On writing my first book!

08 Jan 2025

I just published “The PRFAQ Framework”, a book I authored and self-published. I learned about the writing process, the book industry, and how to publish and promote a book from this experience.

When I started with my journey, I reached out to friends who have published books, bugging them with basic questions. I’m writing this post to help others who are considering authoring and publishing a book as well, going into the nitty-gritty of this process.

The first thing that I learned about authoring and publishing a book is that there are different tools, approaches, and best practices, depending on the genre. Most of the content and resources you’ll find online are for fiction books. My book is a non-fiction, non-biography, business and management book. There is very little content available for this type of book. On the one hand, this is good. It’s a sign there is less competition in the market (or is it bad because there is less demand?). On the other hand, you have to figure out a lot of things by yourself.

The Idea

My original intent was to write a series of articles about the PRFAQ framework, what I learned at Amazon, and how it applies to early stage founders. After twenty years building startups, mentoring and advising founders, and participating in the startup/VC community, I had clarity on how PRFAQs are useful for founders and investors.

When I left Amazon, I was about to build a new startup (related to PRFAQs/writing). I thought of the articles about the PRFAQ framework as “content marketing.”

You know when you learn a new word or term and then you start seeing it everywhere? Well, as soon as I started to pay attention, I saw many well-known thought leaders talking about the advantages of using writing to think, pitch, and persuade. Then, I saw this:

This tweet from Scott Belsky (the founder of Behance, CPO at Adobe, and the author of The Messy Middle) was the tipping point for me to realize the opportunity was bigger than a series of articles.

I wanted to write a book for a long time. I started writing a few times but never found the time to do it consistently while having a full-time job. Back in February 2024, I decided to put the startup on the back burner for a couple of quarters and focus on the book first.

The Target Audience

The first working title of the book was “PRFAQ for Startups.” I wore my product manager hat and thought about the customer, the pain points, the jobs-to-be-done, the solution, and the go-to-market for the book. What was available today? What was the opportunity? What do customers (founders) need?

I did research to understand the ideal customer profile (ICP) and quantify the total addressable market. I treated my book like a founder treats a SaaS product idea.

I estimated there are between 50,000 and 80,000 new “startups” every year. That includes startups that come to exist and the startups where founders give up before doing much—I called these “pre-founders”. The 50,000 to 80,000 have an overlap from year to year. It’s not like 50,000 new founders found a startup each year.

Out of that group, you discount people who don’t read books, people who are not interested in PRFAQs, people who don’t speak English well enough to read my book—well, it’s a pretty small market, but an interesting niche.

A friend told me that books in the business category sell 5,000 to 6,000 copies in the first three years. This market data, with my top down estimates, made me happy to write a book where a few thousand people would read it.

However, as I did research for the content of the book, I realized that I could expand the audience of the book. The obvious segment to expand into was product managers at large and medium size tech companies. There are another 50,000 to 100,000 of those out there. This is also a segment I’ve worked in for the last two decades, so I could draw content from my experience without having to do much research. Besides that, there are another 500,000-1M product and program managers in corporations across the US.

From a jobs-to-be-done perspective, I realized the problem I was solving wasn’t limited to founders or product/program managers.

This was a book for anyone who needs to think critically about a problem and a solution while working with others, be able to articulate them to garner support (approval, funding, grants, etc.), and who want to rally people around a vision and a strategy. Yes, it doesn’t roll off the tongue easily, but that’s how broad I believe the use cases for PRFAQ are. These are innovators. People who are creating a new business, product, program, or service, or changing an existing one.

Research Phase

I consume a ton of content. I read anywhere from five to ten books per year. I listen to hours of podcasts every week. I watch YouTube videos while exercising at home, and when I want to learn something new. My first action was to learn about the process of authoring and publishing a book. I read books, articles, Reddit posts, listened to podcasts, and watched countless YouTube videos on book writing and self-publishing. I spent a month on that topic and concluded I could do it. I wanted to do it.

