I wrote the first part of this in 2014, when I was running a home care business and setting out to write my first book. Everything after it was added later, once I’d written three.
I’m making my first foray into book authorship. It’s going to be a resource on how to choose a quality home care provider. In doing some research, I discovered there is very little information out there about how to find quality care. There are plenty of books on finances, wills, powers of attorney, and even providing the care yourself. There is a complete dearth of information for people who are having to hire home care, which is one of the fastest growing sectors in our economy.
With this book, I hope to share some of the lessons I’ve learned, so my readers don’t have to. I hope to save them the aggravation and pain I went through myself when I was faced with finding quality, caring caregivers for my parents.
It’s not an easy decision to allow someone into your home. What if they aren’t compatible, or they’re late? What if they steal from me, or take my mom’s medication? That’s why it matters how the agency conducts its interview process, and why it’s important that you ask a lot of questions.
What happened next
That book became Choosing a Caregiver: Expect the Best and Know How to Ask, and it became an international bestseller on Amazon. The plaque is on my wall.
I’ve since written two more. Leadership Girl and Fearless Marketing, both also international bestsellers.
Three books in, here is what I actually know that I didn’t in 2014.
The second book took half the effort of the first
This is the part most people don’t realise, and it changes the entire calculation.
Choosing a Caregiver was written from scratch. Blank page, every word new.
Leadership Girl was not. By the time I wrote it, I already had years of content on this site. So the process was completely different: build the outline first, then go through what already existed and work out what fitted where. Repurpose it. Reuse it. Expand the parts that were too thin, cut the parts that didn’t serve the structure, and write new material only for the gaps.
Start to finish, about five to six months. And most of the information in it is still good a decade later.
That’s the lesson I’d give anyone running a business who’s been writing consistently: you may be further along than you think. Not a finished book — blog posts aren’t chapters, and stitching them together without an outline produces something that reads like stitched-together blog posts. But the raw material, the thinking, the examples, the things you’ve already worked out how to explain? A great deal of that is done.
The outline is what turns a pile of posts into a book. Without it you have an anthology. With it you have a structure that tells you exactly which existing pieces belong where, and what’s genuinely missing.
The third route: say it, don’t type it
There’s a method I used on the caregiver book that’s worth knowing about, because it suits a particular kind of person and nobody mentions it.
I didn’t write the first draft. I recorded it, chapter by chapter, and had the recordings transcribed. The transcripts became the raw manuscript, which was then edited into shape.
This works well if you explain things better out loud than on paper — which is most people who’ve spent years talking to clients. Speaking produces a more natural voice, it’s considerably faster, and it bypasses the blank-page problem entirely, because talking through a chapter you know well isn’t intimidating in the way a cursor is.
The trade-off is that spoken language needs more editing than written. Transcripts ramble, repeat, and lose their thread. You are not producing a draft; you are producing raw material that then needs real structural work. Budget for that rather than being disappointed by it.
I worked with Rob Kosberg on that book, and having someone running the process mattered as much as the method. Left to myself I would have recorded three chapters and stalled.
What the third one taught me
Fearless Marketing took about eight months from outline to final. I created the content, then had it professionally edited.
That editing step is worth its own sentence. Writing the manuscript is not the same as finishing the book, and the gap between the two is where most self-published business books fall down. You cannot edit your own work properly. You know what you meant, which is precisely the problem.
It’s also the book I still use. Not in a nostalgic way — as a working calling card. The material in it holds up, and handing someone a book you wrote does something that handing them a brochure cannot.
What a book actually does
It settles the credibility question before you’re in the room. “I wrote the book on this” is a shortcut no amount of marketing copy replicates. It doesn’t make you better at the work. It makes it easier for someone to believe you might be, which is the barrier most experienced people are genuinely stuck behind.
It forces you to know what you think. You can run a business for years on instinct and accumulated pattern recognition. Writing it down exposes every place where you don’t actually have a method. That’s uncomfortable and extremely useful.
It keeps working. Ten years on, the caregiver book still finds people making a hard decision about a parent. A social post from the same week is long gone.
What it doesn’t do
It doesn’t make meaningful royalty income. If you’re writing a business book for the earnings, the arithmetic will disappoint you. The value is in what it opens, not what it pays.
It doesn’t substitute for being known. A book nobody has heard of is a PDF with better formatting. The writing is maybe a third of the work; the rest is making sure the right people know it exists, and most first-time authors are too tired by then to do it.
It doesn’t have to be long. The urge to be comprehensive is usually what stops a book being finished.
Three questions before you start
- What specific question does this answer, and for whom? “How to choose a home care agency for your parent” is a book. “Everything I know about business” is a project that never ends.
- Have you already said this out loud, repeatedly? The best business books are usually the explanation you’ve given a hundred times. If you say the same thing to every client, that’s the book — and much of it may already be written somewhere.
- What is it for? Credibility, lead generation, closing a genuine gap, or the satisfaction of having done it. All four are legitimate. Confusing them produces a book that does none of them well.
If you already have a body of writing
The repurposing route is worth spelling out, because it is much faster than starting cold:
- Build the outline first. Before you look at a single existing post. If you start from what you have, you’ll end up writing a book shaped by your back catalogue rather than by the reader’s question.
- Map what exists onto it. Go through the archive and slot pieces into chapters. Expect roughly half to fit somewhere.
- Mark the gaps. The chapters with nothing under them are your actual writing list, and it will be far shorter than a whole book.
- Rewrite everything you reuse. Blog posts are written to stand alone. Chapters aren’t. The same material needs different transitions and a different opening.
- Get it edited by someone else. Non-negotiable. You cannot edit your own work properly, because you know what you meant.
That’s how Leadership Girl got written, and it’s why it took five months rather than a year.
Eight months is a realistic timeline for one built from scratch and properly edited. Five to six if you’ve been writing all along and didn’t realise you were already doing the hard part.
