I’m absolutely love writing. It’s cathartic for me.

For example, this week I’ve been on vacation and have spent practically everyone morning writing.

My biggest focus this week was putting the finishing touches on my newest book, Stress-Free Finances.

Stress-Free Finances is my fourth full-length book and the third book that I have self-published.

Today, I’m going to share with you the process and tools I use to self-publish a book. In hopes that I show you how simple the process can be.

Notice that I don’t say the process is easy. It’s not. Writing a book is a labor of love, no matter how you cut it. But, if you’ve ever thought of writing your own book, my process might work for you.

Why I self-publish

Before I go into my process for writing and self-publishing a book, I wanted to talk about why I choose to self-publish.

First off, my decision to self-publish has nothing to do with financial rewards. My friend, Mark Schaefer, who has self-published and done deals with publishers, has told me his income from book publishing is a nice income, but its not enough to sustain his lifestyle. This matches what I’ve read from other authors and statistics from the Author’s Guild Income Survey, which found, in 2023, the media income for full-time authors was between $20,300-$31,200.

Choosing to self-publish was largely about control for me. I wanted to write about the topics I enjoy and in a way that felt good for me as a writer. I didn’t want a publisher and editor to dictate decisions to me. For example, I had a timeline in mind, the goal had been to publish by the end of Q3 of 2024 (which I missed by a few weeks). With a publisher there would have possibly been penalties for not delivering on time.

Finally, I wanted to be able to use a tone that felt good to me. As an author, I’m pretty informal in my writing style. I even allow for grammatical and syntax errors in my writing.

Would the quality of my writing and therefore my books be better if I worked with a publisher? I’m sure that would be true. But, I don’t think I’d enjoy the process as much.

My self-publishing process and tools

I’m going to break this down in separate sections. First, I’m going to talk about my process. Next, I’ll talk you through the tools I use.

