Interested in how books come to get written?  Or any of the following questions, which I am frequently asked:
How did I come to write The Leader's Guide to Storytelling?
Is this my magnum opus?
How come the book is out so soon after Squirrel Inc?
How long does it take to actually write a book?
How do I get the time to write?
Where do I write? 
How did you use the blog?
Why did you stop the blog?
How do you get published?
What advice would you give an aspiring writer?
Now read on...

How did I come to write The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling? 
I’d written Squirrel Inc for right-brained people. It did very well. Jossey-Bass wanted to have a follow-on book. Some left-brained readers told me: the story is fun, but give me a cook book that would spell out exactly what I need to know. Teaspoon of sugar. Pound of flour. That kind of thing. I proposed this to Jossey-Bass and they said great. So I signed a contract and I set to work. 

Is The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling your magnum opus? 
That’s what Larry Prusak called it. It’s a substantial book – some 386 pages including the endnotes and index. In fact, I had started out with a different idea. I thought to myself – why not a slender, elegant book like The Elements of Style? Pretty simple stuff. It sold a zillion copies. But Jossey-Bass said the market would respond better to to something comprehensive and authoritative, rather than slender and elegant. So that’s what they got: something comprehensive. It’s not a book you can get through on the shuttle from Washington to New York. It’s going to take more than one sitting. But I believe it’s also readable and funny. I was struck by how many quirky and amusing stories I was able to come up with, even in areas as apparently dull as Xerox copying machines. 

Why is the book out so soon after Squirrel Inc? 
When I signed the contract with Jossey-Bass, the understanding was that The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling would come out in September 2005. It was actually shipped on April 8, 2005 – an acceleration of some five months. How did this happen? 

In mid 2004, I got an email from Jossey-Bass, saying that Squirrel Inc was doing really well and they were thinking of moving up the publication date to June 2005. That made me a little nervous, since I only had a couple of chapters done at that point. 

A few weeks later, I got another email from Jossey-Bass, saying that Squirrel Inc was doing really well, and would it be ok if the book was published in April 2005? I replied that it was a funny thing about books but generally they had to be written before you could actually publish them. 

Well, we had some discussion and eventually we agreed that I would do my best to expedite the writing of the book and they would radically accelerate the physical process of editing and printing the book. We set up a tight schedule that depended on everyone performing exactly on schedule, and in the end, we did everything on schedule, and so the book came out on time. 

How long does it take to write a book? 
It depends. I had been gathering notes for a book like The Leader’s Guide for some time. But I didn’t start to make a serious effort to write the text as it now appears until early July 2004, after Squirrel Inc had been published and I’d been through the PR efforts associated with that. The manuscript was finished for copy editing in mid-January 2005. So that makes just over six months, which is pretty fast for a book on the scale of The Leader’s Guide. 

My other books took longer. The Springboard was begun in December 1997 and the manuscript was submitted in September 1999. So it was almost two years. I had a full-time job during that period, so I couldn’t spend all my energy on the book. But what took the time was not so much the writing itself as it was finding the right way to tell that story. The problem was that it was a story about real-life senior managers in the World Bank, many of whom had played a less-than-glorious role in what had happened during the period and would not be too happy to have that revealed in my book. How would the book ever get permission to be published? Eventually Kent Lineback proposed the solution in using the model of Herrigel's Zen and the Art of Archery where no one is named. So in The Springboard, none of the senior managers is named and even the World Bank isn’t named. In the end, I didn’t need anyone’s permission but I showed the manuscript to the World Bank management and they didn’t object; in fact, they said it was “a sweet book.” But the funny thing is that while they couldn’t see themselves in the story, readers could! The readers could imagine the skullduggery that was implied – but not described – at every turn. 

Squirrel Inc was very different again. I began writing that in May 2002 and submitted the manuscript in December 2003 – just over a year and half. That wasn’t a period of steady writing though. About two-thirds of the book was finished in four months – by about September 2002. Then the book writing was set aside, for several reasons. For one thing, I couldn’t see how to finish the story. For another, I was having trouble finding a publisher for such a quirky tale. So I decided to put what I had written on my website in the hope that a publisher would turn up. This is what happened, since Jossey-Bass was thinking of commissioning someone to write a fable on storytelling and then learned of my work and so contacted me. With this happy development, I set up about finishing the book, with the help of a theater improv event at the Golden Fleece group in Washington DC in May 2003. The final writing proceeded at a fairly leisurely pace until completion in December 2003. 

By contrast, the writing of The Leader’s Guide was a high-stress activity that involved me 7 by 24. 

