A Journey of Self-Publishing My First Book from a Marketer’s Perspective

I feel like marketing has been building my identity over the past few years. During the past decade since I stepped for the first time in the world of marketing, I had the chance to meet some of the most incredible advertisers, marketers, founders, creatives, copywriters, and understand where my passion lies.

And then I felt I should write the words on “digital paper” to help, inspire, motivate, or solve the industry’s problem. That’s why this year I wanted to focus on the following objectives

1. Publish my first book
2. Connect & learn from the best 25 marketers by the end of the year
3. Sign up for at least three writing & copywriting courses
4. Improve English speaking skills by removing the Russian accent, slowing the pace, and “polishing” the vowels.

To my surprise, I already managed to meet more than 50 incredible marketers since December 2018, whether for a virtual coffee, quick call, meetings, or conversations around the internet. Also, I’m currently making a list of writing & copywriting courses, including Medium Writing’s Course by Dave Schools, Masterclass, and Write of Passage School. Most probably, I’ll finish all of them by November 2019.

Also, in April this year, I found one of the best private English tutors that’s helping with my English skills, and especially fixing my accent and pronunciation. It’s not easy learning English when you’re born in Eastern Europe and everybody can spot your accent.

However, the key phenomenon of this year is self-publishing my first ever book that I’d love to tell you more about. “Marketing Teams of the Future” navigates content marketing’s journey from the early beginnings and dives into a profound analysis of today’s industry. You will find patterns, principles, and workflows that will help upgrade current workflow and processes for a future-proof team.

In this piece, I’d love to outline more about my journey of writing the book and how you can replicate the same for you! So that’s why I’ll present 8 things to keep in mind when writing the book and how to do it better than I did

1. Choose your topic

When I decided to write my book there were many things I wanted to talk about, such as:

• Brands & Their Relationship With Influencers (on how brands can work better with their influencers)
• Disclosing Reality - Instagram Influencers & Why The Industry Has To Change (on Instagramreality)
• Something on Data & Growth of Marketers
• Thinking Fast & Slow of Marketing Industry (on how marketers don’t realize how things that they automatically do severely affect the company brand and how they can change it with a parable to Daniel Kahneman’s book)
• True Fans of Your Brand (on how brands can build better relationships with their fans long-term)
• How Personalization Will Change the Way Brands Interact with Customers (on the biggest trend of 2019, personalization)
• Agile Marketing (and how to prepare your team for that)

And many more (btw, you’re free to steal any of these ideas - I doubt I’ll start writing another one in the near future).

However, if you look at the way marketers plan, organize & collaborate on content (social media, blog posts, banners, podcasts, newsletters, email campaigns) it’s old school. One of the most innovative industries bows to the “almighty” Excel that Microsoft released back in ‘85.

Don’t get me wrong. I myself love Excel. It is certainly a powerful tool that helps you build great charts, organize, plan, analyze, and bring data together. The fact remains that it’s not designed for creative marketing professionals. We’re the people with just a tab more creativity in our minds than normal. And we’re all stuck and limited by cells. Excel documents are limiting creatives in all possible ways, instead of enabling them to focus on what they do best - creating beautiful & inspiring content.

But then I understood - content creation and approvals happen across borders and time zones. Marketers spend two hours a day gathering information as a result of being isolated. Marketing channels are expanding and brands are creating more content than ever which leads to professionals being overworked. By 2020 content will become marketer’s biggest bottleneck. And the tools they currently use are not going to help them make this easier.

Today, content production happens across a mishmash of spreadsheets, powerpoints, and endless email threads. This process is slow and frustrating for those on the frontlines. It is also very expensive for those who are paying the extra hours of tedious work.

If we continue wasting time we will never evolve as an industry and will just fortify the bottleneck. After analyzing hundreds of teams and discussing with thousands of professionals I found a fix for that - that’s the main thesis of the book - improving & creating an efficient workflow for content collaboration efforts by implementing high-value insights & techniques that I shared in the second chapter of the book.

2. Outline & describe the topic for more clarity

I went onto brainstorming these topics with the Planable team and finding the right approach to these. After everyone agreed which of my ideas was the winning one, I moved to the next step. I decided that the best approach is to move further and understand how to emphasize the topic in the best way.

What is actually important? I asked myself. I needed to understand my audience. That’s why I decided I’m writing a book for marketing managers working in medium & big agencies or in-house brands because these are the departments and people that are frequently paralyzed by the processes inside their team & organization.

Then, I started researching the topic further so I managed to come up with this structure.

