Writing and Publishing an eBook with Diane Kinney

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Diane Kinney. Diane, how are you?

Diane Kinney: I’m great, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe Casabona: Thanks for being on the show. We have been on office hours FM after hours together as well as interacting a few times, So I’m glad to get you over here on How I Built It and we’re going to be talking about your book that you are writing with Carrie Dils right, called ‘Real-world Freelancing?

Diane Kinney: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. So Carrie actually teased this in Season One. I think you guys, I think we recorded right before you announced so I’m glad to have you as the follow-up. This episode will be coming out hopefully right around the time the book launches. So let’s just jump right into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came up with the idea for the book?

Diane Kinney: Well I have been running a small business in the marketing and digital space for 16,17 years I think at this point and I’ve never really embraced the term freelancer that’s kind of one of my themes. But when we were thinking about it, I’ve given a lot of talks and then a fair amount of mentoring in the business space. And so there are always recurring conversations about how do I get started if I want to run my own business? Where do I get good advice, right? Because the Internet is full of bad advice like take your laptop to the beach you know, Sydney glaring sun and you’ll make $100,000 just by, you know, soaking up those rays. And it’s just, there’s just bad advice everywhere you turn mostly because there’s some, you know, kind of motivation around that advice like take my $6000 overnight millionaire course, you know? And so Carrie and I were chatting about, you know, what do we want to do for a project? You know, we keep having these conversations, of course, curious gutter podcasts that’s business focus. Then I worked with her on that quite a bit and we’ve done some webinars and different things. Then we kind of got to the evolution of, you know, let’s write a book. And then we said to each other, “If we’re going to write a book, we’re gonna write a real book.” We’re not going to write, you know, fantasy, here’s how great your life will be if you buy my book’ but are real positive but realistic guides to freelancing. And so once we kind of developed that idea we started talking about, you know, themes. And you know, we kind of had this spot we’re aiming for where it’s the, you know, your own version of survival guide. You know, you need to think about a plan for how to, you know, create a marketing plan for yourself, how important is branding yourself, like real examinations of some of these things. Not just like do this and this but how important is it, where does it fit. So we’re really excited about that.

Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic. And I know exactly what you’re talking about. Anybody who’s ever read a business book, my favorite example of this is the ‘Four Hour Work Week’, right? ’cause Tim Ferris’ very smart guy. But if you’ve read the ‘Four Hour Work Week’, it’s like all you have to do is these things and your life will be amazing. Like that’s easy and…

Diane Kinney: Amazing.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, just like you’ll work four hours a week and you can eat whatever you want like you mentioned that somewhere in the book too. [laughing background]

Diane Kinney: Because that’s so important

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. So the idea of having just like a legit no BS book which is what it says on the website real-worldfreelancing.com is great because it’s not especially at the beginning, starting your own business is not easy.

Diane Kinney: It is not easy.

Joe Casabona: And you need to have the dedication to do it, right?

Diane Kinney:  You need to have dedication, you need to be prepared, you need to decide if it’s even for you because that’s also kind of one of the misnomers, you know, that you know everybody should be a freelancer, everybody should be a business owner. You know, like that’s the aspirational dream of the current generation. Does that really make sense? I mean some people are more suited to working for others, you know, you really need to do kind of a self-diagnostic of, you know, are you prepared to deal with some things like uncertainty. Owning your business is always, can have an element of certainty. Owning your own business so it’s gonna have an element of stress, you know, is that stress manageable for you, you know, or is that stress becoming somewhat overwhelming for you. You know, these are decisions that you need to make. You can’t just blindly say this is for me, I’ve bought the book, you know, my life is going to become amazing. And instead, you’re like a broke, you know, stressed-out basket case, you know, not good, not good.

Joe Casabona: Exactly. And that’s great I mean the first question you do need to ask is, is this for me? So you have been, you know, you’ve been running your own business and doing a lot of things for several years. Carrie Dils is kind of in the same boat.

Diane Kinney: Right.

Joe Casabona: So as you’re writing this book, what kind of research, if any, did you do? Did you pull from experience or did you look for like sources to kind of back up your claims?