How do I get the time to write? 
I make time. Obviously, the effort involved depends on the pressure of the schedule. In the leisurely completion of Squirrel Inc in the second half of 2003, I would spend a couple of hours each day reviewing the manuscript and making final touches. 

For The Leader’s Guide, where a large volume of writing had to be done in a short space of time, ahead of the original schedule, I eventually had to set aside everything else to work on the book, 24 hours a day. I stopped answering emails, stopped going to conferences, stopped going out, stopped everything to give my total focus on finishing the book on schedule. I am grateful that my wife and daughter were so understanding during this period, as I wasn’t exactly easy to live with. But in the end, it’s amazing how much time is available, once you decide to give total focus to something. 

Where do I write? 
I work at home on a lap-top computer. I like to work in different parts of the house during the day. At times, in my office. At other times, in the dining room, the living room, the bedroom, the garden. Particularly when I was involved in the high concentration period late last year, when I was writing 24 hours a day, the change in scenery helped keep my mind fresh.  I also get quite a bit done when I'm traveling.

Like many writers, I like writing in bed. I find this particularly relaxing with a laptop computer on a special table that fits over the bed. From my reclining position, I can look out at the garden, watch the squirrels playing and continue my writing in a very reposeful position. 

The other day, I was listening to a writer on the radio trying to explain why writers like writing in bed. His theory was that when you’re lying in bed, you no longer have to worry about gravity. The body is totally supported by the mattress and the mind is free to float wherever its fancy leads it. I don’t know whether the theory is correct, but writing in bed certainly works for me. 

How did I use the blog? 
I started my blog in July 2004 at the suggestion of Cliff Atkinson, who said this was a useful way of reaching a larger audience and getting feedback on one’s work. So I started by my blog as an experiment to get feedback on chapters of The Leader’s Guide as I was writing it. 
I found this particularly helpful in the case of the chapter on branding, where I got some absolutely wonderful feedback from Phil Cubeta and his listserv of marketing people. This led toa total re-think of that chapter – something I couldn’t have got in any other way in such a timely fashion. 

Why did you stop the blog? 
Around November 2004, I stopped the blog, because I was under such pressure to meet the looming deadline for the book, I found that the blog was distracting me from finalizing the chapters. Although it was generating useful feedback, the schedule was simply too tight to allow anything during the day to interrupt my writing. So I regretfully set aside the blog to focus totally on the writing, and got feedback from people once the chapters were finished. If the schedule hadn’t been so darned tight, due to the acceleration of the schedule, I would have continued the blog.  I am restarting the blog in May 2005.

How do you find a publisher? 
It’s a question many people ask. It’s a bit like asking: how do you find a spouse? Any which way you can. 

Initially, I got into the book writing business because someone from Harvard Business School Press heard me at conference and suggested I write a book. They didn’t eventually publish the book, The Springboard, but they got me started. (When The Springboard was finished it didn’t look like Harvard book, something I had warned them about from the outset, and we both agreed that it would be a disaster to try to turn it into a Harvard book.)

So I looked elsewhere and on Larry Prusak’s recommendation, hooked up with Butterworth Heinemann. Since The Springboard did so well for them, they were keen to have another book by me, and they were delighted to publish Storytelling in Organizations. 

In the case of Squirrel Inc, I didn’t find Jossey-Bass. They found me. I was actually having no luck finding a publisher, so I decided to put the chapters that had been finished on the web and see what happened. Eventually, a colleague, Sandy Schuman, who knew about my project from the website was talking with an editor at Jossey-Bass who were thinking of commissioning a fable on storytelling. Sandy told them there was no need to commission a new book – I already had one almost finished. Jossey-Bass contacted me and they loved what I had done. So it was easy to reach agreement on a deal. 

Since Squirrel Inc had done so well, Jossey-Bass was keen to line up a follow-up book and so we reached agreement on The Leader’s Guide about the time that Squirrel Inc was finished. 

So what advice would I give to an aspiring writer? 

• Focus first on finishing the manuscript first and having a high quality product. If you have a high quality product, it will in due course find a publisher. Few if any publishers will enter into agreement with a first-time author to publish a book until they see a finished manuscript. There are so many aspiring writers out there, with manuscripts that never get finished, that publishers are understandably reluctant to bet that an unproven author can actually finish the manuscript, no matter how good the idea for the book is. So do yourself a favor and stop wasting time on finding a publisher before the manuscript is actually finished. 
• Make sure however that the book does have a potential audience. The content and style should fit the audience for which it is intended.
• Make advance chapters available on the web and share them with colleagues so that you get feedback on the book as it evolves and so that people know that you have a project under way. 
• Connections and colleagues are important to link up with publishers. 
• Obviously, the second book is much easier than the first, assuming the first book turns out ok.

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