In this solo episode, Beth Cougler Blom shares her journey of writing her book, Design to Engage: How to Create and Facilitate a Great Learning Experience For Any Group. She talks about her research and self-reflection process, using tools like Trello, setting daily writing goals, and taking writing retreats. Beth highlights the value of revisions and working with editors. She also shares insights on designing a professional-looking book and her decisions about publishing. Beth reflects on learning from interviews with facilitators, how the project impacted her career, and offers advice for aspiring authors, with a hint at her next book.
Links From the Episode
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- facilitatingonpurpose.com
Connect with Beth Cougler Blom
- Give feedback or suggest upcoming show topics or guests at hello@bcblearning.com
- Visit bcblearning.com to explore Beth’s services as a facilitator and learning designer
- Purchase a copy of Beth’s book, Design to Engage
- Follow Beth on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions.
Show Transcript
[Upbeat music playing]
[Show intro]
Beth Cougler Blom
00:02
Welcome to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work.
00:17
I’m your host, Beth Cougler Blom. [Episode intro] Hello. Thank you so much for choosing to listen to this episode of the podcast. In this episode, I’m going to share a whole bunch of behind the scenes activities that I undertook while preparing to write and actually writing my book, Design to Engage.
00:43
This goes back a few years because I did most of the writing for my book in 2019. Then in 2020, that saw me mostly editing the book, working with editors and my publishing services company. It soft launched in the fall of 2020 and officially launched as a copyright date of 2021.
01:08
It’s been about three and a half, almost four years since the book came out. The book is called Design to Engage, How to Create and Facilitate a Great Learning Experience For Any Group. It still is doing very well.
01:21
I get great feedback on it and I’m very proud that I did it and that it’s useful for folks. I’ve had a lot of people – and maybe you are one of these people – that told me you appreciate the book and you’re still using it and you still find it valuable these few years later after publishing it.
01:40
In this episode, I thought I would just dive behind the scenes, share a little bit about the process I went through because my main motivation is to help you. You might be interested in writing a book in the field or in another field that you are expert in. Or you might be able to share this episode with someone that you know that has a writing skill that wants to write a book or has always talked about writing a book and hasn’t done anything about it yet.
02:10
So if you’re interested in the book writing and publishing process, I’ll try to tell you as much as I can just given the length of this episode that I don’t want it to be a two-hour episode. I’ll try to make it as short as possible and as impactful as possible to give you some good tips that I think I could suggest after going through it myself.
02:32
So the first thing, as we get started thinking about me getting started with the writing process, actually I guess it started with the researching process and really a self-reflection process. I started with reading a lot of books about writing.
02:51
I don’t have them in front of me. You can always reach out and ask me which books I read about writing to get primed to start the writing process, but I did do a lot of reading of writing flavoured books.
03:04
And I also…I think in one of those books, it recommended that I ask myself a bunch of questions about why I was wanting to write a book, who it was for, what I hope to get out of it, and all sorts of questions like that.
03:20
So I did go through and I actually still have a Word document around those kinds of questions. So I always would recommend, if you’re thinking about writing a book, to go through that purpose –y ou won’t be surprised to hear that I’m suggesting for you to think about purpose.
03:37
Why do you want to write a book in the field? What are you hoping to get out of it yourself? And what are you hoping for your future readers of your book that you want to write? Why do you want to write a book for them?
03:50
And what do they need from such a book? So there’s all sorts of questions that you can ask yourself as you’re starting the initial researching process. And it did start with self-reflection with me.
04:02
And I found that really valuable. As I started as well, I started keeping track of all of my to-do list items in the platform called Trello. I’ve used Trello for years and that might have been actually one of the, well, maybe not the first Trello board I ever had.
04:20
I probably had used it for a little bit before that. But that was one of the reasons why I really started to become a Trello user is I used it for the book researching and writing and publishing process and all of those to-do items within each.
04:37
If you know how Trello works, there are lists that you put cards in and you really move the cards from list to list as you think about wanting to do them, doing them, and then having them be done. So I used Trello and actually I’m still using Trello for other reasons, but I’m also using it for a second book that I’m starting to write right now.
05:00
So I really encourage you to find, it doesn’t have to be Trello, but some sort of organizational process for yourself and some sort of organizational tool where you can keep track of all the things that you need to do around writing your book, because there are so many of them.
05:16
Not everything that I wrote in my Trello board I actually did, but at least it got it out of my head onto digital paper and I could consider whether I wanted to do that thing later on when it came time to do it in the process.
