How to Publish a Book Even If You Are Not a Writer with James Woosley | Ep 7

Having a paper book gives a credibility to the person, you become an authority in people’s eyes. And for many people publishing a book was a huge jump in their career. But it always seems complicated and takes a long time.

In this episode, we will talk to James Woosley about how to publish a book even if you are not a writer.

And as this episode is part of the Marketing on a Budget series we will also talk about how you can publish a book without spending a lot of money.

James is a significant influencer and strategic planner who communicates the potential he sees so that it can be realized. As a project manager, coach, and consultant, he helps people and organizations move ideas from the dreaming and planning stages to full implementation.

There was a time when James wanted to make his first book as real as any book published by a major company, and he did it. It turned out to the self-publishing company where he helps other people to publish their books.

In this episode, we will cover:

• [00:22] About the episode and James Woosley
• [02:49] James shares how diversity of his experience brought him to the strategic planning and writing his first book
• [04:06] How writing a book benefits you and your business
• [05:43] James started to get more clients, getting on interviews and it turned to a new business
• [06:31] Who can write a book
• [07:35] What to do if you are not a natural writer
• [09:10] How to choose what to write about if you have many ideas and knowledge
• [10:01] If you write a cookbook, but talk about different things your audience won’t be interested in buying your book
• [10:08] What’s the process of writing a book?
• [11:38] James shares how he wrote his first book
• [12:46] What to start writing a book from?
• [14:28] How to finish a book faster, but still keep it effective?
• [15:47] Chunk your process so you can see the progress on your calendar
• [16:39] How James had his ups and downs in his writing
• [17:39] What to do when you finished writing your book and ready to publish it
• [18:02] The choice between self-publishing and traditional publishing
• [19:29] Should you do everything by yourself or invest in the book?
• [20:14] Finding the balance between quality of writing and presentation of the book. James talks about J.K. Rowling as an example
• [22:13] How much it costs to publish your first book and how to do it at a low-cost
• [25:25] If you’re really on a budget – start with the ebook
• [27:34] Get your book published on Amazon
• [28:06] Are you spending so much time developing your book vs. creating content and serving your customers? Outsource things that aren’t core of your business
• [29:40] What are 3 steps you can do to start writing and get ready for publishing your first book
• [31:15] Even 20-30 minutes a day will make the difference
• [32:42] Where to find James
• [34:34] For the show notes go to marinabarayeva.com and subscribe to the Marketing for Creatives show

3 Steps you can do to start writing and get ready for publishing your first book:

1. Pick your topic of the book
2. Outline your book. Make it easier to accomplish each milestone, divide the process into small pieces: 1 hour of writing, 1 page at the time, etc.
3. Sit and write. Have it as a discipline

Pin the quotes on your Pinterest:

Download podcast transcript [PDF] here:

• How to Publish a Book Even If You Are Not a Writer

Resources from this interview:

• Learn more about James Woosley on freeagentpress.com
• Read James’ books Conquer the Entrepreneur’s Kryptonite: Simple Strategic Planning for You and Your Business and Challenge Accepted!: A Simple Strategy for Living Life on Purpose
• Publish your book online on kdp.amazon.com
• Follow James Woosley on Twitter

Connect with Marina Barayeva:

• marinabarayeva.com
• Follow Marina on Instagram
• Follow Marina on Twitter

How to Publish a Book Even If You Are Not a Writer – Interview Transcription

Marina Barayeva:

So looking forward to this episode. James, let’s start from the beginning. You are strategic planner, project manager, coach, consultant. How did you get to all of this? What do you specialize in? And how did you come up with the idea of getting your books?

James Woosley:

Well, I do a lot of things probably because I have multiple personality disorder, something like that. I like to do a lot of different things. But I really think what it comes down to is – I’ve just had a lot of different experiences from my time in the military, the time in consulting and then realized that I had this kind of strategic planning – gift, that my coach pointed that out to me.

I’ve just done a lot of different things, but really what it boils down to is I am good at getting things done. And so, I take all of the ingredients and I can make what needs to be made out of those ingredients.