Diane Kinney: Well, one of the things that we did was look at the landscape of what was being published in this area. You have high profile books like the ‘Four Hour Work Week,’ you have a lot of, I guess what I would think of as inspirational and promissory kind of books. And then you have some like lower level just like somebody just kind of whipped a book together to get out there and get a few bucks in their pocket maybe. But there really wasn’t anything in that kind of middle realm so we knew we wanted to position ourselves there. And then we have a good fortune, you know, to have so many friends and so many relationships in the business world that you know, we’ve each had the opportunity to hear people’s stories. You know, people that we can reach out to and talk to in more detail. Things that we’ve personally learned, you know, just in terms of I’ve been doing this long enough that there literally was no model when I started. There was actually no Facebook or Twitter or you know, any of those things. And so it completely figured it out as you go. 

You know, I don’t think I opened a business checking account until a client paid me a significant sum of money and I went to the bank and I had been course employs them with my business name. You know, ’cause I was a fancy business you know, and then I took that check to the bank and they were like “You can’t deposit it,” It’s not made out to you, it’s made out to a business that does not have a business checking account. And it was like “Oh-oh!” And then there’s a mad scramble. You know, and so you just literally learn every step of the way. And so to be able to, you know, save people from that a little bit, here are some things, you know, you really need to do. You need to understand your taxes, you need to use an account, you know, these are unquestionable, you know, precepts to keep yourself on the right path. Then there’s a whole wider world of, you know, choices, you know, directions and how you run your business. And my style is kind of there’s no one right answer when you get into some of these things. You know, the things that work for some people don’t necessarily work for other people, different styles, different markets. And so once you get beyond the basics it becomes a lot more about advice, suggestions, heavy thought about not necessarily here’s the one true way, you know, too…

Joe Casabona: Right. And that’s another great thing about it, it sounds like about your book is like, you go off and you read these other business books and it’s like this is the way I did it, and this is the way to do it.

Diane Kinney: And it’s so common I mean, I just go on media, right? Look at the freelancing tag and there are, you know, 100 articles that say in order to succeed in business you need to get up at 4:00 AM. I think specifically, and then you need to take a nice cold shower like that’s somebody’s protocol that is successful. So you need to implement that, and then you need to meditate, and then you need to journal and then you need to have a wheatgrass smoothie. And then if you do those seven things you know, you are going to be a business success.  If I had to do those seven things there is no, I wouldn’t even get out of bed, frankly.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, my day would be half over and I’ve done no work.

Diane Kinney: No, no. Well, first of all, if I need to greet the day with an ice cold shower in order to be a business success, I am getting out of business. That’s not what I want to be doing so there’s so much like you know, woo woo, right?

Joe Casabona: Right, right.

Diane Kinney: You know we feed this popular figure and he plunges himself into an icy pool of water and now we must all do that, you know, it’s like…

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Diane Kinney: No, this is not a critical success factor.

Joe Casabona: Right. I might have told this story on the podcast before but I placed third in like, this business plan competition in which we could have a whole show about how I feel about business plans in general. And so I was in this incubator and I would get advice from just everybody else who has a successful business and one guy came into me and said “You know what you need to do to be successful? You gotta wear a suit to work ’cause then you feel professional.” I said this on after-hours, right? I don’t want to wear a suit, I don’t want to wear pants. That’s the exact thing I said to that guy. It’s like [laughing background]

Diane Kinney: I mean I don’t really want to wear pants either. It’s like, and that’s way way way more tolerable than the icy cold shower. It’s like “No, I don’t want to do those things. I don’t want to meditate. I don’t want to drink wheatgrass.” These things are quite frankly appalling to me. But yeah I’ve managed to, you know, keep a business of flow for I think 17 years without doing any of those things. So it’s possible you can do it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. So maybe we can talk about you know, I usually ask who you talk to if you’re part of a mastermind.? And maybe we can kind of package that is a question of what is your advice for someone who wants to be successful ’cause I know talking to people is definitely part of that but I, you know what else could go along with that? An icy cold shower or not?

Diane Kinney: I think there are two keys to being successful and one is, what should, what’s the level of fortitude? You know, will power, zeal, however you want to look at that. You know, is there something inside of you that keeps you going in the face of challenges or obstacles, and are those possible? Even things that make you more determined or do you have a tendency to go sit on the couch and be like “Oh, I can’t do this!” You know that there’s an innate quality that separates people and kind of like we were talking about in the beginning is running your own business for you. Not unless you have that, you know, kind of warmth in the furnace inside of you that’s going to focus you on continuing to move forward. Or even if you stop, you know, you regroup and dust yourself off. But if you’re someone who doesn’t, you have a certain amount of stubbornness, you know and you’re just gonna make it happen. 

