UPDATE MAY 2019: the PRINT version has also been published—get your hands on a physical copy of the book too!
Another project has been completed!
I’ve wanted to take my Free Meditation Course and turn it into both an eBook and audiobook. One of those items got checked off on January 1, 2019; the other will hopefully be done this coming year.
So here’s how I did it. Plus, a preview after the story…
Can’t wait? Buy the book now!
…
I had originally planned to spend my downtime while volunteering in Panama last year as when I’d edit the original course. In the small cabin where I was staying, there was a simple desk looking with a large window (well, a giant wooden rectangle you would pull up and hitch to “open”) looking out into the tropical jungle, but I kinda decided to tackle a few other projects, like making a Spanish-language audiobook.
This is how all the great writers do it, right? It would have made for such a cool story too! Oh well…
Sunday Meditation
So fast-forward a few months and I was now in San Diego with freeways in the distance. Not quite as romantic as the Caribbean islands.
I still wanted to tackle this project and with everything else going on, I thought I might have a solution.
In one of her “Joyfully Jobless” newsletters, Barbara Winter once said that if you have multiple projects and want to make progress (and can’t put any of them down), then assign one to each day of the week.
I really don’t believe I could be that disciplined with all my projects (some I just enjoy too much!) nor could I make the kind of progress I’d like with just one day each week. I’d end up turning the monthly podcast into a quarterly one—and ain’t no one gonna stick around for that!
But I had a hunch I could actually complete the meditation project this way.
I planned to take about an hour on Sundays to edit the book, and then once that was complete, to format the book for the Kindle.
I started in November and it only took about a month to finish editing. There were, of course, little things when changing a course from email to book, but I also found there were a number of places where I wanted to clarify ideas, or perhaps expand a concept, or maybe I’d even changed my perspective or learned something new, so all was fair game!
With tracking on, I made nearly 300 changes to the original course, and still kept each day short! Only added about 1000 words total across the whole document.
I’ll actually be continuing these “Sunday sessions” to publish the print version, create an audiobook version, and any other ideas and marketing work!
Let’s publish this!
About halfway through my work, I decided to set my sights on releasing the book on 1/1/19—a great time for anyone to start building a new habit! The goal seemed very manageable, and I still had a number of Sundays left to not only work on the content, but get all the graphics and technical stuff done too.
It was definitely a challenging experience (writing clearly always is!), and I’m glad I took the time instead of just hitting “print on the original content. (I do plan to go back and edit the emails with all the updates too.)
Probably the most time-consuming and tedious process was the formatting. There are programs to help you do this, but you get really locked into things at a certain point, and you can’t re-upload new versions. I may just hire a professional Kindle formatter to go through and manually format it (since I can be crazy that way), but for now, it looks great and definitely works!
In fact, check it out for yourself…
Once you click “Preview” below, you can change the text size, and you can even click “Read in Kindle” to send yourself this preview on your Kindle device!
(For some reason, the formatting looks even better on the actual Kindle than in this preview. Go figure…)
You can buy the book right now and start the course today!
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What do you think?