In terms of books, that kind of came out as an extension of all those other things. I’d always loved writing, publishing, I’ve been a high school newspaper editor, year book editor in college. I just love that part of my life, but as I got into the real world, I got away from that. I came back around whenever I became a coach, and I wanted to write a book to share my knowledge with people.

And I wrote that book, got it out there and everybody is really impressed with how well it was done. That turned into ‘Can you help me with my book?’ Since then it’s just turned into a nice business of publishing and helping other people publish their books.

Marina Barayeva:

Fantastic. It’s good to have a nice feeling that you have a book. But still we are in business, and we need to market ourselves. How did the book benefit your business and what we can plan or expect from publishing the book?

James Woosley:

There are so many different ways of getting the book done, and I went around of, I don’t have a big audience, right? I needed to find a way to position myself a grown audience. For me, the eternal desire to write a book overrode the need to ‘Let’s wait 2-3 years, build an audience of 10-20 thousand people and then write a book, right?

I decided No, I need to write a book, because it’s in my heart and I have to get it out’, it’s kind of blocking me from doing anything more. So, I wrote the book to establish my expertise to get my thoughts out on paper, to have some tool that I can share with my clients, people I’m training and to help them do their strategic planning.

I went within backwards approach, from what most people will say. That did help me to establish expertise and that did help me grow an audience, not as big as it could have been – had I done it other way around, but it was right path for me.

I wasn’t looking at New York Times Best Selling Author, things like that, with my first book. I’d still love to do that one day, but for that point, 4 years ago, when I wrote that book, it was no, I just need to get the book out, establish that expertise, have that tool’ and then grow my business around that.

What happened was exactly that – I started getting some clients, I started getting on interviews, I started doing all these different things, and the book really helped me get some traction. What I didn’t expect was that the book itself would turn into the business. That was not the content of the book, that was the structure, the organization, the look and feel. Then it eventually turned into a publishing business.

So, you have to be ready for those surprises when they happen, but I think it’s great for people to write books, it really does establish your authority, your expertise, and gives you something that you can give and share with your audience.

Marina Barayeva:

What a nice surprise – write a book and ‘Wow! You got a new business there!’

James Woosley:

You never know what’s going to happen, so you got to be ready to ready to peeve it.

Marina Barayeva:

Exactly. You mentioned that you liked to write, and you were thinking about your book for a while. Who do you think can write and publish the book? Because many people can’t really write. A maximum they can do is they just text the message on the phone or do a post on social media. The book seems too much hard work and still they want to have their book.

What to do with that?

James Woosley:

I think there is a survey out there that says that up to 95% of people want to write a book. So, there is this thing about writing a book that we all want to do, but so few people actually follow through and do it. Some who do – do it poorly. And it’s really a dangerous thing to do for your marketing and your messaging, because now you’ve got this ugly thing out there, these horribly written things.

You don’t want to do that, you want to make it as good as you possibly can. I am a writer, I love words, I love putting words together, at least in English. I am not bilingual in any way, so my words in another language would be horrible. But you’ve got to take what you’ve got.

If you’re not a natural writer, but you still have ideas and concepts and those ideas and concepts can be put in a book format, there are different ways to do it. I know when I worked with a lot of speakers. And a lot of speakers will have a keynote address. We can take a keynote address and we can formulate it into a book, just by adding some stories, adding some content here and there, and coaching them through that process.

Whether they write it or whether they speak it and have it transcribed and then we compiled it together into a book, there are other people who just need to sit down with somebody and tell their story and the person writes their book for them. That’s like using a ghost writer. So, I think, there are lots of ways to think about writing as a different thing.

We always think of somebody sitting at the typewriter and typing it out, but content creation is really what the book is about. Book is just one form of a content. It could be an audio book, it could be a training program, it could be a keynote address, it could be a lot of different things. The book is just one manifestation of that concept.

To anybody who’s not a writer, I would say ‘Don’t worry about that’, think about what’s your concept, what’s your idea and how do you define what that is and then get it into the format that your audience needs, and a lot of times that’s a book.

Marina Barayeva:

But some people want to have their book, as you said, a lot of people, like 90% or whatever, but many people have bunch of knowledge and so many ideas and not sure what to choose what to focus on.