The next wave of research was more complicated. I wanted to understand what had been written about PRFAQs (almost nothing), what people thought about PRFAQs, and what were the alternatives to that framework. I read about a dozen books on strategy, decision, writing, pitching, storytelling, etc. I interviewed about forty founders, a dozen product leaders, and a dozen VCs and managing directors of startup studios, incubators, and accelerators. The one audience I was interested in the most was people who worked at Amazon, left, and founded a startup or joined another company. Were they using PRFAQs? If not, why not? What have they tried? What worked? What didn’t?

When I was reading books, I would keep a notepad next to me, and scribble important notes on it. Those would include chapter ideas, quotes, interesting topics, insights, etc. When I was listening to podcasts (while driving or running), I would use the Voice Memo app on my watch. Then, I would transcribe the voice memos and paper notes into a Notion document. While interviewing people, I would also use a notepad if we were in person or use Notion to take notes for virtual meetings. Those also got transcribed into my master Notion list of content ideas and insights. For example, I would be talking to someone and they would say, “for me, the writing process is more important than the content I wrote because it helped me think through the problem.” I clustered that quote around other quotes of people who said similar things.

[Side note: in the book I speak about a method called Collect-Collate-Compose to write a PRFAQ that is applicable to books or any writing.]

At one point, after six weeks, I felt I had enough content to start writing the book.

The First Draft

I wrote the chapter outlines of the book several times. First, I would be happy with that version of it. The next day, I would think it was crap and redo it. At one point, I felt I had clarity on the right outline, and I sat down to write.

I wrote the entire first manuscript in three weeks. I would start writing around 9am and write for two hours, taking breaks as needed. Then, I’d write for one or two more hours in the afternoon. I used an app called Ulysses for Mac. It’s specifically designed for people who are writing long form text. I wasn’t a huge fan of Ulysses, and I don’t think I used it as it was meant to be used. It did the job, and I really liked that it used Markdown with no fuss.

My rule of thumb was to write 3,000 to 4,000 words per chapter, and 1-2 chapters per day, without worrying a single bit about grammar, spelling, and how chapters connected to each other. I flushed out the ideas in my brain to the “paper” without constraints. I knew that editing would reduce the number of words and simplify passages, so I didn’t limit myself.

If I got stuck in a chapter, I stopped and went for a run, came back, and finished it.

After the chapters were done, I took a break for a couple of days and then I read the draft manuscript for the first time. I went through each of my notes in Notion and marked them “done” if I wrote about it—like a checklist. I covered 80% of the notes in the first manuscript, and missed several other important topics that I had to add in. For example, I really wanted to talk about confirmation bias. I realized that after the first manuscript, I wrote about what it was, but not how to think about it, and how to defend against it.

Revisions

This is the part that caught me by surprise the most. You will do a lot of revisions in your manuscript. A lot! I guess if you are working with a publisher, they will share that load with you.

At this point, I hadn’t decided if I was going to self-publish or not, but I wanted to do the revisions myself. My first manuscript had 55,000 words. Each round of revision took three to five. The first revision, I did a grammar and style pass, using no tech tool, on Ulysses. I did two more revisions on Ulysses, where I shuffled paragraphs within or between chapters, and even shuffled (and renamed) chapters.

Then, I moved the content to Microsoft Word. For better or for worse, Word is the official tool for book authors and publishers. The fifth revision was the first one where I used Word to help with grammar, style, and spelling. During this revision process, I was still researching, interviewing people, and testing ideas to see if they made sense. Each time, I would go to Notion and add more bullet points to the list of things to add, remove, or update in the book.