The other thing that I believe is a key to success is to give. To give more than you take. And we as a society are kind of trending in the wrong direction, you know, all over the place where you know the world is full of quid pro quo, you know I tweeted your link, you better tweet mine. You know you get emails from people you know, do this. You know, the guy, I did you some imaginary favor, do this for me, you know. And I I think that that’s a  very wrong approach. You know, help as many people as you can,  don’t expect anything in return. You know, give freely. One of the things that has meant so much to me was when I was starting to learn CSS in the days of the CSS Zen garden and there were a lot of bloggers that were blogging about like detailed technical techniques and I learned from these people like I didn’t have to join their email list, I didn’t have to, you know, give them anything. I didn’t have to make a donation, I didn’t have to buy their course, they just gave, you know, other knowledge and it benefited them but it also benefited other people. And I really believe that that is the best possible approach to tag. Just in terms of personal philosophy,  you know, try to give something whatever it is you have to give. You know, it could be time, it could be a listening ear, you know, could be supported, it could be a little bit of knowledge. There’s a better way to do that, you know, but if you can give something instead of just being the consummate kind of taker, I think that is going to make a huge difference in where you end up in business and in life which is not all that different.

Joe Casabona: Right, right, that’s excellent advice. Should have saved that question for the end now that would be a great way to end the show. However, we do need to get to the title question right? So you are writing this book with Carrie Dils, so I’ve written a few books. It was published by Peach pit which was a very interesting process, but self-publishing is something that I’ve struggled with a little bit. So I would love to know first of all if you are self-publishing, and how you’re doing it, but how are you building the book?

Diane Kinney:  We are indeed self-publishing. Our process has been to use the collaborative tools that we kind of has around us. We tried a couple of different things actually that went by the wayside like tools that were specifically designed to make it easy to collaboratively write a book, didn’t work out particularly well. And so we’re using a combination of two things. Microsoft OneNote is kind of similar to Evernote, but a little bit different. And we’re using that to write collaboratively and we’re using Google Docs. So we’re putting our output together in one note, I use Google Docs to write sections and pieces. And I’m using that specifically because and I don’t know why this says but if you install Google Docs on your phone and dictate, it is the most accurate dictation that I’ve been able to achieve with any tool app or anything. Google Docs understands me at a level that you know, Siri doesn’t understand me like that. You know, but Google Docs does. And so one thing that’s really hard to do is to sit in front of a device and have good thoughts. You know, you get caught up in how many words in my writing or editing yourself and different things. So by removing ourselves and this worked for Carrie too, from sitting in front of a keyboard and output words to get a little bit of a different environment, you know, maybe go to the park, ride your bike. But if you can, you know, talk those thoughts out, you know, and look back and think about. You know, I imagine somebody asked me like “What, you know what are the five biggest lessons you’ve learned or you know different things?” Low points, high points, and then talk through them. It comes much more readily for me than trying to type, think and type and not getting caught in the editing trap. 

So get some volume of words going. I mean we made outline sections and those types of things but really producing the volume of the words it’s the key to writing a book. And then we’re moving toward the point where you know, we need to start rounding the editing. aAd an interesting thing is it’s almost a half and half process to write. We need to write a book but we also need to market that bug, we need to sell that book, and in our case, we are offering packages along with so you can buy the book. But then you can buy some enhanced packages with additional information, checklists, reference materials, and things that you can actually use. So we also had to plan that out and we really got that close to the beginning where we sat down and figured out at least roughly what the vision was for not just the book but the book as a product. You know, how would it be marketed, how would it be sold, because we looked at different ways, you know up selling it and see how to figure out both of those, right? You have to write a book and you have to figure it out even if you work with a publisher. As you know, the publisher wants you to do some more too so you gotta be able to go down those, you know, that dual track. And once we get a couple rounds of editing in, I lucky you know for us as a team and spend big chunks my career designing so I can do layout, I can do website designs, I can do you know different things like I design the cover of the book and you know that kind of thing so that makes it a little bit easier, you know, to have that available in house. So our layout and editing process can kind of overlap a little bit more than in the traditional hand of.

Joe Casabona: Nice. So a couple of follow-up questions on that are one: what are you using to layout the book? 

Diane Kinney: InDesign 

Joe Casabona: Indesign, OK. That’s what I thought. I just recorded a video just this morning about what it’s like designing an ebook in PowerPoint ’cause I’m not a designer but Indesigns is totally the way to go there, and how are you gonna sell the book? I assume your website is probably WordPress powered. Is that a fair assumption?

Diane Kinney: Yeah, it is a fair assumption. It’s WordPress powered and the landing page is built with Beaver Builder.