James Woosley:

You got to think what your inner state is, what is the goal for the book.For me, part of my goal is just ‘I want to write a book’. Okay, I have written any book and checked that box of. But I wanted to write a book that had substance, and had meaning and it made difference for people. And at that time, I was really focusing on my strategic planning business, so I said ‘Well, I’ve got all these different book ideas, but this is the book I need to write right now.’

Why? Because I need this book to help me grow my business, to establish my expertise, to have collateral and tools and a written-out process for people to follow.

You’ve got to think in terms of: what’s the book that you need to write; what’s the concept you need to write for; what’s are the in-results that you want to get out of that; and what’s the impact it’s going to have on your audience; what book does your audience want from you?

If you’re writing a cook book, but you’re talking to people about something completely different, they’re not going to be interested in buying your cook book. You’ve got to think of the things that your audience is interested in as well and that you can sell. It takes some time and some work, but once you launch on that idea, the writing goes a whole lot easier, because now you’re focused on specific target.

Marina Barayeva:

What’s the process of writing a book?

James Woosley:

Everyone asks me how long, how many words does it need to be or what’s the best tool to use, all these different things. I really don’t have a good answer, because I say that the book needs to be as long as it needs to be and I don’t care how you write it, if it’s on stone tablets if that’s how you write best – then put it on stone tablets.

Lots of people use computers obviously these days and write in Microsoft Word, Google Docs or something similar. Others like a feel of a typewriter, others write it out by hand. Some people speak their books and get this recorded into the audio recorder. I can’t tell somebody how to write because we all write in a different way.

The point is that you have to get it out of your head, because when it’s stuck in your head, nobody else can benefit from that. You can’t change the world just by thinking of stuff. Your ideas don’t get outside of your head until you start transmitting them, whether it’s spoken or written or some other way. That’s what you got to do, to make an impact and make a difference.

I wish I had some magic formula. I think it helps to outline. I think it helps to create a plan around your book and to set aside time to write.

For me my sweet spot, where I wrote best was in a first-class seat on a long airplane ride and so I had 4 of 6 hours to just sit there. This was then when I was first writing my book and there was no Wi-fi on planes.

So, I put my headphones in, I set at my computer and I just typed. I had 6000-8000 words done in that time frame. Because I had no external stimulus. It was like being in a pod. I can just go in that pod and just write, and it was my only focus. That for me was my sweet spot. Other people, they need to go to coffee shop, they need the noise. Find your place when you do your best work and then do that.

Marina Barayeva:

As you said that you need just to start doing that, writing that. For many people that is the most difficult part. Because when you start writing, then you go with the flow and it’s much easier. What did you do from the very beginning when you started writing your book? You just wrote down everything or what did you do?

James Woosley:

I would recommend that you write ugly, right? Just get the words out, because a lot of times what I did is I just started writing and I would hate as I was writing. But then good stuff would start to come. My ideas would become more clear and I could communicate them better.

One of the things I did, as I was teaching a lot of classes at that time. So, I started my book, I had a general outline, and then I listened to my own recordings. So, I teach a 2-hour class or series of classes on this topic, and I would just sit and listen and as I was listening I was writing down. Like I was a student in my own class taking notes. And I was writing down the best stuff.

There was supposed to be a float because I had earlier recorded it. So now I can just take and master that. I could have all the words on paper, not a transcript. Just the highlights. And I can move them around just so they were in the best order. Then I can just add on to that.

For my first book, I had 18 chapters, because I built out an outline for 18 chapters, and then I thought each chapter, I broke it down. I said ´What are the key points of this chapter, the 3 to 5 things?’ Once I did that, I had 18 chapters 3 to 5 things per chapter. All I really needed to do is to write about 7-8 blog posts.

That size of content, you start to check them of and you do it. It changes a lot in a way, that’s normal. Because what’s your initial outline is going to shift and as the book evolves and you see a better way to do it, but it gets you going. That’s the most important thing is to get going, start writing, write ugly and you clean it up afterwards.