Here’s what it took to get this book from the first manuscript to the final version:

Manuscript — me — 3 weeks
3 content revisions — me — 3 weeks
Grammar/spelling/style revision — me — 1 week
2 content revisions - me - 1 week
Editorial assessment — Editor — 10 days
2 content revisions — me — 2 weeks
Development Editing — Editor — 2 week
2 content revisions — me — 2 weeks
Copy Editing — Editor — 2 weeks
1 content revision — me — 1 week
Interior design — Designer — 1 week
Proofreading — Proofreader - 1 week
1 content revision — me — 1 week
Final interior design — 1 week (+2 weeks for ePub hassles)

That adds up to 23 weeks — which happened between May and November 2024. As I mentioned before, revisions took as little as three days and as long as five. I estimate that I spent 50% of my time either waiting for editors/proofreaders/designers to do their work, “beta readers” to send feedback, or I was taking a break on purpose to refresh and re-energize my brain.

AI/LLM

I’m as fascinated and a user of LLMs as the typical early-adopter. For this book, I decided not to use LLM to write or edit a single sentence in the book. I had three reasons for this choice. First, and most importantly, I wanted to be a role model for what I teach in the book. The book is about using writing as a mechanism to think critically and to learn how to develop and articulate ideas. LLMs are the antithesis of that. Second, I find LLM writing bland. Every time someone says they used an LLM to write a blog post and it turned out great, my first reaction is not to think the LLM did a great job — it’s thinking that this person doesn’t know what good writing looks like. Lastly, I wanted to tell my audience that AI did not create what they are reading. I believe people value human-generated content more than AI generated content — and that value will only grow the more AI content exists.

I used LLM extensively to do research for the book! I’d ask questions about other books, authors, insights, and concepts. I used it to figure out if people had done research on a topic, or if it could find a paper or article about a story I heard. I had ChatGPT open at all times on my computer. I also used Google Scholar extensively during the research phase of the book.

Interestingly, between May and November 2024, LLMs became much better at using the Web to search for information. ChatGPT 4o was a gift.

The Book Team

Honestly, I was clueless about who I needed on my team to write a book. Pretty much everyone knows about book editors, but not about other roles. I was also uninformed about what an editor actually does. Well, turns out there are multiple levels of editing and people who specialize in them:

Editorial Assessment: An overarching review of the content of the book and its strengths and weaknesses — this is where you’ll discover missing chapters, concepts that were introduced in one part of the book referenced earlier, missing explanations, etc.
Development Editing: Big picture review of the manuscript and how it’s structured, the “plot,” the pacing, etc. — this is where you’ll find inconsistency between chapters, headings/subheadings that are confusing, lack of cohesiveness within a chapter, stories that have a beginning but are missing an end, etc.
Copy Editing: It’s a line-by-line editing, focusing on grammar, spelling, word choice, sentence structure, readability, stylistic consistency, etc.

This is not all! After that, you still need a proofreader. I asked my editor if I really needed one, because they did such a great job. I had reviewed the book a dozen times, and dozens of people have reviewed and provided me feedback. Well, it turned out you do need a proofreader. In tech terms, they are your Quality Assurance team. They have an incredible eye to find mistakes that are obvious once you see it, but hard for the untrained eye to catch it.

I was surprised when my proofreader found 200 issues in my book! It included grammar issues, typos, consistency issues, capitalization issues, and your mundane formatting issues (too much space between paragraphs, numbered lists with the wrong start number, indentation issues, etc.)

Writing a book is not like writing software, where you can frequently make updates to make it better. It’s a “one and done” thing, and I really wanted to publish the best product I could make. You can release revisions and new editions of a book, but you can’t update a copy someone already has on their bookshelf or on their Kindle.

You also need a cover designer and an interior designer. I was lucky to find someone with great experience with both. She was not only very experienced; she was super fast.

The two services I used to find professional help were Reedsy and Upwork. I really liked Reedsy because it helped me understand all the steps in book publishing, and the quality of their talent is outstanding. Upwork can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t know how to evaluate the skills of a talent. I used Reedsy to find an editor, and Upwork to find a designer (cover/interior), and a proofreader.

It’s really hard to hire talent on Upwork. It’s a vibrant marketplace, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with offers. It’s also hard to know people’s true experience and if they are being honest in their representation. I won’t write about how to find the right talent on Upwork, but if you are not familiar with the platform and how to screen and evaluate people, I recommend you find the people you need on Reedsy.

