I published a book!! It’s called Puzzled to Organized and it is an organizing activity workbook, with puzzles and activities that are meant to challenge and strengthen your organizing skills. From idea to publishing was a two year period, so I want to share what that looked like.
Inspiration Strikes
I am a member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing professionals (NAPO). They hold an annual conference, which I attended in Baltimore in April of 2022. At this conference, I went to a talk on different revenue streams for professional organizers. This got me thinking about products that I could sell online. Somewhere along the 10 hour drive home, I came up with the idea of having an organizing themed puzzle book. I’ve always loved doing activity and puzzle books, and I thought that would be a fun vehicle with which to teach organizing skills.
Brainstorming and Planning
My goal was to have the book be at least 100 pages (because that seemed substantive but not overly whelming), so it felt natural to break that down into ten chapters each with ten activities. I decided each chapter would represent a room in the house or a category of items that typically needs organizing. I settled on the following chapters: Kitchen, Bathroom, Bedroom, Entryway, Living Room, Office, Dining Room, Supplies, Storage, and Memories. The activities would roughly be the same for each chapter. Below you can see a picture of my initial brainstorming of the activities that would be included in the book.
For the final draft I included the following activities: getting motivated, writing poems, word searches, word jumbles, categorizing items, designating zones, coloring pages, shelf assignments, organizing tips and tricks, spot the differences, self discovery, and giveaway lists. And there we go, I had an outline for my book! I then created the outline in Canva, a very nice drag and drop digital media software.
And then I left it there for about 6 months. š
I cannot tell you exactly what made me drop off on working on it or what made me get back into it because I don’t entirely remember. Originally I wanted to finish it by the end of the calendar year (HaHa!). I think it was towards the end of the year when my sister asked how the book was going where I was like “Crap, I need to get back on that!”. I’d say the reason I fell off it was because I didn’t have a set plan of attack. If you’re familiar with Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies framework, I am an upholder, so I’m pretty good at following through on my own expectations, but they need to be clear and be put on the calendar.
So a plan was made! Since I had the page outline in Canva, I thought the easiest way to attack the book would be to work on a singular activity at a time and create it for each chapter. I suspected certain activities, like motivation and giveaway lists would be quite quick to make, where as the designating zones pages would take a lot of digital creation and the tips and tricks would take some thought and writing. Thus, I tried to condense and spread them out appropriately. Below is a picture of my planned schedule for getting the book done that I made towards the end of 2022. You can see at the end I had to rework the plan again, because I fell behind, again. My day for working on my business is Tuesdays, so that is, for the most part, when I worked on my book.
There were weeks where I didn’t get anything done and some where I was even able to skip ahead. What I didn’t entirely account for was how long editing and publishing the book would take.
Design and Development
I initially created the book in black and white because I knew that if I added in color in the beginning I would get way too bogged down with messing around with colors. Once I had finished the book in black and white and with my own rough graphics, I handed it over to the fantastic digital designer, Emily Eder. She added a color scheme and was able to recreate and improve my roughly made line graphics. I then had to do several iterations of editing, including a very tedious page by page alteration of all the margins after realizing they weren’t up to Amazon’s snuff! I enlisted the help of friends, family, and fellow organizers to test out the activities. Their feedback was invaluable! It helped me refine the puzzles, adjust difficulty levels, and ensure that the instructions were clear and concise. Below is an example page from initial draft to post digital designing.
Launch and Beyond
I finally got the book up on Amazon May of 2024! Now I had to tell people about it. I started by emailing friends and family and I’d mention it to people in person. Then I emailed past clients about it. Next I’ve thought about doing a book signing or some type of event or workshop at the library. We’ll see what I end up doing!
By the way, here’s a link to the book, if you’re interested!
Here are some things I’ve learned from my process:
- Make a plan, but also be flexible with yourself and the plan
- Create some form of accountability
- Really check the formatting requirements before making anything!
- Keep forefront why you’re making the book
- Don’t forget to have fun!