Marina Barayeva:

It sounds like a lot of writing is over there. Of course, it should be, but do you have any tricks how to write it faster or finish it faster, but still to keep it effective?

James Woosley:

You’ve got to set some deadlines for yourself. If you have that outline and you know that it needs to be 20 thousand words or 40 thousand words, or 60 thousand words, whatever that might be, the target – break it down into bite-size pieces. You do that first by breaking it down into the sections that you need to write and you estimate: okay, it’s 500 words per section, 800 words per section, whatever that might be.

And say, okay I’ve got 70 sections outline, if I do one per day, I’ll have my book done in 70 days. At least, the first raw draft of it. So, you can’t sit down at the computer and say – ‘okay, I have to write my book this weekend’. You’re not gonna write a 40-thousand-word book in a weekend, most people aren’t. There’s always an exception out there.

Marina Barayeva:

Of course.

James Woosley:

But the most people, that’s just too much to bite out. You could write a 5000-word book and it can be really really good in a weekend. It took me 3 years to write my first book, it took me 5 days to write my second book. Why? They were completely different books, I had different material to start with, and it was just a different focus.

Obviously, the knowledge of having it done once before helped a lot. But you’ve got to set some deadlines and focus, and then chunk your work. Build it so you can do a bit at the time and you can see that on a calendar or in a schedule and say ‘Okay, I have to have my first draft done in 3 months or in 1 month or in 6 months’, whatever your timeline is.

And you say ‘Okay if it’s 60 thousand words and I got 6 months, I got to do 10 thousand words per month’. That’s so and so number per day or per week. You just break it down. Then you have to have the self-discipline to sit down and do it. That’s the hardest part – self-discipline.

But if you start to see your progress, make a chart and keep track of your numbers. There’s power in seeing the progress, in starting the checked boxes. That’s like ‘I am making momentum, I am making this happen, it’s starting to go’.

What I felt, myself personally, I had a lot of ups and downs in my writing. I would write 6-8 thousand words in a sit-down on a plane and I wouldn’t touch it again for month. I went through confidence problems, distractions and all these other things that were going on in life at the time.

So that 3 years of the first book, which was about 40 thousand words, I could have it done a whole lot faster, but I was learning, I was gaining experience, I was refining my craft. As you got to give it time that it needs as well for those things. I don’t have a simple answer, it’s just you’ve got to do the work, and you’ve got to have a discipline to do the work.

Marina Barayeva:

Even if there is so much work, I still feel that you enjoy the process of writing your book. For those who already finished and ready to publish, what do we need to do to publish it?

James Woosley:

There are so many ways to do that nowadays. We live in an amazing time when don’t have to go to printing press. There is always this print-on-demand tool, where you can send your files of and somebody puts it together and then spits out the book. There are the traditional publishing rounds where you go through an agent, or you make a pitch to a publishing company and you hope to get picked up.

There are a lot of methods out there. I really like self-publishing, because I control the process. And I kind of consider myself an artist in that, so I understand layout and design and what it takes to convey a message in written form.

You’ve got to balance all those things to figure out – do I get a chance to getting a traditional publishing deal and do I want to wait so long if I do, because typically it tales 2 years or more for that book to actually get printed.

I can take a manuscript and if it’s tide, is it’s clean, if we know what the focus is – I can get it done in 90-120 days from start to finish. Sometimes faster. It depends. I don’t want to promise I can do it in a week. But if it was my only thing, if it was my book personally, I didn’t have to go through someone else with decisions, yeah, I could publish a book in a week.

You want to find what’s your timeline, what’s your budget, what’s your expectations of the book, that’s your audience’s expectations, do they care if it’s full of air, do they care if it’s ugly or plain. Or do you need a professional look in fields to your book.

I mean, if you’re a doctor or lawyer or something like that and you go out and publish your book and it’s got an ugly cover, full of typos and it’s written poorly, you’re putting your reputation on a line.

Marina Barayeva:

Typical book for a doctor or lawyer.

James Woosley:

But a lot of times people do. They just publish too fast. I am off for action, right? I want people to move quickly and get things done. The typo here and there is not going to kill you, but if your book is poorly written, poorly constructed, ugly, hard to read or it’s got like huge fonts and tons of spaces, it looks like the ‘grandma version’.

