Every Company Needs a Good Map

Whenever someone asked my thoughts on a particular subject I would just rattle off what came to my mind. The trouble with that is that I have learned a lot from many people over the years. I could not always recall all of it in one sitting but I was not really aware of that. Writing my book made that very clear to me.

When you write things down, you free space in the front part of your mind that allows more stuff to be brought out from the back. (this is a key point of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen http://www.davidco.com/ ) As you review what you have written, things come to you that you see can be added to what you have said. Allow this to happen for a few rounds. When you start repeating yourself, you have brought 90% of what is retrievable without pressure. You will also be surprised at the amount of stuff you had in your head and disappointed that you had not done this sooner as you would have looked much smarter more often.

It gets worse before it get better...
At first, the manuscript seems to keep growing and growing as you add more thoughts. You come across material that you feel would fit nicely in this chapter or that. You begin to feel like you are becoming an expert on the subject. Your feelings will be reset when you begin to show your drafts to people who have sufficient knowledge to critique your writing on content and not just on style. It was a bit intimidating to show my draft at first. I was kindly but clearly brought to the understanding that I had certain tendencies that needed to be worked on.

When you refine, you remove redundancies and your ability to present what you know improves. Suddenly you sound smarter and more polished. You are able to speak with greater confidence and authority. This happened to me in the area of developmental biology when I was a graduate student. It has been said that on the day you defend your thesis you know more about your subject that just about anyone in the world with few exceptions. (Your advisor might agree as long as they are an exception.)

Just when you think you are done...
There is a lot of work taking a manuscript through the process of copy setting and editing. Facts have to be rechecked before you can publish. References need to be spellchecked and titles of books italicized but not the titles of articles. A useful index has to be created so that people who have not read the book 10 times, as you have, will be able to find the important points after they have read the book. In fact, the index is often a selling tool. People look at the subjects listed there to see if topics of interest are covered in this book.

No matter how hard you try, when you move the text from the word processor to the page layout software hundreds of spelling errors will appear. It may be a Microsoft vs. Adobe kind of thing. They want you to do all of your work in their software. More than likely the issue is that when things move from one layout to another, things appear that were always there but not seen. Figure legends and captions, references to figures, and the size of the figures change when the text moved from full double-spaced sheets to single-spaced book sized sheets. This change rearranges the text in ways that comments about the figure to the right are now comments about the figure on the left and so on.

The day a finished book is in your hands...
There was so much work to get things to this point that it was a relief when the first books arrived. Early in the final steps, a proof copy is made. Often many copies of the proof are printed so that they can be sent out to reviewers before the publication date. These often contain mistakes that still were undetected, but that is understood. The idea of the pre-publication copy is to have reviews available on the date of release or before. I did not leave much time between the pre-publication copies and the final copies because I knew that as a new author it was unlikely that many reviews would be written. We used it for more of a practice run and to get the book to special individuals who had been very helpful in the process.

People treat you differently when you have a published book; more so if it comes from a major publisher. You can be a celebrity if your book is in stores. Yet, none of that helps sales very much. You still have to go out and promote. The promotion part is not unlike launching a new product. The same issues exist: resistance to change, fear of the unknown, and scarcity of shelf space. Fortunately, the Internet changed that last hurdle.

What has writing helped me achieve...
I am still learning from this experience and so the answer is incomplete. At this point I would say that I learned that I knew more than I thought but the greatest thing that writing has helped me achieve would have to be: I have a much greater appreciation of how much people taught me during my early years of company building and entrepreneurship. Some days, as I sat thinking about a concept, I could still hear the voice of the person who helped me better understand something I did not. I am very grateful to Alan Stanford, David Landsberger, Paul Seliskar, Dan Rime, and John Baldeschwieler who were very patient with me as I tried to bring my vision to life. There were many others who contributed to my education, but in the interest of time and space, I list these five because I felt they were the most influential.

So, what are you going to write about?