth classes for a reasonable price, which I intend to take some day when I’m not that swamped. There is a website to find more info about her and what she offers. If interested, I can check the name of that website and share here. Best!

[Heather Holm]

Three members of my family have self-published books, and another is a professional book designer. I myself designed my father’s book, but for mine, I’ll hire my step-sister-in-law to do it.

I’m working on a novel, my first. It’s fiction, but heavily based on channelled conversations. So it’s similar to a non-fiction book that compiles sessions, except I have to invent details to protect privacy and make it hold together as a story. I hope to have a first draft in the hands of a few people for review before Christmas.

At that point, I’m going to do some research on self-publishing. There are a lot of people out there giving advice. Lots of writers’ collectives, people in the industry etc etc. Even people giving courses.

The writing part isn’t hard for me. I’m just writing it in Word for now. Use what you’re comfortable with for the writing part. That’s hard enough.

Then when it’s time to design the book, you or the designer can transfer to Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress or whatever professional software is needed.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be using Amazon for print-on-demand and Kindle, because everyone knows them. My step-brother resisted Amazon for his book, as independent bookstores weren’t happy to have him on Amazon at first, but he’s there now. He did have some copies bulk-printed to sell on his book tours, though, and he gives talks and workshops so I’m sure he still brings books along to sell and autograph. But Amazon provides a broad reach.

For myself, I don’t worry about the writing and publishing end of it; my main concern is how much or how little I’m going to reveal about the origins of the story in interviews! I’ve listened to authors being interviewed on the radio for decades, so that’s where my worry-imagination goes when I think about promoting a book!

If I were writing a non-fiction book based on sessions, I would think about the overall theme of the book, select sessions that illustrate it, put them in some kind of sequence or flow that builds the theme, then write intros, extros and intermediate bits for each as needed to make it readable and highlight the points you’re trying to get across. (Not so different from what I’m doing.)

I would also think about whether to write it (a) in script format as Dolores did, like a play, with for example, “D:” or “Irina:” or “Heather” or “Client:” at the start of each unit of speech, or (b) in narrative format with quotation marks and tags, like,

“I see a charred landscape,” Bob said. “I’m barefoot. I think I’m a child. I have a feeling of great loss and something missing, something that used to be there.” His voice was trembling.
I asked, “What do you imagine used to be there?” I paused, allowing the image to come to him….

Some people find the narrative format easier to read than the script format. It also allows you to describe the client’s voice or actions, or your own thoughts.

Here’s a useful article I found in a quick search: https://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2014/04/25/how-to-self-publish-your-book-through-amazon/?sh=f874b9744d35

Keep us posted! Exciting times.

[Irina Nola]

I am thinking maybe I just should take a class. Does anybody know any good writing classes? My issue is EVERYTHING – from writing to formatting and designing, I love writing, but short pieces or answers to questions, and not a large book. I already have most of my material written on Quora or in my journal, I would just have to put it together as a book. I do not think I want dialogue there at all, I heard it is very hard to format, plus I am too lazy to listen to all the audio, I might just write stories without the transcripts. I started writing down stories after each session in the ‘Monkkee” online journal, so I would just have to change names and details and choose the best stories to illustrate my theoretical ideas.

[Allison Brown]

@Irina_Nola, if you’re good at writing small pieces, that’s really all you need to do. You just compile them into a larger book. I find it helpful to have a rough outline of the book, broken down into chapters, in essence, the themes I want to cover.

Once you have the outline, you work chapter by chapter and break that down even more. Find the best sessions that illustrate that theme or that chapter. First, write a chapter introduction, explaining what you’re going to cover in that chapter and perhaps why. Then write a brief description to each session story within that chapter, detailing why you felt it was compelling. That way, you could actually use chunks of dialogue instead of having to write a description of the session. Describing the session in your own words is fine, but that’s all the more writing you’ll have to do, when instead, you could allow the transcribed material to do the work for you.

(I’m not sure about others, but I found it tedious, after a while, to read Dolores‘s books that contained pages and pages of practitioner/client dialogue. Smaller chunks that illustrate a point are much more manageable.)

Once you identify the sessions that you want to use, it’s easiest if you have them transcribed. For my pet book, I found a wonderful transcriptionist on Fiverr. Yes, it costs money, but I think it’s reasonable, plus, I can write it off on my taxes at the end of the year as a business expense. My transcriptionist is near perfect. It saves me a heck of a lot of time versus using Otter, for example.

When you look at the book as a whole, it can seem very overwhelming, but I find that once you break it up into sections or chapters, and keep breaking it down from there, it gets quite manageable. You just plug away, and before you know it, the book is complete.?

[Allison Brown]

Regarding the other pieces of producing a book, I used 99Designs to create my front and back cover. It was a fun and easy process, and the results were outstanding! Again, it’s a fairly minor cost that can be written off. Then, we used Vellum to design the inside, which was pretty straightforward, if you are halfway tech savvy. You can even write the book within Vellum, but I didn’t do that. Lastly, we published through Kindle, and again, it’s pretty straightforward.

My first book was produced with a traditional publisher, but since I’m not a big name (yet ?), I went with a small independent publisher and frankly, I think my second book, that I designed myself, looks 100% better. Not to mention that I had much more control over every piece of the process. And I didn’t find that the cost to do it myself was prohibitive. Either way, these days, you pretty much have to market the book yourself anyway. A traditional publisher expects you to have a marketing plan and do most of the legwork yourself.

[Heather Holm]

Thanks @Allison_Brown for this info! Very helpful.

I took a look at Vellum and saw that it’s only for Mac. So I googled “vellum for pc” and found this article which compares Vellum with a fairly new program called Atticus which does more or less the same thing, and costs less.

Article:
https://kindlepreneur.com/vellum-windows/

Atticus
https://www.atticus.io/

[Irene Erin Aslin]

@Allison_Brown Thank you for bringing up a session transcribing topic. It takes so much time for me to edit and transcribe a session prior to putting it on YouTube that I finally realized I’d need some help here if I want to continue. I tried Otis and Wondershare softwares but they, although somewhat helpful, didn’t seem to do the trick. So, I started thinking of finding an assistance/session editor to help preparing videos for production, and even did some research on Fiverr but what was stopping me from moving forward was that I wasn’t sure about the legality of sharing the pre-production version with someone since there would be some personal info there that I normally edit out before posting. However, since the transcription process takes for me much more time than just editing, outsourcing the transcription part could be the answer for me as I can send already edited out version, which doesn’t have personal info for the transcription. Thanks again for mentioning this topic!

[Irina Nola]

Otter.ai is cheap and OK to transcribe sessions, but it makes lots of mistakes, so you will have to edit everything.

[Allison Brown]

By way of update, Vellum is 30% off today. We ended up purchasing a small Mac hard drive in order to use Vellum. You can tie the hard drive into an existing monitor and keyboard so you can save money….

Yes, Irina, I’m not impressed with Otter….too much work on the back end to refine the transcription. My Fiverr person charges around $30 for an hour of audio. (One hour of audio would take me 4 hours to transcribe on my own).

You can also find a kind person to do some free transcribing in exchange for a session(s) or some other trade….