You’ve got to think about all of those things, if you just don’t have an eye for design, it’s not worth doing it yourself, it’s worth investing a little bit, finding somebody who does that work and getting it done professionally. It will make such a huge difference. I am not advocating though – making it look great without making it great to begin with.

So, there is beautiful, great content and there is beautiful, great composition. And how it looks and feels. You’ve got to have both as much as you possibly can. Don’t take a bad book and make it pretty, but if you expect to make a difference, beyond your audience, beyond your influence, then you got to have a good content and also make it look good.

You can have a good content and have it be ugly, but if you’re still trying to get some traction in a market, it will be really hard to sell that book. You take somebody like some famous author, J.K. Rowling, right? Hogwarts. Harry Potter. She could write a book and it could have a black text on a white cover, plain as it could be. It says: New book by J.K. Rowling and she’d sell a million copies overnight.

Because she has that platform and that name. The content better be good though. Because if she writes junk and she makes it look beautiful. Even though she is really popular on her stuff, the people will revolve. Because it’s like: what is she doing, that’s just horrible. It will come back around. So, you’ve got to find the balance between quality of your writing and quality of your presentation.

And when you do both, I am not talking like all-star best Pulitzer, all those kinds of things, but if you can do both well – you can carve out a niche in the marketplace and really make a difference in your business.

Marina Barayeva:

That’s a good point to keep good content and to make it pretty. And with all of the process, how much does it cost to self-publish your book for the first time and this is the episode of the marketing on the budget series, so how can we find a balance between writing a book, keeping it pretty and don’t spend a lot of money on it?

James Woosley:

That’s the challenge, right?

Marina Barayeva:

Yes.

James Woosley:

It’s hard to do everything all at once. And in project management there is what’s called theory of triple constraints; your speed or your schedule, your budget and your cost, and then your scope for your quality. And they always say’ ‘Pick two’. So, you got to factor in all these different things and really looking at your business, how much you can invest in the project? What’s it worth? What’s it going to mean?

You really want to think about it in terms of the investment, right? The trick is that most people will not make enough money from book sales to make up the cost of what it takes to publish the book. So, you’ve got to think in terms of ‘yeah, sales are great, but what’s it going to mean for my business?’

Because if you wrote a book and it cost you around 2000-3000 dollars to get it published, but you start getting 10 thousand dollar clients out of it – it’s worth it, instantly. But if you spend 10 thousand dollars on a book and you start getting $100 clients, you have to get a bunch of clients for that to make sense. You really got to balance that out.

What does it cost?

I have the skills and the knowledge and the expertise from years of doing this. I can publish a book for 0 dollars and it can be awesome. I don’t recommend that though.

Marina Barayeva:

Why?

James Woosley:

Because most people don’t have the knowledge and skills and experience to pull it up. It will be an ugly poorly done book. It’s easy to find someone up there and spend 10-20-30 thousand dollars and have your book professionally done.

I don’t think that’s required and I really get scared when people do that because a lot of those companies, I am not going to name any names, but a lot of those companies are vanity process. They’re saying “Give me lots of money and I’ll publish your book” and then when the book sells – they keep the royalties or they split the royalties with you. They own your content and it gets really messy there.

So, what I do – I kind of split the middle and I say “Look, I am going to help you publish your book and it’s going to cost few thousand dollars, you know, depending on what’s needed – cover design, e-book design, print, audio book, whatever is needed, will build that package and you own it”.

When it’s done – you get all the files, you’ll own all the copyright; you get all the royalties, because I am setting it up in your name and in your account. That’s the best way I found to do it, because that’s what I’d want as an author.

As if I’m going to hand of my book, my baby to somebody else and say “Make this perfect and then give it back to me, I want to own it”. I want it to be mine. That’s the bold part; it really depends on what you need.

But if you’re really tied on a budget and you need to have a book, you need to have some content out there, the things you need to invest are obviously your time to do the writing and pull it together, the next thing – invest in editing. I don’t care if you’re an English major, if you have Doctorate and all those things, you will still make your own mistakes, because we become blind to our own writing and our own mistakes.