05:30
So it helped organize my thoughts and not miss anything I suppose along the way. Of course, part of the early work that I did was thinking a lot about who I wanted as my ultimate reader for the book.
05:44
And in my case, I started out thinking about people who work in non-profit organizations, because in my career I had had a foot in both non-profit sector and the public institution/post-secondary sector.
06:01
And particularly having had an instructional design job in post-secondary and looking around at all of the research and learning that exists in the post-secondary environment for people who are in the field of education, I started to look back at non-profit work where I had been before that.
06:20
(I guess I’ve kind of gone back and forth a little bit in my career to both sectors.) There weren’t many clear resources for people who were working in non-profits, who were facilitating workshops, who were facilitating meetings.
06:34
There just weren’t clear and understandable and easy to read resources that weren’t really, really academically written at the time and rewrite it, I guess, in a different way and a much more understandable and a much more clear and even fun way that basically anybody in any sector could pick up the book and go, oh, this looks like an interesting non-fiction book to read and not have it feel like drudgery to go through it,
07:00
but actually be a really fun and exciting process to read a book in a non-fiction field, the field of learning design and facilitation. So that’s what I did. I started out with the non-profit audience as my first initial audience and that broadened along the way as people started to read drafts of the book and they would say to me, “Beth, you say this is for people in the non-profit sector, but actually people in the education sector in post-secondary could really use this as well.
07:30
You’ve written it in such a way that it’s so accessible for people to read and by the way, government people could use it as well and corporate people, that’s great. That’s another great audience for the book.” And so the people who were beta readers for me started to encourage me to expand my original target audience into a much broader audience for everybody who really didn’t go to school, didn’t go to university at any level for the field of education,
07:59
but still found themselves doing something related to learning and they could read my book and have it be accessible and feel like it’s something that they could do and they could start to make steps and do things right away.
08:11
They didn’t have to have a degree in the field like I did. I guess the book writing process really is very similar to a learning design process. As a learning designer, I always start with analysis and trying to figure out who my potential learners are and what they need and all those great questions that we do at the beginning of a project for learning design and that’s exactly what I did for the book as well.
08:36
Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? And what’s success going to look like along the way and at the end as well. So very similar kind of ideation and planning and targeting work as we would do in our own field while creating some sort of learning experience.
08:54
Now as I started my research and my work and then my actual writing, I bought into a tool called Scrivener and that has served me really, really well. There are probably other platforms that other writers use and I know my mother is also an author and she has always just written her books in Word.
09:15
But for me, I loved Scrivener because it’s really made for authors. And if you take a look at it, you’ll notice that it has a couple of neat features that really make a difference and make it better than writing a book in Microsoft Word or another word processing program.
09:33
So Scrivener has a left side kind of navigational menu where you can put folders in there and you can put pages within the folders and you can see all those really visibly and you can literally drag them and drop them around and reorder them quite easily using this left navigation menu.
09:54
And that alone was a really great thing to do along the way because of course I was sorting and organizing what eventually became the chapters and the sections within the chapters of the book and Scrivener just allowed me very easily to drag and drop those elements around as I considered what the flow of the book would be.
10:15
It would have been more difficult to do that in Word because you’d be getting into the copy and paste functions but Scrivener just allows you to drag and drop the subsections of each chapter so easily.
10:28
I really appreciated Scrivener for at least that function. The other thing you can do in Scrivener is keep all of your research and your notes and your websites and you know even images or little snippets of quotes.
10:41
Anything that you’re doing as you’re researching your book, you can keep all that in the Scrivener file. And so it’s not just holding your draft or your final copy of your book, it’s holding all your research and your notes and pieces within that you draw from as you write the book and that was a really easy file actually for me to take and port to another drive, another you know go from my desktop when I was at my regular desk,
11:11
put it on my laptop when I was going for retreats. I did a couple of retreats while writing the book so that one Scrivener file was really all I had to take with me digitally along with just any paper things I wanted to take when I went and did writing retreats.
11:27
So there might be other tools out there. If you have one you like please let me know but that’s the one I used at the time and it still is the one I’m using now for my next book and I’m still appreciating Scrivener.
11:40
You might be curious about my writing process and I won’t lie to you it was a lot of work. [laughs] If you’ve seen my book it is not small. I didn’t really realize when I was writing it how big it was going to become.
11:55
I do say in the beginning of the book you don’t have to read it from start to finish. You can dip in there to the pieces you need when you need it. But, yeah, it became a big book because I really worked at it incredibly hard and I worked at it on a mostly daily basis for about six to seven months.