I did the authoring, illustration, indexing, marketing positioning & strategy, book website, and newsletter by myself.

Why self-publishing?

Disclaimer: This part will upset some people!

This was a difficult decision. If you are a well-known author or a celebrity of sorts (millions of followers), using a book publisher is the way to go. If you are publishing a complex book, like a cookbook, an engineering book, or a book with lots of illustrations or photography, I also think using a publisher is a good choice. In the realm of business/management/entrepreneurship books, I conclude that self-publishing is best. You lose three things if you use a publisher: 1) Editorial control, 2) Royalties, and 3) Control of timeline. However, by not using a publisher, you lose the book publishing and publicity apparatus they bring to the table—a team of experts, a deep understanding of market and marketing, and their channel power with Amazon and bookstores.

I spoke with ten authors I know, including New York Times best-sellers. None of them, zero, zilch, were happy with their publisher and most of them advised me to self-publish. The reason given was similar — the financial trade-off you make between having lower royalty fees and a book publisher vs. having a higher royalty and doing your own marketing is not worth it.

Book authors already make little money. In the category I’m publishing, if you sell a book for $30 at retail, at best you’ll make $7 or $8 per copy sold if you self-publish. Using a publisher, your royalty drops to half that, or lower. Because they print in batches, if the book is not selling as expected, they drop the retail price of the book, sometimes by 50%. Your $30 book now is being sold at Amazon for $15. Your $3-4 royalty now becomes $1-2/copy!

Imagine working six months on a book and making $6-30K in three years!

The pitch from publishers is that they will help you sell more books using their “special sauce.” The authors that I spoke to didn’t believe it was worth it. They still had to do most of the legwork to get reviewed by creators and influencers, to appear on conferences and podcasts, and to be mentioned in articles and other publications.

Eons ago, an entrepreneur friend of mine (who was a master of getting his company mentioned in the press) said the secret to hiring a PR agency was to find one where you’d be the #1 or #2 client. His reason is that these clients get 80% of the attention and energy from the agency, while #3-100 clients get 20%. I extrapolated that to the book publisher world as well. If you are Malcolm Gladwell, Walter Isaacson, or Simon Sinek, the publishers will use their whole arsenal to help drive sales for those books. If you are not, oh well, here’s some tips to help you market your own book.

Another thing that didn’t excite me about the book publishing world is how slow it is getting a book published. The industry is quite broken in the way it approaches this problem, and it seems to have no rush or desire to fix it. I know authors who took over two years to get their book from manuscript to book shelves. That’s a deal breaker for me.

Book Authoring Cost

The cost of authoring and publishing a book, in business & management, varies by the book size (physical size, number of pages, and number of words), and by how much you want to do yourself. You can hire a ghostwriter to do the writing and that’s going to cost anywhere from $5K to $50K (or more). You can also join a service like Manuscripts that will coach you how to write and hold your hand while you publish a book (with a publisher or without one). If you want a book website (yes, you want a book website), you’ll have to pay for that if you can’t do it yourself. Illustration, marketing strategy, promotions, translation, audiobook, coaching, query letters, advertising, and other activities add up to the cost of self-publishing.

In my case, this is the cost to author and publish the book, excluding publicity:

Website: ~$400/year (domain name, Webflow, Zapier)
Newsletter: $200/year (Kit.com)
Editing: $3,000 (Reedsy)
Cover Design + Interior Design: $1,200 (Upwork)
ISBN (block of 10): $300
Company Formation: $500 (Stripe Atlas) — Not needed
Proofreader: $1,100 (Upwork)
Total: ~$6,700

There are other expenses that I didn’t include here because they aren’t “necessary.” Those include: ChatGPT Subscription, Virtual Mailing Address, Branding, Headshot, Indexer, books you’ll read, newsletter subscriptions, and the coffees/meals you’ll have with folks you are interviewing and getting advice from. Also, not included is any translation for publishing in other countries, and the cost of doing an audiobook ($5-8K). I haven’t done those yet, although the hardcover will be available in nine countries and the ebook will be available in thirteen countries, all in English.