The V-Vs to happen, we double a word, we misspell something or we just miss something because we’re blind to it. So, we’ve got to hire an editor now when your content is really good. Next – your cover design and your interior layout, those kinds of things.

But if you’re really on a budget – start with e-book.

Write an e-book. It’s much simpler to get the e-book out there. It’s easier to do it on your own. Otherwise I still recommend an editor and a cover designer, but you can upload a Word document at Amazon and there’re all kinds of tutorials online. You can get your e-book out there and then you can start getting audience feedback. You start seeing what people see. And it starts to get your message out without having the bigger investment of print.

Now there’re ways to do print cheap. If you’re in a fiction world – it works better, but in non-fiction where you’ve got charts and graphs and callouts and quotes – you need a greater design than just a straight text. You really need to find a graphic artist. A layout artist, somebody who understands book presentation, understands what their readers experiencing when they’re reading the book.

It’s like a poorly designed book will take you out of the experience. Because it’s like being in a movie theater and the cell phone goes off or the baby starts crying. You’re no longer watching a movie in the movie, it’s not immersive, and you’re now listening to baby cry. With poorly designed book, you’re flipping to the pages and you realize you’re reading a book instead of being in the story.

That’s why you want to go as professional as you possibly can. If you’re tied and you’re on a budget – start with e-book, it’s easier on the point of entry. But then grow that business; grow those sales so that you can release the print book. If you can get that going, then release the audio book. I call that the ‘try factor’.

When you search on Amazon and you see a book and it’s got e-book version, a print book version and an audio book version – you intrinsically know ‘hey, this person invested in their book, there is something behind this, it’s more than just fluff’.

Because anybody in 5 minutes can upload a word document and have their book on Amazon – it doesn’t mean it’s good. So, there’s a lot of junk out there. Raise above the junk, present your content and give it what it deserves. So that you can reach your audience and have authority with your audience. Because if you start producing junk – you will have a junky brand.

Marina Barayeva:

How to get to Amazon? Isn’t it just for regular publishers? Anyone can add their book there?

James Woosley:

Anyone can do it. You know, kdp.amazon.com for publishing on Kindle e-books. It’s the biggest bookstore in the world, I think 60% of e-books are sold on Amazon. Very easy to do. Harder to do well, to do really really well. But easy to get started.

Experiment. Play with it. Create a Top 10 list or Top 100 list and just put something up there and learn through the process, which you have to be careful of those: are you spending so much time developing your book vs. creating content and serving your customers?

Because if you’re not careful, you’ll go down that hole and your customers will all disappear, because they don’t see you anymore. Is your business – writing and creating content or is it doing whatever that you do and the content is simply an extension of that.

That’s why you need to outsource those things that aren’t the core of your business. Find the experts that do it well and do it great, and then use them and pay them appropriate lead to do that.

I don’t recommend things like Fiverr, but a lot of people use Fiverr. Fiverr to me is powerful for some things, but it’s dangerous for things like branding and content stuff. Because think about it: they’re making 5 dollars to spend a few minutes of doing something, there have been cases when people have stolen pictures to put book on book covers and then there’s copyright issues.

Just because you’re spending only 5 bucks it –you’re not getting a true professional in most cases. There’re good people on Fiverr, I am not beating them up. But I’m going to invest to make sure that it’s done well and one right.

Marina Barayeva:

Fantastic. If you would put all of those into strategy from writing to publishing, what are 3 steps our listeners, our dreamers of their first book could begin from to start writing and get ready for publishing their first book?

James Woosley:

I know for some people it seems really daunting, really hard. It’s like saying ‘I want you to go carve a 5^th person on mount Rushmore’ and it’s like what? But it’s really not that hard, when you boil it down to the basics.

Step 1 – pick your topic. What’s the core of what you do, and what’s the topic? How are you going to serve people with your writing? Are they going to be entertained, are they going to be equipped or are they going to be educated? What is your message? And pick that topic and say ‘Okay, that’s the book I’m going to write’, ‘How to XYZ’. Whatever it can be.

