What I Did Different With This Book
This Just In: Launching a second edition wasn’t as simple as I thought it’d be, and I learned some lessons along the way.
It’s been two weeks since I published the second edition of Write Now. Going into the rewriting process, I thought it’d be simple — edit the whole thing, rewrite the applicable sections, and republish. Boy, was I wrong.
The rewriting was actually the easiest part. It only took a few months and was no different than writing anything else. I went a chapter at a time, ripping the entire thing out and reworking everything from the ground up. The problems began when I started replacing the rewritten text in the book.
For the first edition, I hired a typesetter. To save a little money and learn how to typeset myself, I wanted to control the process. I thought it’d be easy. It led down an entire rabbit hole that ended in typesetting not one but two versions of the book — one for print and one for digital.
You all, typesetting is difficult! There isn’t a great tool out there for nonfiction typesetting. Vellum is fantastic for ebooks, but its limitations in print are substantial — especially if you want to include worksheets, as I did. I likely could have saved some time and frustration by shelling out for a professional instead of trying to do it myself.
I learned that simply dropping the words into Apple Pages or Vellum led to SO MANY unexpected — and, frankly, unexplained — mistakes that somehow Grammarly and ProWritingAid missed. For example, no tool could tell me I had typos or misspellings in a chapter heading. Huh?!
Anyway, these issues all came to light when I sent out Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) of what I thought was a polished and print-ready book — it wasn’t.
There’s an entire chapter in my book about the benefits of multiple revision rounds and hiring a high-quality editor. Reader, this is one of those times that I absolutely should have listened to myself. Instead, I had built the idea that the first edition had been professionally edited, and I was simply making some changes; naturally, the second edition would be fine without a professional.
Why this logic made perfect sense to me, especially when I was READING MY OWN INSTRUCTIONS TO THE CONTRARY, is beyond me. I’ll just say that writing a book is hard, and your brain stops working somewhere along the way.
Thankfully, the amazing Sandra Wendel and her teammate, Kathleen, stepped in and assisted with a fabulous professional edit that crushed the glaring issues that I was absolutely blind to. Reader, if you’re writing a book, don’t do what I did and bring Sandra on from the start.
In addition to typsetting and editing, I spent more time marketing the second edition. By more time, I mean that I spent time marketing the second edition. I sent out the ARCs and requested honest reviews to try and drive organic traffic.
I followed all of the admittedly high Amazon guidelines and asked people to leave honest reviews based on receiving an advanced reader copy. In the end, about half of those reviews were gated by Amazon anyway since the book wasn’t purchased on the site. So that kind of sucked. Amazon reviews are a mystery to me, so if you did read Write Now, please consider leaving a review; maybe it will get posted!
I also created some social posts and — gasp — videos that may or may not have driven some traffic. Just like last time, LinkedIn somehow drove the most engagement. Why? Maybe it’s because a book is a “professional achievement” that caters to LinkedIn’s algorithm. Or maybe people are generally more engaged on that network. I have no idea.
So, what did I do differently with the second edition? Well, in a way, everything. But also, nothing? I ended up following a process that was more or less the same as round one, but completely unplanned and way out of order.
Despite the challenges, I feel really good about the second edition of Write Now — the advice is better, it (hopefully) won’t age, and it is in a much better package. If you’re curious about the final product, it’s available now.
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