Now that my Handbook, Marketing Your Career: Positioning, Packaging and Promoting Yourself for Success has been published and is available, I thought I’d reflect on the process I went through to conceive and deliver this project.
Birth seems to be an appropriate metaphor, because there really is a conception, gestation and then delivery process. Unlike having a child, though, this process isn’t guaranteed to be over in 9 months. Sometimes it can take a whole lot longer to get from Point A to Point B, and sometimes, just as in real life, there are writing efforts that don’t quite make it the whole way through the process.
In my case, there was about a two year process from when I decided I would write a full book to when I finally said, we’re not getting anywhere–let’s go at this another way. Last spring, after a discussion with my mentor Alan Weiss, I decided to create a series of shorter works instead.
The idea would be to take some of the key concepts in my Leverage2Market Model and create shorter booklets (which evolved into handbooks) as a first step in creating published works. The initial topic was a natural one: Take the material that had been so well received in my articles and workshops on Marketing Product YOU and evolve it into a guide to help professionals better market the ultimate product offering, themselves. From that point, the path to the final product was a bit circuitous and included a long discussion about whether this material was better suited to marketers in particular or professionals in general. (Arguments on both sides were compelling–I finally decided to be more inclusive and talk more generally to a broad professional audience.)
I also learned that writing a book is only a small subset of what’s required to get a book published. The publishing process in itself has been an incredible learning experience. Look for more posts on this topic in the coming weeks.
What’s interesting to me is that just like with a real life child, people tell me the book looks great and ask when I’m going to do the next one. Right now we’re just recovering from the first one. Stay tuned