Step 2 – outline your book. We talked about outlining earlier, it just makes this huge process, it makes it’s easier. Because now it’s done to bite size chunks. It’s an old saying: how did you eat an elephant one bite at a time? It’s cliché, but it’s true, because the book is a massive undertaking or it can be. But if you just break it down, you can write one word at a time, one page at a time, one chapter at a time, – it starts to come together and you start to see progress really really fast.

And step 3 – this is the hard one. Sit down and write. It’s the discipline of doing it.

Marina Barayeva:

The hardest step.

James Woosley:

Absolutely, it’s the hardest step, because you can dream about it all day long. I dreamed about it for 20 something years that I wanted to write a book.

Marina Barayeva:

That’s too long.

James Woosley:

No, it’s way too long and I got tons of ideas, I’ve got notes. I’ll think of a good cover and I’ll go and register a domain, right? How many people are guilty of that? But we never take it to the next step. So you’ve got to have a discipline to sit down and write. And if it’s curving out 20 minutes a day – that could be all it takes.

It’s just 20-30 minutes a day, just sit down and work on a book. Then you go off to your regular job or you go off to work on your business or you go off to take care of your kids, whatever it might be that takes the majority of your time. If you carve out a window of time, 10-20-30 minutes, and hour – whatever you can afford.

And you just sit down and you do it consistently – you will be able to write your book. Most people though, they don’t have the discipline to do that.

Marina Barayeva:

Thank you, James. You really simplified that process. Still seems hard, but already have some vision on how to do it.

James Woosley:

Well, the hard things are the things that are worth doing, right?

Marina Barayeva:

Exactly.

James Woosley:

I like to make things simpler, I like to make them easy, but they have true meaning, when there’s some difficulty and some sweat that you have to put into it. It can be a simple thing that is still hard to do. And that’s where the value comes from. So, give your audience that value, give them the best of yourself, not some fluff. Not some junk. Do the work and rewards will come. Maybe not fast, but they will in a long-term.

Marina Barayeva:

Thank you, James. Where can we find you? Where can we know more about your publishing business? How can we connect you and just like how can we get in touch with you?

James Woosley:

Absolutely, my website is freeagentpress.com You can go there, it needs an update, but hopefully we’ll be getting an update soon as my work slows down for the end of the year and I’ll work on that on Christmas. But you know, when you’re busy, we know the website is good enough. But all my basic info is up there and you can reach out and schedule an appointment, we can talk about books and that stuff. And see if I might be the right person to help you put your book together.

I am putting together some coaching programs where we actually go through the process of writing and publishing your book within a 6-month period. If there’s anybody interested in that, you can just reach out to me, just James on freeagentpress.com, that will kick off in January and I hope to continue doing those groups on a cyclical basis. If you’re listening to this in June, don’t think you’ve missed out, just reach out to me and see when next class is.

It’s going to be a lot of fun to really go deep with authors and help them create their content and build out their books. It’s a fun process, it’s the closest thing I’ll ever get to being a labor delivery doctor I guess, you know ‘here is your baby, here is your book’. It’s a lot of fun and I enjoy it. There is nothing quite like the feeling of opening up the book, the first time you see it and smelling it and touching it.

And I get to help people experiencing that. So, it’s a lot of fun.

Marina Barayeva:

James, I really like how you say it, ‘it’s hard, there is a lot of work, but it’s simple and it’s easy and have fun.’

James Woosley:

Yes.

Marina Barayeva:

Thank you so much. I am very grateful for this episode and I wish you to have a good day.

James Woosley:

I thank you very much, it’s been a pleasure of speaking with you. And I hope your audience gets a ton out of it and I’d love to hear from everybody, what did you like, what did you not like and whether did you have questions?

Marina Barayeva:

Sure, we’ll keep in touch shortly.

Marina Barayeva

Marina Barayeva is an international speaker and coach who helps women entrepreneurs become recognized experts and confidently sell their services. She is also a TEDx speaker, has presented to audiences in Asia and North America, and has been featured in such media as ArtPeople, CCTV, China Radio International, and others.