We all have that wish list or bucket list in our lives – that travel or destination we want to visit, the side hustle that we want to complete (still would love to start a restaurant that serves coffee, craft beer and BBQ) or that “love to have” achievement that you might be working towards. For me, I have always loved writing and never seem to make the time for it, that was, until May of 2022 where I stepped up to a LinkedIn request to author a book with Packt!
- Accepting the author offer and planning my confidence
- Planning the writing and delivery of chapters
- Working with the Packt team
- Support from my friends and the community
- Marketing the book and publishing experience
- Author and Book resources
- Conclusion
Not going to lie – I was impostering a bit with the offer. Why me? Why now? How could I really fit this into my schedule? Will people even trust that I’m an expert in ANY of these topics? Then I paused and reflected for what seems like a week (was maybe a day) and agreed to at least pitch an outline to match what the AZ-801 Exam from Microsoft tests our knowledge on. It was truly a whirlwind from the time of submission to acceptance of the outline with very little revision to what I thought would bring value to readers.
I started brainstorming and thought about what most study guides seem to lack – a building blocks approach to learning starting with small consumable bits and building upon prior learning with each chapter, then building to a full hands-on and fully functional environment. The largest hurdle was truly planning my confidence to ensure that I was clear-headed during the writing process reminding myself of the:
- The why: I wanted to share my learning path and experience with others so that they could learn and be successful in their exam pursuit.
- The how: I needed to ensure I was taking time for myself while taking care of my mind and my body during this process while keeping confidence high, resisting the nay-sayers (including myself) while keeping the “keep going and don’t stop” mentality. I also needed to ensure that I could create this lab environment with as little cost to the reader as possible.
- The when: I needed to determine the schedule for availability of time to complete drafts of chapters and I also needed additional time for any reviewer feedback, rewrites and adjustments to the content forcing me to set and keep boundaries for both work and general social life. Yes, this meant I was frequently writing on nights and weekends, including travel time to conferences!
- The where: I honestly never thought much about this until the second or third chapter was being drafted. I found that a consistent approach to time, setup of writing environment (with open lab environment and research tabs) was key. A cup of green tea, glass of water and snacks were all gathered before I got into the “writing groove” at my standup desk. Sure, there were moments where I was writing in other parts of the world – but the majority was done from this one consistent spot in my house.
Honestly, creating the outline was easy to complete – it was the schedule of chapter delivery that was incredibly hard (and little did I know, helpful at the time) to determine. There were at least 25 chapters with some of them reaching over 30 pages. I followed a rinse-repeat process that I will outline below:
- Scheduled roughly 1 week per 10 pages of writing. This means that if I had to deliver a 30 page chapter, I would ensure I had roughly 3 weeks (two weekends) to complete all of my research, lab setup, capture of lab steps and writing of additional deeper supporting content for each topic.
- All prior scheduled events and appointments were communicated to the Packt team (including holiday time as not everyone celebrates the same holidays that the US does).
- All research was completed first and a wireframe was created for the lab buildout and took roughly one day. This was to ensure that the lab was at least possible first (with little changes to the UI or scripts being used).
- Lab buildout and rebuild was completed next with a few late nights of tinkering to ensure the steps were smooth and the approach understandable. Larger labs took a few days to complete.
- Screenshots were taken during the second pass at the lab buildout and were added to the wireframe chapter (using Microsoft Word and Packt’s awesome formatting template).
- Writing the fill-in content was completed next which typically took the longest and required the most focus.
- By the time I was into Chapter 4, I was averaging 2-3 pages of content per hour which helped to meet out deadlines quite nicely.
I must say, the Packt team was quite accommodating during the entire process. I worked with a team of 7-10 folks throughout and found everyone to be incredibly friendly, supportive and flexible during the writing process. There were multiple times where either I or one of my family members were sick for an extended period of time.
I quickly found that communication was paramount – the sooner I shared that something had come up, the sooner we could all adjust our expectations and timetables for delivery. I was attending various conferences in Orlando and other spots in the US, so there were adjustments to the scheduling that simply had to be made. There were only two chapters that were late (by a day or two) and let’s be honest – this was NOT my primary job so this is expected.
While there was some handing off between editors at Packt, this process was quite smooth and ultimately helped to deliver a more well-rounded resource to the community.
I will say that I could NOT have done this without the support of my family and a few key community friends. Everyone was supportive in both answering any questions I had on the process, how to approach certain content delivery, overall health and wellness during the process and keeping me positive throughout the entire process. Having one of the best minds (Shannon Kuehn) to review and write the foreword for the book was a blessing in disguise, helping me to deliver one of the most solid guides for this wide surface area of content!
One of the greatest moments of 2023 – where my mentee had purchased an advanced copy of the physical copy of the book. She took it to Arizona so that I could autograph it in person before giving our joint session at DynamicsCon Live 2023!
This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon for sure. Plan the work and work the plan is just one approach – planning for community support and downtime is just as necessary for overall success!
I was gifted a great team to help send out reviewer copies to folks and found that positive and rewarding reviews were pouring in for support of this resource! I was humbled to have the opportunity to complete an interview process from Packt on my experience with writing the book and that article can be found here.
I did have to order additional physical copies to do my own book signing event but those are minor details…
The experience I had was not even close to what I had expected from the start and that was a very good thing. I have learned so much from this experience and have realized the sheer amount of knowledge and work it takes to pull this together. I could not have done this by myself and really appreciate the teams, my family and friends and the community support in general for this resource. I hope that you all continue to find this book valuable in your certification pursuits and ask that you reach out if you have any questions on the content, the process of writing or simply to say hello/congrats/thanks!
CG
