Over the past year, nights and weekends I have been working on a book encapsulating my learnings at Vkernel implementing a high velocity, B2B marketing team.  Most of my career experience up to that point had been in operations as a naval officer and high touch B2B sales and marketing.  VKernel was an interesting learning experience and at some point, I felt the need to start writing about my experience.  The time I spent at Dell also provided an interesting perspective as Dell integrated, copied and changed the model.

You can check the book out on Amazon.  If you are a Amazon Prime member, it is free in the lending library.

If you are ever considering writing a business book, here is what I learned:

• I was used to writing and easily cranking out white papers for my job.  The book seemed like a big collection of white papers and to some extent I wrote it that way.
• I spent a good three weeks in Microsoft Word in outline mode, just outlining before I started writing. The outline generally held as I wrote.
• At some point, it seemed as though illustrations were needed. I remembered virtualization blogger Scott Herald use to doodle out some images for his powerpoint that were highly effective. So I bought a book on being a visual communicator, purchased some sketch pads and colored pencils, and started trying to figure out how to do some simple diagrams. They are really simple, but they work. I ended up purchasing a Samsung Galaxy Tablet 2014 Edition and all the sketches were completed using this.  I now use it for taking notes in all meetings. Highly recommend this tablet.
• To use a publisher or not? In my case, I just wanted to get the book out, and I did not think a publisher would help me promote.  So having complete control over the output and the ability to push the book live when I wanted, plus some advice from a business school classmates wife who is a writer, pushed me down the Kindle Direct publishing model.
• Editing – I paid an editor to go through the book to clean it up.  A good investment in money given how long it would have taken me to accomplish this.
• Length – 50,000 – 70,000 words seemed to be the optimal length.  I ended up at 70,000 words.

This was a great experience, and one I hope to repeat on a new topic.  This blog will serve as a fodder for new topics.  Sales and marketing operations is a rich topic area!