I’ve written a book! Here are some lessons I’ve learned on the way

I’ve written a non-fiction book, found a publisher to bring it to life, and it’s out in April 2021. Despite a background in print and online journalism, blogging and PR, this is my first attempt at a non-fiction book, so here’s what I’ve learned so far along the way.

My creative outlet outside of work is a blog and podcast called Outside Write, where I cover football history, culture and travel. For the last four years, I’ve been researching the roots of the sport in the major footballing territories. It started as a series of podcasts and blog posts before I thought about consciously turning it into a book.

The result is Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World, which tells the country-by-country story of how the game got started, and the people, associations and sponsors behind it, from the first kick to the 1930 World Cup, by which time the game is truly global.

Here are things I’ve learned through the creative process:

Play to your strengths

I’m sure everyone thinks about writing a book at some point. I’ve made some truly horrific attempts at fiction in the past that I always abandoned. I finally accepted that fiction is not for me.

I write non-fiction for a living as much of my work is technology copywriting, so I decided to stick to what I know – researching and investigating facts, interviewing experts and articulating the story. Except this time it’s over 108,000 words…

Here are some lessons I’ve learned along the way:

People are incredibly generous with their time

To get as close to source material as possible, I sought out local experts where possible. I found people incredibly generous with their time when they learned about my project, some even proofed some text for accuracy. 

Thanks also to the friends who have been ‘sounding boards’ and read chapter drafts.

Should I ever be invited to be a source or interviewee for any books, I also plan to be generous with my time.

It’s the research that takes the time

The writing wasn’t the time-consuming part, it was the research. I wrote the book while working full-time as a freelancer, so the upside of travelling two or three days a week into London an hour each way on a train with decent Wi-Fi is that it gave me time to read, research, listen to podcasts and make notes that I could write up later.

The British Newspaper Archive is an absolute treasure trove, and I have been to museums and events in England, Scotland, Italy and France as part of this research.

The learning curve

There are so many great copywriting tools out there. I used Scrivener to put the first draft together, put that text into Word then ran it through Grammarly to check for readability according to my target audience, grammar issues, and to make sure that my content is unique. 

Speaking to other authors has certainly helped me understand fair usage when quoting published sources and I’ve got the emailed permission of all my interviewees for their quotes so there are no surprises! Some clubs were really responsive, and some didn’t reply at all. I’d recommend all football clubs, however old, have a history page on their website.

It’s been interesting to get to know the publishing process as I am already working on a second book and I think it’ll take a lot less time.

It’s still early stages for my book so I will update this post as I go. It’s both exciting and terrifying in equal measure. I’m sure that over nearly 400 pages there is something someone will pick me up on.

Now I need to set about creating buzz around the book…

Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World is out via Pitch Publishing in April 2021. You can learn more about the book itself here on Outside Write.