12:16
So what I would do – and my daughter was younger at the time – and so what I would do is set my alarm for I think it was maybe about five, five fifteen, five thirty, somewhere around there. And I would come down to my computer and I would write for almost two hours in those wee morning hours before my daughter woke up and we had to turn our attention to getting ready for school and getting ready for the day and so on.
12:43
So I was definitely one of those early bird writers who, I just made it part of my weekday work day. And it did make for a long day because then of course I would come back after dropping my kiddo at school and I would work between nine to five mostly on my regular job which was the company that I still own and run today.
13:04
So very busy six months or seven months of my life doing that but it also just became a practice for me. And actually within Scrivener it has a tracking tool in there that I could set a goal that I could then try to achieve every day that I went in to do the writing work and I think I might have set it if I remember at 1400 words a day.
13:31
So was that a polished 1400 words a day? No probably not, right? I mean I would just try to bang out as much as I could in the early days, like what Anne Lamott calls the ‘shitty first draft’. You know just get it out onto the digital paper from your notes and see how that accumulates over time. And in Scrivener you can see okay now I have 5000 words, now I have 10,000 words, now I have 20,000 words and so on.
14:01
So it does track your word count for you and I did find that motivating that you know it was mostly meeting goals on a daily basis and then accumulating the word count that I was aiming for across those months that I was working on the project.
14:17
If you’re curious,I believe Design to Engage is about 70 000 words. So, if you’re looking to write a book yourself and you’re not sure what size of a book you’re going for or how a size translates into the number of words – I remember I found that kind of confusing I would be trying to figure out with the books that I had all right well how big is this book? Like how many tens of thousands of words is this particular other book that I’m holding? Because they’re all different in terms of the trim size – they call the size of a book the trim size – and if I just found it impossible to try to estimate how big certain books were. So if you have my book just know it’s about 70,000 words and maybe you want it to be half that much or a quarter of that much or the same size. That might give you a bit of a ballpark for what you’re trying to write.
15:09
I will say there are many many books these days and these are ones I’ve read as well that are much much shorter than 70,000 words. In the end I almost didn’t realize that I was writing a fun-to-read textbook size book! [laughs] So it was a big one and you don’t have to do that in this day and age. And I might not do that big of a book the next time for the one that I’m beginning to write now. So, books can be all different sizes. It really just depends on what you’re trying to do for who and maybe the size factors into that as well.
15:43
As I think about how I stayed motivated during that initial writing process for that first six or seven months I did take a couple of writing retreats, I mentioned that before. So, yes I did the daily work but sometimes I just needed longer to sit and mull things over and just get away from my daily life and go to do a retreat by myself. And I booked a couple of hotel rooms at two different times to go and do that.
16:12
I would do something like leave on a Friday early afternoon so that you can check in kind of at normal check-in time and then I would stay till after check-in [sic] on Sunday so I would really get two nights and you know the days in between obviously where I would sit my butt down in that hotel room [chuckles] and bring my sticky notes and bring my markers and go for walks and come back to the hotel room and write more and and really just immerse myself in the project.
16:42
So I love those writing retreats, I find them really rejuvenating. Not everybody might be able to spend that kind of intense time like I did but you know yourself best. Just figure out a schedule that works for you either small bits that add up over time or big chunks of getaway sort of writing retreats or a combination of both like I did as well.
17:06
Now when I was close to finishing the first draft of the book I did take a full week of writing at my home office with my family members not here [laughs] to be able to get the time to just focus on finishing the draft without anybody else in the house. So my family members went away for five days or however long it was and I again sat my butt in my chair and focused hard on finishing the first draft. And, again, I really like that process. You might think that that just sounds terrible, [laughs] something you don’t want to do because it’s really full on. But that’s what worked for me and I could just focus in and really immerse myself and and get it done. And that’s what I remember doing, it was a July week in 2019 that I spent that time finishing the first draft.
17:59
Now there are many drafts of a book and I don’t know how many you might have for yours I don’t think the number really matters. But just know that finishing the first draft is not finishing the book. I think I probably spent another year and a couple of months, well maybe another year for sure, from the end of that first draft to finishing the final draft of the book with my publishing services company and getting that ready for publication. So it was the whole process for me was about a year and three quarters I guess from just starting right out of the gate to having the book in my hand. And that might feel long to you and it might be long in this day and age.
