Production Process
This lesson is part of the orientation series for potential newline authors. If you've landed on this page - and you're interested in creating a book or course -- you might consider starting back [at the author application page](/write-a-book) for context.
Lesson Transcript
[00:00 - 00:11] Alright, so once we decided the topic that we wanted to teach and the format we 're going to teach you did, what does the process of production actually look like? Basically, it looks like this. The next step is we're going to write the outline and we need to make sure that it's compelling.
[00:12 - 01:24] There's a lot of detail that goes into doing this well and so I'll have a lesson outlining in-depth, but let's stay at a high level for now. Once we have an outline, then we'll just start writing. I'll give you access to a Git repo and some templates that we can work from. As you write the sections, you'll send them to be reviewed. Someone will look over them and we'll give feedback and then we'll iterate. Again, I have a lot of advice on how to structure your teaching, outline templates you can use, how to pick the right level of abstraction and so on, and we'll cover all of these in future videos. As we get even further along, maybe even halfway through, we'll grab some beta readers from our audience and they'll go through the content and they'll give us feedback. There are good and immediate between us as editors and our first customers and they'll uncover things that we didn't think of and we'll nearly always make changes based on their feedback. Then as we prepare to ship, we'll put together landing pages for the content, we'll put together email, drip campaigns, tweets, everything we need to get the word out and then once it's ready, we'll launch. Some people will buy it and we'll deposit money into your account every two weeks. While you want to need to handle customer support forever, it's a good idea to hang out in the Discord channel the first few weeks after launch.
[01:25 - 01:56] People will want to see that you're there to ask questions and they'll usually get pretty good feedback. Then after the launch and then we'll move into a phase of blogging. We'll write about the topic, we'll drive folks back to the course and then a certain number of those people will sign up for your tutorials and then a certain number of those people will buy and it'll be this virtuous cycle. At a high level, that's it. We decide what we're going to write about, we write about it and then we tell people about it. Of course, we've picked up a lot of tricks along the way to make this as easy and high quality as possible. The future lessons will cover that.
[01:57 - 02:02] But our immediate next step is that you need to write an outline.
[00:00 - 00:11] Alright, so once we decided the topic that we wanted to teach and the format we 're going to teach you did, what does the process of production actually look like? Basically, it looks like this. The next step is we're going to write the outline and we need to make sure that it's compelling.
[00:12 - 01:24] There's a lot of detail that goes into doing this well and so I'll have a lesson outlining in-depth, but let's stay at a high level for now. Once we have an outline, then we'll just start writing. I'll give you access to a Git repo and some templates that we can work from. As you write the sections, you'll send them to be reviewed. Someone will look over them and we'll give feedback and then we'll iterate. Again, I have a lot of advice on how to structure your teaching, outline templates you can use, how to pick the right level of abstraction and so on, and we'll cover all of these in future videos. As we get even further along, maybe even halfway through, we'll grab some beta readers from our audience and they'll go through the content and they'll give us feedback. There are good and immediate between us as editors and our first customers and they'll uncover things that we didn't think of and we'll nearly always make changes based on their feedback. Then as we prepare to ship, we'll put together landing pages for the content, we'll put together email, drip campaigns, tweets, everything we need to get the word out and then once it's ready, we'll launch. Some people will buy it and we'll deposit money into your account every two weeks. While you want to need to handle customer support forever, it's a good idea to hang out in the Discord channel the first few weeks after launch.
[01:25 - 01:56] People will want to see that you're there to ask questions and they'll usually get pretty good feedback. Then after the launch and then we'll move into a phase of blogging. We'll write about the topic, we'll drive folks back to the course and then a certain number of those people will sign up for your tutorials and then a certain number of those people will buy and it'll be this virtuous cycle. At a high level, that's it. We decide what we're going to write about, we write about it and then we tell people about it. Of course, we've picked up a lot of tricks along the way to make this as easy and high quality as possible. The future lessons will cover that.
[01:57 - 02:02] But our immediate next step is that you need to write an outline.