My self-publishing process

• Generating book ideas - coming up with topics to write about can be simple. For me, I either tell stories about my own personal and professional lives, because people love stories, or I write educational content. My first two books were based on the latter. “Lessons from a Failed Startup” told the story of my first startup, GoGrabLunch. I followed that up with “The Ladder or The Grind” where I explored my personal decision between being an entrepreneur or an employee. This new book, “Stress-Free Finances” is an educational download of everything I’ve learned about finance in 25+ years in the industry. What is great about those two ways of generating ideas - personal stories or educating people around topics you know well - is that it doesn’t require a ton of research, like a biography might. You are simply sharing what you know.
• Walking with the book concept - once I have a concept for a book, I will usually walk around with it, or think about it, for quite a while. I allow myself to ruminate on the overarching concept and as ideas for content come up I capture them.
• Researching similar books - I do spend time researching similar books, although that research typically falls short of buying those books and reading them. I’ve heard of some authors buying similar books and reading them, but I avoid that so that I don’t have my own content skewed by theirs. What I’m generally looking for in my research is the overarching concept, how I can approach the topic differently, and, more specifically, I use their book outlines to ensure I’m not missing a huge piece of the subject.
• Book covers - I will almost always create the books cover BEFORE I build the outline or start writing. This very well may be a bad idea, because I can see where the content of a book could dictate the title and more. But, for me, I like creating the book cover because it will excite and motivate me and makes the book feel more real to me. When designing a cover, I often look back at similar books in the category for inspiration. For example, for Stress-Free Finances, I looked at other personal finance book covers and many had the author’s picture taking up the bulk of the cover and then the title. Tony Robbins does this.
• Building an outline - Next up, I start to build the outline of the book. One thing that is important to note here is that where a chapter falls in the book can change once I have been writing for a while. One chapter’s placement might make sense in the beginning, but content in another chapter make necessitate moving things around. Another tip here is to not just list out the outline. Within each chapter I will list key talking points I want to cover.
• Let the writing begin! - I have never wrote a book in perfect sequential order. While my writing does tend to flow from one chapter to the next, because they are often building upon one another, I will veer out of order and work on other chapters. This typically occurs because something has come to the front of my writer’s brain during my “walking around” time or because something else brought that chapter to the forefront of my mind. For example, the fourth book I’ve written, that I didn’t mention above, was a fantasy book that I only shared with my immediate family and friends. The ending to that book came to me during a hard workout session. So, that night I skipped straight to the end and wrote that chapter. Now, that can be dangerous, because you have to make sure that chapter is backwards compatible with those that you write later.
• Writing environment - I’ve talked about this before in a past post. The environment I write in is pretty consistent. Most of the time I do my writing in my home office. However, sometimes I’ll write from a coffee shop. The perfect writing environment for me involves a keyboard that feels good to type on (nothing fancy; I’m using an Apple Magic Keyboard), some soft, no-lyric music playing in the background (usually Apple’s Spa station, like right now, or something LoFi). In the colder months, I’ll generally have a candle burning nearby, as a substitute for a fireplace, because my office doesn’t have one. Sometimes, I’ll run an ambient video on YouTube, with an autumn or winter setting (even in the spring and summer). I usually wear my blue light glasses, even during the day. This is less about blocking blue light and more about the action of putting on my glasses switches my brain into writing mode. My preferred writing time is in the mid to late mornings. I’m not an early morning person and I feel the most alert during the time between 9am-12pm. Finally, sometimes I’ll use the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of writing with a 5 minutes break).
• Editing - I try not to edit on the fly, because that interrupts my stream of writing. However, I will make small edits on the go. For larger edits I use software, see below, and, sometimes, I will hire a professional. Like I did for Stress-Free Finances. One takeaway here that I want you to realize is that even with editing assistance there will always be errors. For example, I do not like the way the spacing looks in one of my books. But, my personality is one of “done is better than perfect,” so I accept some level of mistakes. This is one place a publisher adds a ton of value. Still, I’ve seen professionally published books with errors. So, the point is, don’t get too wrapped around the axle with your editing. I generally make multiple passes and then call it from there.

Tools for self-publishing

• Capturing ideas, outlines, research - for this I use Notion. Which is also where I am writing this article.
• Book covers - I’ve used Canva for all of my front book covers. I design the back book cover in Amazon KDP.
• Writing the book - for my first book I used a software called Scrivener. What I liked most about it was that you could set a daily writing goal, of word count, and it would track and display your progress. Although it is somewhat user-friendly, I found it to be too restrictive. So, I now write all of my books in a Google Doc. I don’t use Notion to write anything longer than a blog post/newsletter article.
• Editing - one of the reasons I use Google Docs for writing is that it has a built in spelling/grammar check that is now powered by their AI solution, Gemini. I also use Grammarly for most of my books. For Stress-Free Finances, I hired a human editor. I’m sure we both missed plenty of errors, but, in general, we caught the bulk of issues.
• AI - I’ve no doubt that some of the most popular books being released today are written almost entirely by AI. Because I love writing, my personal stance is that I will use AI to help me generate ideas, outlines, topics, and the occasional paragraph (usually of a technical concept, so that I explain it properly). But, I’d estimate 95% of what I write is my fingers to the keyboard. Right now, since I am a paying subscriber, I use Google’s Gemini, not ChatGPT.

Summarizing my self-publishing (the TLDR)

• Keep it simple
• Write about things that are unique to you - your story, your experiences, your knowledge or skills
• Have a consistent environment that puts you in a writer’s frame of mind
• Tools I’d use to get started
  • Canva for design elements
  • Google Docs for all text-based activities.
  • Built in spell-check + Grammarly + consider hiring someone

Ok, if you’ve made it this far, I should take this opportunity to point you towards my latest book, Stress-Free Finances. In it I share 25+ years of experience in personal finance, where I teach you everything I know about creating a stress-free financial life.