My First Book Almost Killed Me

I wrote a book, and it almost killed me. 

I hit publish, and it’s up on Amazon. 

But what started out as a personal experiment felt like it would be the end of me. 

Here’s How it Started

While I was in recovery from getting my kidney transplant last year, I would constantly find myself “doing the most.” 

I was supposed to be lying down and conserving my energy, but our home with three children, plus my Mother-in-law, who was here to help, made me irritable, and I felt useless. 

That’s not a good place for a man to be. 

The YouTube Rabbit Hole 

I eventually had to put on earplugs and stay in my room because I could not stop getting involved. 

While doom-watching an endless stream of YouTube videos, I must have fallen into a trap of quick money-making schemes. 

You know the type, “$0 - $10k in No Time Doing [fill in the blank]

I must have stumbled across how easy it is to publish an ebook and was off to the races! I compiled a few documents from my files and uploaded them to Canva, and Bam! I had an ebook! 

I created a landing page and made a link. Guess what? Nobody downloaded it.

That didn’t stop me at all. It felt good to know that I could create something on my own without permission. 

I was still stuck in bed, so I figured–what the heck, I’ll write a book. 

Go Big or Go Home

I needed something to do and realized I had tons of unfinished and unpolished thoughts on my hard drive. For the first time in 10 years, I had the space to do something with them. 

Some of those documents are 20k- 25k words long. I was surprised! 

That's how I ended up writing a book. 

But the resistance showed up as soon as I started down the path. 

This began my downward spiral into all my own worst thoughts. 

I am An Imposter 

The first thing that came to mind was the gnawing thought that I was unqualified to write a book.

As a pastor, writing a book is a great accomplishment. Whether spoken or unspoken, most pastors aspire to become published authors, even if it’s just collecting hundreds of sermons in one volume. 

But for me, no publishing company is asking to publish my work. You’re just typing words on the couch. That’s what my imposter syndrome sounded like in my head.

It was relentless. 

People Will Be Disappointed

My book addresses my journey to overcome people-pleasing.

I explore issues I faced as a young man and even sensitive thoughts regarding my relationship with my Mom. That kind of vulnerability will disappoint some folks. Let me stop playin’…a lot of folks will be shaking their heads because my Mom is a saint, and I’m supposed to be a pastor.

I hate disappointing people, but writing a book about pleasing people means being honest regardless of the cost for once. 

This Costs Too Much Money

On YouTube, everything is free.

With titles like “Publish A Book For Free’ Or even better ‘Become a Millionaire by Publishing Your Own Books.’Well, I quickly found out—it ain’t cheap! If you want a textual editor, developmental editor, cover designer, book interior formatting, ISBN numbers, etc. All that stuff costs money. I learned real quick that many of these videos were produced 3-4 years ago before most of the world was aware of sites like Fiverr.    

So I hit another bump in the road.

This is just supposed to be a little experiment—something cool to show my kids that their dad has his own product on Amazon. But now it’s going to cost hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars, to make it happen. I ain't got no money for all that! 

Yet another reason it took me a long time to publish the book. 

This Ain’t a Real Book

A 10,000-word book does not count.

I don’t know if you know, but most nonfiction books are at least 30,000 words. My book ended near 17,000 words. Is it even worth pursuing if you don’t have a book of 100 pages? Now, it’s just a joke. 

I was so happy to read Chris Stanley's book, The Mini Book Model. I had already seen the works of Category Pirates and how they had been creating a truckload of “mini books,” but I just assumed that since they were established writers, they could break the rules. 

But Chris Stanley in The Mini Book Model was helpful to me because it freed me from feeling like my work needed to fit certain constraints in order to be valid. My book needed to solve a problem, and that’s it. 

Game changer. 

I’m Still Alive

This is what it was like to write my first book. 

What started as a personal experiment became a gut-wrenching exercise in self-exploration. Pushing past one's own limiting beliefs is hard work, and this exercise proved to be exhausting but well worth the result. 

At the end of the day, what was supposed to take 3 months took almost an entire year. 

On the anniversary of my kidney transplant, I released the paperback version of my book, From Nice to Known. 

If you want to check out my first-ever self-published book, hit this link.

Don’t let the voices in your head stop you from doing the things you aspire to do.