About two weeks ago I started writing my first book. The working title for the book is Personal Evolution: A Handbook for Getting the Most Out of Life and I plan to release it sometime in the fall. The book basically takes the core ideas of this website and really fleshes them out. Readers who have read all my articles here will be familiar with the concepts but I am presenting them in a very detailed and comprehensive way that couldn’t be done justice in a few blog articles.
Most of my articles simply skim the surface of a topic and don’t really leave a lot of room for deep debates. I love writing free content and my ultimate goal is to help people, but I believe there are a lot of people that want more depth that I really just can’t fit into a blog post. So far writing the book hasn’t impacted my blogging rate, so those readers who just want a new article every day or two won’t be left out.
Originally I thought of releasing the book as a free e-book. But when I totaled up the amount of content I wanted to write, I was looking in the 150-200 pages range, which is starting to get a little unmanageable for a basic e-book and the costs of producing it would make it difficult to distribute for free. As the folks at lulu.com are able to print hardcover and paperback books on demand, I’ve signed up with them and I’m testing their services.
Because the book would be in a 6×9″ format, the page count I initially projected is a little low. Based on the first two chapters I’ve written I expect the final book to be about 300 pages of content. The total amount of writing in the book is likely to rival the size of my entire archives. I haven’t settled on a final price for the book, but lulu.com has preset production costs that I need to take into account for publishing.
I’ve already written the first fifty pages of the book, but I understand that over half of the process of writing a book is editing and clean-up. Here is a chapter summary for Personal Evolution.
- Introduction
- Chapter One: Evolve Yourself
- Chapter Two: Habitual Mastery (vastly updated from the original series [1])
- Chapter Three: Goals
- Chapter Four: Productivity
- Chapter Five: Learning
- Chapter Six: Emotional Mastery
- Chapter Seven: Lateral and Vertical Growth
- Chapter Eight: Creating Passion
- Chapter Nine: Beginning Your Evolution
- Conclusion
Although it is still early, I’ll be needing a bit of help to get the book completed. I’m looking for people to review copies of the book before publishing. I will also be budgeting expenses for someone who can do cover/book jacket design and someone who has professional book editing experience to do a final edit of the books content. If you would like to do a review or can recommend/offer services for design/editing please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail [2].
Any comments, suggestions or questions are welcome.