How I finally finished a marketing book that took 20+ years to write.

Several months ago, I pulled a fat file called “Book” (pictured) out of storage.

I began tossing ideas, articles, and other stuff into it more than 20 years ago. When I started the file in the early 90s, I was getting ready to write a marketing book.

What took so long? For one thing, I've been sorta busy. Running a marketing agency along with being a husband, father, brother, uncle, nephew, cousin, friend, and neighbor is, well, time-consuming.

I'd known first-time authors who shared stories of serial rejection by publishers. I wasn't thrilled with the prospect of embarking on a series of dog-and-pony shows for staffers at publishing houses with Gong Show-like power.

Then the e-book revolution came along and almost everything changed. I now had the chance to create a book my way, act as my own publisher, and make it all happen by using some amazing technologies.

One of these was Dragon Dictate for Mac. (Disclosure: Dragon has been a client.) I dictated the entire first draft of Optimarketing: Marketing Optimization to Electrify Your Business using Dragon. I'm a guy who generally finishes what he starts, so once I had a first draft, there was no stopping me.

I had more than 20 years of notes, along with history from our record-breaking campaigns, so content wasn't in short supply. In fact, throughout the process I kept adding points I considered essential. Integrating everything ended up being one of the biggest challenges.

Fortunately, the great Sheila Butler, who’s been the Contenteurs marketing agency’s copy editor for years, was available as my book editor. I totally agree with those who say every book author should have an editor. Sheila made this thing considerably better.

When the book was ready to be produced, I chose Amazon’s CreateSpace publishing platform for the softcover version, and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for the Kindle version. CreateSpace integrates nicely with KDP and has great promotional options.

After this project went into high gear, I began calling it “The Beast” – but I'm so excited about how everything worked out, I'm now wondering if I'll average one book a year. We’ll see.