Damn! Why Didn't I Write That? | Book Club Picks - For Authors | Forum

I’ll give this a go because I finished the book a few days ago. I do want to be honest, though, and say that I really was not impressed by this book; I wouldn’t be surprised if the author spent 2 days maximum working on it. However, in one of the book proposals samples that the author, Marc McCutcheon included in the book, one can see that he is talented and does have extensive experience. I do also have to say that this book did make me consider the possibility of a nonfiction book, especially when you review the number of people trying to create fiction books vs nonfiction books.  Even though I wasn’t that impressed by the book, it just didn’t speak to me necessarily, but I am sure that the book will appeal to other people.

Because I didn’t feel thatthis book was that great, I had a hard time answering the questions. For example, providing a massive list of book titles in chapter 1 covering books such  as “Star Wars Quotes” was not appealing to me as a reader,  so I don’t want to revisit it again in a series of questions (although if I liked the book, I’m sure that I would respond in different manner). I’ll include my answers to below a few the questions that were interesting to me, though.

Q5. Did you learn anything new about book market research from Chapter Four? Tell us what that is.

I do think that the author presented a unique way of approaching marketing research in one of his comments in chapter 4. In particular, purchasing 2 to 3 books of the leading competitors so that he could identify in gaps and/or weaknesses.

Another new idea for marketing books that I learned from this chapter as thinking from the get go: Can the book be turned into a series?  Great approach.

Q7. Knowing the growing interest in indie publishing today (not to mention a significant history of success in independent and e-publishing specifically nonfiction work), would you opt to independently publish if you wrote a nonfiction book in the near future? If so, what kind of questions would you like to see answered if there were a future edition of this book with a bigger emphasis on that publishing path?

This idea occurred to me immediately when I read this book—the idea of trying to appeal to an editor for months on end seemed ridiculous (to me). Moreover, now that there are tools for publishing your own work and access can be gained to your own audience, I don’t even understand the appeal of traditional publishing. Also, as most people are aware, the sale of Ebooks this year exceeded print books and I am sure the gap widen over time.

I think the following topics would be interesting if they were addressed in a future edition that focused on indie publishing:

• What are the main tools used for indie publishing? For example, what if you wanted to make a product available in Kindle? Or an ibook? Or a plain old downloadable PDF? In addition to listing each type of tool, I’d love to see the following: 1) where you find these applications; 2) what does the typical person need to do (do you need to hire someone? Can you do it on your own? If it is on your own, are there good learning resources?; 3) if it requires a specialists, what are the costs of these specialists or services? 4) how many audience members are you likely to reach via each application?; 5) are there any best practices (for example, some have reported improved purchases if they have a good cover); 6) where are good places to find a copyeditor and/or artist for your book?
• A real discussion of different approaches to pricing. Now I know that people are passionate about particular answers (book must be priced at X), but I’d rather see actual results (give us the numbers) and people who have experience and have experimented with these different approaches. I’ve seen a few blogs where people do this, actually. Show me the numbers, though, or you could have a few people debate it but give a thorough overview of pros and cons.
• Are there any interesting upcoming trends in the ebook/independent publishing industry? For example,there are some phenomal ipad apps for books – I'd love to see a more thorough review of these things or at least a few examples.
• Point us towards useful blogs. Also, this occurred to me as I read this book – you can tell that it was BARELY updated. If someone makes an ebook or kindle book or whatever, it would be much better if there were active links leading to blogs, whatever.

Q9 What was your favorite tip, story, or information learned from this book? What there anything you disagreed with strongly?

One of the things that I disagreed with was the suggestion to “Learn how to use all of the features of your computer and get connected to the internet.” I do agree that those are good starting points, but it should go far beyond this. If you are going to spend time as a freelancer, then explore the other tools, whether it is blogging, twitter, applications to create podcasts/video, learn new software, whatever –but least be aware of them and spend a little bit of time learning to use these tools.

Q10 The book includes a collection of resources at the end. Can you think of any others to add that would be beneficial to aspiring nonfiction authors?

Go to the next level – links to blogs, podcasts from universities, authors, etc.

Also, just a quick note; I really enjoyed this format for a book club (posted comments and you can respond when you have time). I saw past book clubs and it was hard for me to schedule the time to do so at times if I was really swamped with work – so this “drop in when you have time” works well. Thanks, this was fun, and I’m curious to see what other people thought about the book.

Hi Jenn,

Please don't think that my response is this harsh, I just didn't like the book and especially the first chapter and that's probably why I didn't comment too much on it before. But I suspect that you may be writing a book (or want to write a book) for indie/nontraditional publishing, so if this helps I'm elaborating as to what I thought of chapter 1 and the questions that you posed. Although I don't think that I enjoy what most people read, so let's hope more people give you information if this is in fact your goal or objective.

In response to the following question: "I'm curious about your feelings on the first chapter (with the huge list of nonfiction books published by average folks and the corresponding sales figures). What would say you didn't like about it? Did you not find the information inspirational at all?" I had problems with the following:

• The author made no effort to organize, it was a giant data dump (had this been done in the last few years, I would suspect they pulled data off a website or hired someone to drop it in there), but as a large assembled mass it didn't add anything.
• It could have been inspirational and the same point could have been made with a few categories and a few examples (I really feel like the extra material was fluff/padding to make it into many more pages than it needed to be).
• Did this really represent the "average" when the numbers pulled were best sellers? If the objective was to show what the average person could earn, the all the extremes should have been included: Are there lower amounts of $ earned and for what proportion of people? If you show the extremes, it isn't necessarily inspirational.
• The books weren't necessarily written by ordinary people, although that was the point the author wanted to make …there were some things that could have been written by a 70-yr old who loves knitting to a PhD who teaches physics at Columbia (notice that Brian Green's book was in there?)

I think all of the material in chapter 1 could have been condensed in a few pages maximum with a summary table; it would have made the point.

Even though I said all the negative things about the book, I did find a few positive things in the book, which I mentioned before.