Again, don’t worry if this process takes hours, days or even weeks. Remember to constantly keep going and move baby-steps with each writing phase. Any progress is good. Also, don’t be afraid of starting from scratch. During my journey of writing the book, I deleted 2 whole chapters that were initially planned just because I didn’t feel them “fitting” the book as initially expected.

3. Write consistently

After you made the outline and have an initial understanding of the work, keep going.

Marketers success is an effort built over time. Building a viral marketing campaign can be called luck, but building something everyone admires takes time, dedication, and most importantly, consistency.

Again, don’t worry if you ever stop during the process of writing.

I had a creative blockage for multiple weeks when I was really really trying to come up with the ideas & content for the book but I just kept going. These are a few things that helped me a lot to keep the creative juices flowing:

• Taking long walks daily
• Hit the gym 4x / week
• Brainstorming ideas with my colleagues
• Read books (check my Goodreads for best books I’ve read this year)
• Listen to podcasts (message me, if you’re interested in my favorites)
• Eat healthily, more fruits & vegetables
• Take breaks from time to time
• Go on a short vacation (thank you, Amsterdam)

And there are many other solutions to keep your mind creative. Just don’t hesitate and don’t feel bad if you’re not on the schedule.

4. Make a schedule

Speaking of which - the schedule was another important factor in writing this book. When I started writing, I committed to 5 months schedule at best.

When it comes to task management we’re using Flow and we love it. It helped me a lot to stay organized. I divided my book into chapters, assignments, research, creative, design, launch, publishing and promotion period. It was all very easy to be tracked in a Gantt Chart so I could have an overview of my day-to-day in one single place. And make sure I’m on the right path.

5. Iterate on feedback

A clear flow has input, output and easy process of feedback iteration. It all starts with an idea, the business ambition integrated with the customer journey, content strategy, objectives combined with the editorial & content calendar. When content is being created, it has to be shared with the teammates in an open space enabled by collaboration, then approved, published, distributed, amplified, and measured. Afterward, the content cycle will start over again.

And that’s exactly what I did. Thankfully, I have a professional team of marketers that helped me iterate fast and stay on track with my ideas. When you’re writing, it’s super easy to defocus from the main topic you have in mind and just wander into another direction. However, by showing your efforts to other teammates and asking for feedback helped me debate the best approaches, solutions, and suggestions.

Also, I wanted to make it actionable so that any reader can implement the same workflow of world-class content marketing teams into their organizations. I think that’s the key to writing a GOOD book.

6. Prepping for the book launch

It’s all nice and good until you start working on the launch. The final preparations have to be made, such as edits & corrections (it’s my fault there have been many typos that missed my eye), design (courtesy of Misha Svetenco), interviewing the experts (more than 20 of them) to add quotes & hands-on experience, and iterating on feedback.

However, there have been a few things that I still had to do.

1. First, it was the landing page. As you’ve probably seen it’s a relatively simple landing page, with a call to action and the cover of the book. However, it took us a couple of days to make sure the landing page is working nice, adjust all the settings, and prepare the background image.

2. Second, the conversion funnel. We couldn’t launch the book unless I had any conversion funnels built that would be targeted on converting the users into real customers eventually. That’s why it was crucially important to make the funnel in the right way, with the ideal copy, images, and all the materials to be ready.

3. Third, I had to prepare for my war room. I first wanted to make a full distribution list of friends, family, supporters, and all the other marketing groups that could help me spread the word.

4. Fourth, make sure to prepare all the visuals that could help me in distributing the book, including covers, chapters, quotes, etc.

And when everything was ready there was the launch.

7. Launch

As in the preparations, I felt like a war room. During the launch of the book, I was constantly online sharing the news with everyone I could, including friends, family, marketers, my personal network, our users, my contributors, sources, quotes, etc. It was a joint effort and I wanted to thank everyone for being part of this journey.

Moreover, I shared the book on more than 50 distribution channels. Also, I’ve been scheduled to be a guest in more than 10 podcasts that I’ll be speaking at in the next 3 months and already submitted 2 interviews in major marketing publications, including Martech Advisor with Christine Crandell. And the book has been downloaded by thousands of people. It was a major success.

Another great growth hack that I used is adding a new position on my LinkedIn account as self-publishing author which generated thousands of news views to my account and the book.

8. Push forward

And what happens after the launch, you ask? Well, I continue promoting the book like speaking at podcasts, featuring the book in guest publications, sharing links on social media and helping other writers succeed.

So as it turns out, it’s not that hard, and you can simply replicate this yourself. Reach out if there’s anything I can help with!