Publishing a book is a funny thing. Tell someone, “Oh, and my book was just published…” and the response is, “Wow! What a big deal that is.”

End of conversation. Sometimes I shift my feet – or look away.

What do you say from there when, in fact, nothing HAS changed for me?

I didn’t dream of being an “author”. My brother is the family writer - a novelist. But 12 years ago, when I was struggling to reinvent my career, I got the light bulb idea that a book like this would help me! Someone should write it.

Four years ago, I narrowed my business focus from executive coaching to coaching highly motivated people (aka “professionals”) living with a chronic illness around their careers, cicoach.com. I thought about writing this book — it would build momentum and attention to the issues and it be so useful for those people I couldn’t/wouldn’t get to work with but who wanted to hear this message.

It came together when I “met” Joan. Joan & I met virtually (she lives in CA and I live in MA) through our mutual virtual assistant, Angie Robertson, a very generous soul. She knew we had several things in common, such as living with chronic illness and being coaches, and said we should “meet”. In fact, Joan and I have only met in person once for a few hours over the past 3 years we’ve been working together.

In our first conversation, I mentioned that I was thinking of writing a book about living and working with a CI. Joan aid she’d always wanted to write and it sounded interesting. A few more conversations and we decided to go for it. Speaking for myself, I was clueless about what this meant in terms of time and commitment. But if felt right and that’s how I often make big decisions.

Honestly? We’ve had to work at working together — duh! We agreed on one thing at the outset that became our mantra. We had to have fun doing this – - particularly since we didn’t expect it to make us money. We’d be lucky to recoup our cost. Yes, the book is part of my business plan but not so for Joan.

There have been times when email created confusion. And one of us would pick up the phone to talk it out. I know we were both grateful that it always got clear and felt right. We didn’t have to be best friends but we’ve been supportive and nurturing colleagues.

It took two years and many drafts to write the manuscript. We were very lucky to find a fantastic editor, Elle Mansfield, who pulled our ideas together and massaged the chapters. We’d always intended to self publish. I never thought a publisher would want this and didn’t have the energy or desire to try to sell it. But when the manuscript was done and I’d sent it to some colleagues to review, it was passed it along to Nora Henson at Demos Health which was building their patient education division. She contacted us, wanting to publish it. I’d heard bad things about first authors and publisher relationships, so I had to be convinced. Boy, am I glad I was – they’ve been terrific to work with.

One year after the first conversation with Demos Health and the book is selling .

We’ll see what changes – I can’t say I wouldn’t love it to become a New York Times Bestseller. But for now, next Monday, I’m going to be interviewed on Zentertainment Radio. You can tune in and listen to me there!

Rosalind aka cicoach.com

PS: If you didn’t read Joan’s last post, this blog is changing focus to being solely about the book – rather than working with chronic illness issues. You can read my other blog, Working with Chronic Illness or Joan’s other blog Toolbox for Entrepreneurs.

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