Joe Casabona: Ohhh! All right.

Diane Kinney: That was my first time building something with the Beaver Builders. That was a very cool and interesting process, and yes, of course, it’s built with WordPress. And I’m pretty sure we’re going to use WooCommerce to handle the sales process and that’s what we’re going to do initially. We’re going to, we’re going to sell the book through the website. I think we’re also going to sell through Amazon as an epub and I’m not 100% positive but there are certain limitations, right? Like initially we thought we would for sure do like the Kindle first program. And we can’t sell it on our own website if we do that for example so I think we’re in a position where we have a little bit more of an audience with our own website than we do on Amazon. So I think we’re going to do direct sales first, having epub, and then we may see where we go from there. And you know maybe it’ll be a fantastic enough book that will talk to a publisher, you know, at some point about a print version. So we’ll see where all that goes. We’re just interested in, you know, the ride in the process.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. And I mean that’s the beauty of self-publishing right is, you can…

Diane Kinney: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: You can put it out there and if it is popular enough you could shop it around to publishers.

Diane Kinney: Absolutely.

Joe Casabona: Which is very cool, awesome. So we’ve been talking for a while, we’re coming up on time and there are two questions I like to ask before the big question. So maybe you could kind of answer this in tandem. What transformations has your book gone through in the book writing process and what are your plans for the future of the book? Let’s look at this, let’s assume that this comes out around or just after launch day, what are your hopes and dreams?

Diane Kinney: I think initially we just had the concept of the book and as a book and the transformation that occurred to us was that it could be more than a book. It could be tools and packages and related materials. And we could make it into, you know, a multidimensional experience for people and we could help them even more, you know than just reading a chapter.

And in terms of the hopes and dreams, in all sincerity, I hope that the book helps people. I have conversations all the time with people and they, you know, they’re doing good but they feel a little overwhelmed or they need some encouragement. We got a note from somebody the other day, we have a mailing list for the book. And sometimes people write us notes like is it done yet ’cause I need it. {laughing background] and someone wrote in and listed out all the things, you know, she was trying to do to start her business. And I mean I’m pretty good at this and I couldn’t get 20% of those things done, you know, so it’s my hope to be able to say to people, you know, you don’t have to do everything. You know, here’s what’s really gonna matter in the long run. Take care of yourself, you know, take care of yourself. We don’t talk about it enough, you know, in the nerd space but mental health is a huge issue for people who you know work primarily in isolation. They work very hard, there’s a personality that maybe it’s a little introverted, a little prone to, you know, being a little hard on yourself. And you know, that makes a difference, you know, just for a few people, I’ll be really happy.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome, that’s excellent. Well, we’re depending on when this episode comes out. I’m really looking forward to it or excited to read it ’cause I got it. So let’s end with my favorite question to ask, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Diane Kinney: My trade secret is not very sexy and it’s to be super organized.

Joe Casabona: Super organized, I like it.

Diane Kinney: It’s to be super organized because I do not have the greatest attention span in the world and I have a lot of ideas and a lot of different things. So it’s really easy to get up the track or forget or see shiny objects. So I have just trained myself, you know, to live kind of by the list and the folders in their organization. So that’s my secret weapon.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, I like it. And it might not be very sexy but always function over form, right?

Diane Kinney: Exactly, exactly. Let’s get a result.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly, awesome. Well, Diana, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a great conversation.

Diane Kinney: Thanks, Joe! I love this show. I’ve seen, I’ve heard every episode.

Joe Casabona: Oh, thank you so much! That means a lot to me. I’m having a lot of fun doing it and I’m learning a lot and  hopefully, the listeners are learning a lot too.

Make sure to check out realworldfreelancing.com. It’s definitely going to be a great resource, I can vouch for both authors. They are now both guests of the show.

Thanks so much to our great guests and our awesome sponsors. And most importantly, thank you. The show wouldn’t be where it is today without your support over the last few months. I couldn’t have imagined that the show would be as big as it is. At the time of this recording, I’m approaching 50,000 downloads total in less than a year and I am ecstatic about that.

And for Season Three, I want to learn more about you so I put together a survey. If you go to buildpodcast.net/survey just a little bit of information about who you are, and what you do, and what you like so I can deliver the best content for you. Again, that’s built podcast.net/survey.

And once again, thank you so much for listening. As we wind down Season Two, I’m really looking forward to Season Three. It’s going to be our best yet.

And until next time, get out there and build something.