Book Pricing & Revenue

When they say authors don’t make money from a book, it’s true. Bookstores (online or retail) expect to make a 50% margin on books with onerous terms for returns and unsold copies. Your typical business book sells for $20-$40 when it launches in the US, and it drops in price in subsequent years. I was actually surprised how little data and information I found about pricing a book online, not even in the self-publishing subreddits. Again, most books are fiction, so the information you’ll find is about people self-publishing fantasy, romance, short stories, or children’s books.

After retailers take their cut, publishers also get their portion of the sales before authors are paid. That includes printing cost, publishing cost, marketing cost, and royalties-share. That’s why authors only make a few dollars per copy sold. Here’s sad math: Let’s assume an author invested eight weeks (320 hours) writing, revising, and preparing the book, with the help of the publisher. If the author makes $4 per copy (generous), and they sell 6,000 copies over a three-year period, that’s about $24,000 for 320 hours of work, which is roughly $75/hour. But this math is not correct, because they only sell 6,000 copies if they go out and promote their book. It’ll take them thousands of additional hours over the next three years writing articles, reaching out to people, speaking at meetups and events, and much more to reach that level of sales.

So, why do it? There’s ego (”I wrote a book”), there is legacy, and there are two financial paths for authors. The first path is when authors build a brand around the book and sell consulting services, collateral products/services, and paid engagements to speak at corporate workshops, retreats, or conferences. Authors in this bucket will self identify as “Author & Speaker” on LinkedIn. They will probably write more books. The second path is when the book is just a loss-leader for something else the author is selling, usually another business they already have. They are not so worried about the profit from the book as they are the prestige the book brings to their business. I’m not sure where I fall. Ask me again in two years.

Amazon KDP

I used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to publish the hardcover and ebook (Kindle). Honestly, I was relieved and delighted at the quality of the hardcover produced by KDP. I only got my author’s copy four weeks before the release date. You have to pay for that as well, but you are only paying for the printing and shipping cost. I found the interface at KDP clunky and outdated. One self-published author warned me about the dangers of picking the wrong launch date and trying to change it later — in many cases, you can’t.

What surprised me the most about KDP is how self-publishing authors don’t have the same controls and features as big publishers. That really caught me by surprise. I was planning on announcing my book in mid-November and starting a big pre-order campaign. Turns out, people can’t pre-order physical copies of the book if you use KDP, only if you use a “real” publisher. Another shortcoming is that you don’t have the discount/promotion tools for a launch discount. I was planning on giving 15-20% off the first week the book was out. I can’t do that. I can change the listing pricing dynamically, but it doesn’t show as a discount (or, maybe, I haven’t figured out how to do it yet).

What would I do differently

If (or when) I write another book, I’d like to streamline the process even more to publish it faster. It took me about seven months to get this book done — excluding the marketing efforts. I think I can do the next one in four months.

Another miss for me is that I only started to read and learn about book marketing when I was less than two months before my release date. That was a mistake because I should have been building an audience for many months, primarily through subscribers to a newsletter. It’s a topic for another post.

The final big mistake I’ve made is that December/January are not good months to announce and/or release a book. People have too much going on, both professionally and personally.

What’s next

For the next few weeks, months, and years, I’ll be promoting the book and expanding the content on the newsletter, via the website, and speaking/evangelizing PRFAQs at conferences and meetups around the world. I have a couple of podcasts and a couple of speaking engagements already scheduled — and I expect more of that. It’s also likely I’ll be collecting feedback and insights from people who read the book and practice what it teaches, leading to a potential new edition in a couple of years. I have at least three other books that could be part of this series. Finally, I still have a very strong startup idea—as mentioned above — to build a product around PRFAQs/writing. As I read and collected my thoughts for the book, I also drafted a startup idea that re-imagines how people write and use writing in a professional setting.

For now, go ahead, grab a copy of my book, read it, and send me your thoughts!