The Road to Wow

Tylock Releases The LinkedIn Personal Trainer

Today is an exciting time in the life of Steven Tylock – I should know, I’m him, and I’m excited!-)

This week marks the release of my first book The LinkedIn Personal Trainer. It’s both the hardest thing I have ever done, and the simplest.

As I wrote in “One, Nothing, Something, and Everything” – You can get from nothing to everything one step at a time. And so it was with this book. It’s the culmination of a bunch of little steps, but is only the beginning of a new path for me.

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It was a busy time…

Writers seem to know that they have a story to tell, but very often the story that comes out isn’t the one they thought they’d tell. That’s certainly the case for me. I knew I had a book in me but even up to a year ago I didn’t have any idea I would be publishing The LinkedIn Personal Trainer this June.

At the time, I was working on a bunch of different things (and still am). One of them was wondering if I should do presentations about LinkedIn for networking organizations – I asked on one of my local email lists and received a very positive answer.

After spending months preparing, I presented to several local organizations with good results. Invariably, I’d get asked by individuals if, “we could meet to talk about LinkedIn?” Which led to me giving short, personal lessons.

The unexpected twist

And then someone suggested I become a paid coach for people that didn’t want to spend the time figuring it out on their own. It seemed to be a good idea, and I ran with it. One of my first thoughts was that if I’m training people, I better have training materials. Not finding anything available, I set off to build a complete and concise training manual to accompany my 90-minute lesson.

That training manual became the central outline for the book. I filled in the lesson material and added the insights that I would be offering the student as we worked together in person – building myself into the course.

Stretching every part of me

While I’ve been writing publicly for quite a while – first with technical articles and then here on this site – I don’t believe my name gets much mention inside the large publishing houses. I knew I’d have to arrange every aspect of producing the book myself.

I consider myself very fortunate – every time I needed a resource, I found it.

I learned about lulu.com out at the bus stop – a neighbor had used them to publish a couple little books for friends and family, and on investigation, I found they handled all of the logistics in book publishing that I had no interest in – the printing of books and running an online store.

When I finally had a revision that I thought was good for review, I turned to MyLinkedInPowerForum, a community of 4000 LinkedIn users looking for better ways to use LinkedIn. I enlisted a small group of volunteers to help.

For editing, I hired a freelance editor that I had met through the Rochester Professional Consultants Network. His comments were brutally honest and picky. And because of that, the book is better!

A book is not just one thing

I’ve read others talk about the process, and their advice is sound – there’s more to writing a book than just writing a book. You need the material for the book, but then you have to lay it out as a book, format pages, contents, provide a cover, get it reviewed, revise it and start back at the top of the list to make sure you haven’t left anything out. I cut the work down to manageable chunks and went at it with gusto.

When you’re responsible for the layout of your book (and you are with lulu.com), you have to think about things like – what goes onto the copyright page that’s on the back-side of the title page? (and so you research other books to see what other authors put there and take the advice of your editor when offered;-)

Wow

The “Wow” factor. I don’t recall where I first read of it, but the gist is that it’s not merely enough to satisfy people, you must Wow them. Through the review process I had heard many nice words about the book – great, wonderful, well written, terrific… It wasn’t until this morning that I realized “wow” was so much better;-)

I had recommended the book at one of our local networking events, and got a message back later. The gentleman had a bad experience with downloading the electronic version of the book from lulu. I gave him some technical advice on dealing with lulu, but also attached the book to my note back to him. (I was certain lulu would come through, but I wanted to make sure he received the book without any more effort on his part)

He later replied with “Wow”. Sure, the download had worked after a refresh, but he didn’t expect me to be sending him a copy. That was a great way to get going this morning, and it makes the point. Wow is great to hear.

All things

So here I have a book that is just one thing, but it covers a whole bunch of things. I built it from all of the things that have gone into my life before, and it will start a whole lot of things for me in the future. Compared to the universe, it isn’t much more than a speck of dust or a fleeting thought, almost nothing. It’s a unique thing, but words have been put on paper for millennia.

Funny how things appear when you step back to look at them…

No matter what it is – I hope you like it.