Determination

This is been a very cool week for me, I was able to do something I never expected to do. Well I shouldn't say I never expected do it, I should say that nobody else expected that I could do it, or really no one expected that I would do it.  Up until a few years ago I was one of those people who was always letting myself down.  I would say that I would to something big, and never get to it.  I just made excuses.

Now that it's been over a year since the book So Now What?  has been on the market, I was starting to get a little frustrated. I have been grinding and pushing to get anybody of any value to look at the book. Finally, a couple of months ago, Jim Pawlak agreed that he would look at it clearly stating that it only had a 1 in 40 chance of him even reading it and much less of it getting reviewed.  After Mr. Pawlak, two more people agreed to "consider it".

Almost one year to the day after the book was published, the San Jose Business Journal online was the first to publish Jim Pawlak's review. I had no idea that he read it and wrote a review, so getting the google alert was very exiting.  If you don't know what a google alert is, stay tuned.  I will tell you how to use them and why they are so important.



Writing a book is almost like starting a business. This book combined years of ideas, notes and research into the first draft. That draft was then discarded almost completely and then rewritten, creating the second draft. At least that's how I did it, I didn't know any other way. When I completed the second draft I went out and found somebody else who had already written and published successfully their own book and asked them for some advice. Basically, I went and found a coach.

Why a coach is important

I actually called over a dozen authors and wrote letters to several others before two of them called me back. One of them suggested a class, which I took, and the other offered to help. This wasn't quite a formal coaching arrangement, we ended up trading work for each other. I helped him with several marketing strategies, and he helped me fine tune the book.

Without having the benefit of the class, with the teacher acting as a coach of sorts, and the other author helping me out, I don't think I could've ever finished the book. As disciplined as I was sitting down every day to write or review a chapter, things just didn't quite come together. I knew something was missing and I didn't know how to approach it. This is where having a coach made all the difference in the world.

For the final draft, my coach did not have enough time to review it (or maybe I didn't have the patience) and suggested I find an editor. Since I was trying to save money I sent the book off to my mother who had written several children's books and a thesis that Stanford University felt was good enough to hand her a PhD. She found over 500 grammar, typographical and concept errors. She also suggested removing several paragraphs and even a couple of chapters as unimportant. I was a little concerned that she felt those chapters and paragraphs were unimportant.  I thought it was because she had lived through part of it with me.

I was able to convince somebody else to look at the book, and specifically those paragraphs and chapters she wanted removed.  I asked that he let me know what he thought. I ended up removing one chapter and two paragraphs. With the third draft in hand, it was sent to the publisher for printing. That is pretty much the book you see today, although we are planning some changes to the introduction and the cover now that we have some market feedback.

Determination Counts

Even having a coach is no guarantee of success, you still have to have your own personal determination to get it done. I spent one hour every day working on this book, for just under a year.  Even while other people were looking it over, I kept re-writing chapters.  Even on vacation in Hawaii and Orlando, I dedicated one hour a day to getting this project done.  When my first book arrived in printed form I was extremely excited. That excitement went away shortly when I realized how many other books are out there and so far, I was the only person that had a copy in my hands.  I started to wonder how was I going to market my book? You see today the author is primarily responsible for their own marketing, the publishing houses do very little. I didn't know how to hire a publicist or a PR agent, so I started pressing forward on my own.  After all, I run a business strategy and marketing business.

Now that I have a PR agent/publicist to work with I realized that hiring one should have been my primary focus, something even my coach didn't mention. He had been using the services of his publicists so long that he just assumed that's what I would do. When we were catching up recently and he asked how things were going, and clearly my reply of "Slow and steady." perplexed him. He asked how my publicist was doing and how much I was paying him or her. The blank stare on my face let him know that I did not yet have a publicist helping me out.

It was out of sheer determination on my own that I found the research materials and the processes that publicist and PR agents use. I spent a lot of time learning something that somebody else already knew a lot better than I ever will. It was pure determination that landed the review in the San Jose Business Journal, which has been reprinted in several other newspapers across the country.  Just like writing the book, I dedicated time each week to marketing it, and learning about how authors get books to sell.

A coach is not a guarantee of anything, but they are a huge help in moving your business or project forward. Add determination to that you're much more likely to find success. As the Chinese saying goes “you are closest to success when you want to quit.”  There were many times that I wanted to quit pushing this book. Even though I believed in it, there was a little voice inside me that said "Hey you spent a year writing it, isn't that enough?".  I'm glad I didn't give up because the feeling of success after seeing the review featured in the online version of the San Jose Business Journal was several fold more exciting and more motivating than just getting a printed copy of the book.  Today I got another Google Alert, another version of the review appeared on the Dallas Morning News website.  Two solid years of effort, and I just can't help but smile.

Never give up, stay focused and let life be great.