I should have known I’d like Guy Kawasaki’s book, APE – Author | Publisher | Entrepreneur. And yes, he wrote it with Shawn Welch.
Like many, I know Guy, or feel like I do through his tweets, his Holy Kaw site which links to almost everything and through another big book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.
This book is, step by step, Guy’s experience with writing and self-publishing. The emphasis is on self-publishing, which he and Shawn call Artisanal Publishing a lovely term that makes me think of warm, yeasty bread.
That’s exactly the kind of care the two have put into this book. It’s a great, even a grand textbook on self-publishing with all its joys and all it’s problem. Plus it’s a fun read. They have little reverence for publishing which is downright refreshing.
It’s a big book, is almost 400 pages according to the book’s website – I read it on my Kindle which doesn’t give me page numbers. Some of those pages are step-by-step instructions on how to prepare and upload manuscript to various publisher’s sites – incredibly boring when you’re reading the book (and easy to skip until you need it) and hugely helpful when you’re actually trying to get your manuscript loaded.
But there’s way more than that in the book.
They start with a question few dare to ask: Should you write a book? Carefully read, this chapter alone can save all sorts of agony, for of course not everyone who thinks they should write a book really should.
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