Okay my book Loserthink, which I am happy to say was accepted yesterday so my publisher accepted my manuscript. Now it was, you know, I knew it would be accepted eventually because we have a long history and I know how to do these things, writing books that is. But it is always a big day for an author to be done with a book.

Now remember I have a day job plus this. So writing, adding writing an entire book on top of what you were already doing, your full-time job that you already had, is a really hard thing to do. I don't know if you can quite understand how hard it is to hold the material of a book in your head because for months and months you have to hold in your head all of the chapters. You have to keep reconfiguring them in your mind, figuring you know you have to learn which ones are stronger and weaker and how they all tie together. You have to figure out sort of a story arc even though it's non-fiction. You have to figure out a beginning and the middle and the end.

So the engineering complexity of writing a book, the kind at least the books that I write, just the complexity of the actual engineering of the writing is insane. It is so brain draining that it's hard to explain. If when you think about writing you're typically, if you're imagining being a writer you say to yourself okay if I can imagine what that would be, you're sitting in front of your keyboard and you know what you're going to write about, you've either researched it or something you know and you're writing sentences. So your imagination of what it's like to be a writer if you're not one is probably about writing sentences that fit well together.

But it's actually layer on top of layer on top of layer of how simple it is, who's your audience, you know have you connected your thoughts, how many thoughts are there, how long is it, how do you engineer them together, how do you manage people's feelings, how do you talk to the audience and still tell them something new, how do you add layers of humor, is there a visual element, to add a visual element how do you tie this all to the headlines, how do you tie it to the zeitgeist, something people are already thinking about, how do you make sure that people see it as something new because there are so many books in the world, how do you prevent somebody saying oh I think there's so many books like this already. How do you do all those things?

You have something like a 25-dimension problem and every time you sit down to write a sentence you have to imagine all 25 dimensions so that your one sentence you're writing, and there will be many sentences in your book, that every sentence makes sense with about 25 dimensions. So that's what it's like to write a book. And if you could imagine how absorbing that is and how much it takes of your gray matter, you know I mean I barely have enough left over to drive a car. You know it's so completely absorbing.

Now not everybody writes books with the same method I do. So I know from experience that a lot of you have curiosity about the mental process or the business process of writing a book and I understand because I had the same curiosity before I was doing it.

I usually work in layers meaning that I start laying down a layer and I'll go back to that layer and I'll rework it lots and lots of times but until I've got a layer that I like I don't add the next layer. So for example one layer might be an outline of the general topics I want to include in the book just so I'll make sure I've got the topics and they're roughly in the order that I want them. That's one layer. But then I've got to tie them all together. I've got to make sure that they make sense as a whole. That's another layer.

I've got to add a style of writing which could be different depending on who the audience is. So my style might be simple or it might be more academic or it might be more lighthearted or it might be something else. At some point I add humor so I might actually write an entire book and then go through and then change some of the sentences to funnier versions of the sentence. So that's a whole other layer.

And organization wise somebody asked a question how do you organize a book and the answer is there's some things that you need to have in some places. So typically your first chapter or two you want to be really really strong and you want it to be the one that makes you curious for the rest of the book. So your first two chapters are really a marketing job for the rest of the book. So marketing is another layer. You're actually marketing the book within the book because if somebody reads the first few pages that does not mean they're going to read the rest of the book. A lot of people bail out. So your first few pages are really a marketing plan to get somebody to read the rest of the book.

Then the last part, the last chapter, you want to leave people with something that they take value from and ideally something they feel. So if you get to the last page of a book and you don't feel a sensation then you haven't done it right or at least you haven't done it as well as you could. You want somebody to feel at the end of the book one of these things. It could be any of these things but you want them to feel one of these things. One: I've got to talk to somebody about this right away. If at the end of a book somebody is saying I need to talk to somebody about this, this is so interesting, I just got to go talk to my friend about this, that's a good book.

If they feel oh my God I just got to chill, that's a good book. If their body, if they're crying, if they feel inspired, that's a good book. If you can get somebody at the end of the book and they say to themselves I'm definitely going to read this book again, that one I love. All right if the last word somebody reads in your book, they read that last word and the next thing they think is damn I got to read this book again, not right not today but I want to read it again.

So those are just some of the things that you want people to see at the end, feel at the end of the book. The middle of the book tends to be a lot of the let's say the bread and butter, the meat and potatoes, the information that may not be fascinating but is still the meat of the book. You know the real important factual good points, solid thinking, etc. So the middle of the book can sometimes be less interesting. At the same time it's more useful. So it could be the useful part of the book in the middle but as an author you know that because it's factually thick it's going to be hard to make it interesting at the same time. So if you've got a lot of stuff you're trying to convey you don't have as much wiggle room for adding the art and the feel and the guiding the reader through.

So those are your basics. You want a big opening that's really the marketing to tell people yeah I really do want to read the rest of this book. So that's your good stuff. The middle might be less fascinating but more useful. So the first part is more getting you interested and getting you excited. The middle part might be less exciting but really the useful part of the book. And then at the end you want to leave them with a feeling. You want it's like a gift. What gift did you give them at the end of the book?

So that's for non-fiction. For fiction you've got a whole story arc. That's a different deal.