How to Write a Book, by Paul French

So here’s a story.

In 2010, I sat a supremely talented performer called James Brown (seen here on ITV’s Penn & Teller: Fool Us)  in front of a dictaphone for three straight days, asked him simply to talk and only let him leave the room for occasional toilet breaks and food.

Then, I enlisted the help of a transcription service. They came back a week later with a monstrous 135,000 word document which I had painfully failed to specify should not have been verbatim.

It was a horrible sight; as long as a dozen university dissertations strung back-to-back and flecked with stuff like ‘Where’s the bog?’ Not a good start. But, a year and a half later, we have a book.

A book that has SOLD OUT.

This post is about what I’ve learnt along the way and the advice I can give to anyone considering the same journey.

  •  You do not need permission to write a book and you do not need a publisher. If you believe in the book strongly enough, just start writing. You can work the rest out later.
  • Don’t tell anyone who doesn’t need to know. This goes against all your instincts at the exciting beginning, but it’ll serve you well in the long run. If you tell people, you will be immediately congratulated, even if you haven’t written a word. Psychology tests have shown that telling someone your goals makes them less likely to happen. And what’s more, without fail, every time you see that person from then on, they will ask, “So, how’s the book?” For example:

 

  • Know this: it ain’t easy. Unless you’ve got some money in the bank, you’ll need to work along the way, perhaps even full-time. You’ll have to work evenings and weekends. You’ll have to work during your holiday. You’ll have to work when the only thing you want to do in the whole world is have a cheese toastie and watch Top Gear repeats on DAVE. You’ll have to re-align your social life. And the whole time, it’s there, in the back of your mind (or often right between the eyes), nagging the fuck out of you. There will be tears.
  • You only need five things to get across the finish line. Once the book is written, you want one person who can turn it into a PDF and one person who can design a cover. You also want an ISBN number, which is as straightforward as ordering anything else over the Internet (tip: go here). You need a printer  – we used Leopard Print, based in Kent – and you need a website to take orders. If you’re resourceful and decisive, it’s possible to get from Word document to a printed sample of your book in 3 weeks and with just £500.

That’s how James and I did it. If you feel like you need a publisher to get the thing done, make sure you do your homework before pitching. If you get rejected once, twice or fifty times, that doesn’t mean your idea’s a dud. Nobody really knows.

Personally, I decided I didn’t want a publisher for three reasons.

1) I believed strongly in the individual and the content of the book and so just wanted to get on with doing it. My gut instinct was that I didn’t need approval. I needed to write the thing.

2) To remain in control of costs. If I was going to work that hard on something, I was going to put a value on it. I didn’t want Amazon hammering the publishing house for the lowest price going or the publishing house squeezing me for profits in areas I had no control of. I started with a cover that cost a fraction of what a publisher would allocate for a designer (thanks, Andreas Brooks). We’re now free to re-invest profits in something more elaborate. It’s straightforward small business bootstrapping, and it works.

3) PR and Marketing. Not bothered. If you know your way around the web, you know that marketing is free to anyone with a good idea. Furthermore, James Brown is a performer; a bloody brilliant performer. Every time he speaks, whether he’s ordering a pint or performing on stage in front of thousands of people, he’s marketing the book.

And that’s about it. In a nutshell, don’t worry about the whole ‘making it into a book’ bit. If you’ve got the steel to write a book in the first place, you’ve got what it takes to do the admin at the end. It was a bumpy ride, but so is anything in life that’s really worth doing. Just ask Huckleberry Finn. It turned out alright for him:

“So there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d ‘a’ knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t ‘a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.”