Writing the Domesday Book

These guys couldn’t blog a book either. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At long last, the new edition of the book formerly known as The Trading Assistant’s Assistant is finished. I just handed it into my editor and the plan is to have it available as soon as is humanly possible. I’ll be doing an official cover reveal and an announcement of the new title in the coming weeks and I’ll let you know when pre-orders start.

My original plan, as I outlined in that blog post above, was to blog the book as a rewrote it and I did post many sections as posts for a while before I realized that my brain just doesn’t work like that. I know exactly how to blog a book. I know why to blog a book. I just can’t actually do it because of how I write, big picture style.

It came down to a decision. Either I could blog the book and write each section with an eye towards making it a blog post and then have to rewrite everything later to make it cohesive as a collected book or I could just write the book and then chop it up into blog posts later. Even when I blog normally, I write something that’s too long for a single post and chop it up into several so I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to do it the other way around.

I was really struggling. I think there is a type of book that I’d be able to more easily blog and I hope to experiment with that in the future but, because of the nature of this book and especially since I was rewriting it instead of starting from scratch, I just couldn’t blog it as a I wrote it. It wasn’t happening.

I finally decided to just queue up the rest of the sections I’d never blogged from Beyond Amazon, eBay and Etsy along with a few others in the hopes that I’d finish the book before I ran out of material for the blog. Then I just concentrated all of my efforts on getting this book done. It took FOREVER but I think it was worth it. It’s actually about double the length of the original draft and much more comprehensive. Considering I’m down to only a handful of queued blog posts left, I’d say I got it done just in time!

But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get to read the whole thing for free on this blog as I originally promised. I’m still going to blog as much of the book as I can in the coming months so that regular readers will still get to read the entire thing for free if they want. The only difference is that now you’ll get to read the finished product instead of my mid-revision drafts which, let me assure you, is definitely an upgrade!

Once I have the book page set-up (so that the excerpt posts can cross promote the book), you’ll start to see bits of the new book here on The Whine Seller. Just like I did with Beyond Amazon, eBay and Etsy, some will be cleverly disguised as standalone blog posts, some will just straight up be like “here’s a part from my book,” and posts will likely not be presented in order. Unlike Beyond, however, which I knew I’d be constantly changing and updating, this new book is pretty timeless so I’m also going to be releasing an audio version of it. This will be podcasted for free in much the same manner as the excerpts but I may also compile it together as an audio book later if there is interest.

Lastly, thank YOU for your patience while I got this book done. I wrote the first version of this book in 2006, published it in 2007, started the first revision in 2008, started another revision in 2010 because yet more had changed and started this complete overhaul and rewrite in October 2013. While 7+ months may not seem like a long time to rewrite a whole book, that time period represents a lot of hard won hours of work and I really hope it shows in the final product. In a way, this book is two decades in the making because that’s how long I’ve been working as a Trading Assistant and I’m glad to be finally able to call it done!

And, most of all, I’m eager for you all to read it!