So, You Want to Write a Book?

A Book Review of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur — How to Publish a Book!

Are you thinking about writing a book? Guy Kawasaki has a new book called APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur — How to Publish a Book, and it is exactly what you are looking for. Think of APE as a compendious guide to writing a book from Guy's experience of traditionally publishing ten books and self-publishing two books as well as co-author Shawn Welch's technical expertise and two previous books.

The genesis of APE is that despite Guy's experience as a writer, mad computer skills and vast network of resources, he found that self-publishing a book called What the Plus! was much harder than he had imagined. Because of this experience, he decided to help others navigate the self-publishing process.

One of the things that makes Guy unique is his collaborative writing process. While writing What the Plus!, Guy asked his Google+ followers about formatting a book in Microsoft Word for Kindle. Enter Shawn Welch, co-author of APE: “Guy posted an open question on G+ about how to get bullets to show up right in the Kindle (from Microsoft Word). I answered his question in the comments section, and then shot him an email telling him I would be willing to help him out where ever he had troubles.”

“He sent me a chapter of his manuscript—complete with complicated formatting—and ten minutes later I sent him back a MOBI file (Kindle formatted ebook file) and a picture of his book on my Kindle,” said Shawn.

This led to Shawn to designing and producing the ebook versions of What the Plus!, and Guy eventually popped the question, “Do you want to co-author a book about self-publishing with me.”  Shawn’s answer to that was obviously yes.

Write a book

The book is broken into three sections Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur each piece of the puzzle needed to self-publish your book. From the technical tools for writing, to the editing process, and finally the entrepreneur section of marketing and creating a platform in which to sell your book, everything is here as step-by-step instructions to create your own masterpiece.

In APE, you get the benefit of Shawn and Guy's previous sixteen books rolled into one how-to guide. You’ll learn everything there is to know about not only about self-publishing a book but the whole process of writing a book from beginning to end. Guy’s expertise, life experience, and writing experience combined with Shawn’s technical skills make an unbeatable combination with the end result being the new guide for authors.

I highly recommend this book for writers who would like to pursue their dream of writing a book. With this book as a guide you have a huge head start. It's extremely well-written and funny. Guy is the master of self-editing by getting to the point without a lot of fluff. In fact, no fluff. He doesn't have time for it and respects his readers by providing value in each well-chosen phrase.

I had the pleasure of reading it while he was working on it, and his rough drafts are better than some published works. He polishes each section until they are ready to go to print. Seeing the evolution of this book from the idea to the final copy was a fantastic process and learning experience for me. Read it. You'll be glad that you did!

Here is the Storify from the #MyBookClub event with Guy and Shawn. It was a huge event with over 74,000,000 impressions having the #2 top tag for it's time slot and #4 global top tag for Monday, December 10,2012 the APE book launch.

Totally tricked out APE website by Shawn

Author Spotlight on Shawn Welch 

Personal Insights into Guy Kawasaki

Pinterest Board with APE Resources {will be kept up-to-date with reviews, interviews etc.}

The APE Community on Google+

Buy APE Here