Writing Find Joy In Chaos
In 2022, Kevon launched a guide about how to build your Twitter presence.
He wrote the book in public; sharing the entire journey on Twitter. He curated the updates at Testimonial.
He started work on the guide in September, 2021. At that point, it was called Showing Up Right. He got feedback on the initial concept by creating a descriptive table of contents. He did live calls with 10 people to review the contents.
He put the project on pause for four months so he could focus on his Build In Public Mastery course. He started working on the project again in January, 2022.
He sent out the first draft of the book in February. He got quality feedback from his beta readers within 24 hours.
He changed the book title to Find Joy in Chaos at the end of April. He launched the guide at the end of May. At that point, it had made $2000 in presales.
He shared his struggles throughout the whole process. This included:
Writing Embedded Entrepreneur
Writing the first draft
Arvid referred to the process of writing the first draft as a book writing marathon. He provided daily updates about the book writing journey, focusing largely on the subjects he included in the book.
With most updates, he included a graphic which included the number of lines, words and characters.
Audience First first-draft marathon
- Day 12: Returned to writing the book and made a pact with himself to get the first draft done by Jan 31st.
- Day 14: Hit the 20k word mark
- Day 16: Felt that he was around 2/3rds into what he wanted in the book
- Day 17: Finished an important section
- Day 18: 2.5k words. Shared how the chapter differed to similar content he’d written for his previous book
- Day 19: Added “just” 700ish words today, but they’re good ones.
- Day 20: 2.5k words. Also recorded his weekly podcast and wrote out his blog post.
- Day 21: thousand words and expanded an outline
- Day 22: 1700ish words on “The Practice of Audience-Building
- Day 23: 1500ish words about Twitter engagement
- Day 25: Wrote 2.3k words after taking a small break the day before
- Day 27: Wrote 3700 words for the book over the last two days, plus other website content
- Day 28: 2000 words. Shared how interesting conversations caused him to add extra content
- Day 29: 2600-ish words about how to tweet
- Day 30: 4600 words.
He finished the first draft in February, 2021. He also decided to change the name from Audience First to The Embedded Entrepreneur. He shared more in a Twitter thread. He finished editing this draft within a week and got the book ready for alpha readers. He shared a milestone half-way through the edit.