18:44
My schedule went right over the start of COVID which probably did affect the publishing services company and their work and their support of me because everybody started to write books at the time and I noticed they started to not serve me as well during that 2020 year [chuckles]. But it just depends, again like what size is the book that you’re writing and how much work does it take to draft? You might be an excellent writer and you can really bang it out quickly with just a little bit of editing but you might need more time because these things sometimes take more time in our mind to sift through and to really work at different drafts, getting them perfected.
19:22
So, that’s what it took for me and it might be different for you. Now if you’re wondering about the editing process I did work with a couple of professional editors briefly and privately before I went to hiring a publishing services company so I believe – if I remember – I sent the first draft to a private consultant who consults with people around books and got some initial feedback on the first chapter or the first few sections. And that was really good because I could course correct from that point forward to integrate their advice into the rest of the drafts and revise the first thing that I had sent them.
20:05
And then when I got the first draft done that July I also had hired after that a professional consultant editor independent person to read the entire book draft and give me feedback on that. So I did that all privately and personally and worked to revise the book based on those two people’s advice at the time. But then definitely I did go and hire a publishing services company. I worked with Friesen Press here in Victoria, British Columbia. And I think from about maybe December of 2019 all through 2020 until I got the book in my hands for the first time in October or November 2020 I worked with Friesen Press.
20:50
And they took it from that very good – well, I guess it was probably about the third or fourth draft that they got – and they worked with me to get it to the finish line. I will say because I had already hired professional editors to work with me, Friesen Press was very complimentary when they saw my draft that I gave them and I really didn’t need much editing at that point. I got feedback from the editor actually that it was one of the best drafts that they’d ever seen. So I know that the work that I did on my own with my own writing skills and the care and attention that I took to the writing process and the revisions that I had already made – but also the hiring that I did of those two consultants – it really behooved me, and it probably made the process faster with Friesen because they got a really good draft when they saw the book for the first time.
21:42
So you are probably confirmed then if you ever had the question of who I used as a publisher for the book and if it’s a traditionally published book or if it’s a self-published book, it absolutely is a self-published book. But the weird thing is no one’s ever asked me that because I was so intent on making it look professional. I did a lot of research and clarification in my own mind about what I wanted the book to look like and how professional I wanted it to look so I did tons and tons of research and gave Friesen Press a lot of direction around what I wanted the book to look like.
22:20
And if you have the book in your hands you’ll know it’s fairly colourful in a professional way. I was very intent that the chapters be different colours in terms of the edge of the paper so you could find different chapters easily. I wanted callouts in there. I wanted to do the encapsulating pages at the end of each chapter.
22:38
There were so many things that I had already pre-thought of that I basically went to Friesen Press and said this is what I want to do and guided them through the process. Because if you think about it – and actually Friesen Press told me this when I was working with them – they said I’m the publisher when I’m a self-published author. So I’m the publisher and they work for me and so it was up to me to be really really clear on what I wanted the book to be. And so I did that. [chuckles]
23:07
I guess it’s because I’m a detail oriented person as well and I like things like graphic design, I like things to look good, I like things to look professional. And so I really had to drive that process and expect excellence from the folks that I worked with at Friesen Press and otherwise all the way through the process. Particularly when I saw the draft cover designs that I was given that weren’t good enough in the beginning, I had to push and say no we need to do better.
23:37
And then do a bunch more research and show them what I wanted and and so on. So if you’re going to go the self-publishing route just be prepared to do all of that research yourself and get really really clear in terms of your vision for what you want the book to b. Because the more research you do and get that clarity, the more you can guide the people that are working for you to create that book for you to make a really really excellent product. The bad thing about self-publishing sometimes for other people is that they don’t do that work and then the book looks crappy,
24:16
to be honest. [chuckles] I’ve seen a lot of crappy looking self-published books. I don’t feel mine is that. And there’s a reason why. Because I worked really, really hard to make sure that it didn’t look like a traditional, not very well done self-published book.
24:32
I hope that doesn’t seem arrogant. [laughs] I just know what I like. I know what I want. I’m a huge reader. I always have been. I did my research and I did it right. And that is kind of how I run my business as well. [chuckles]
24:46
We just try to get it right as much as possible. And that takes effort. And that commitment to excellence has always been very important to me. So if that’s not you, if you like the writing process, but all of the details around the writing and pulling it together and the look of it, the graphic design, the cover, all that stuff, if it’s not you and your strength, you might consider finding somebody to put onto your team to help you with that piece and really drive excellence in that way.
25:17
As I look back on the whole process of writing Design to Engage, there are a couple of things that I’m very grateful that happened along the way. One was intentional in that I decided that I wanted to interview 30 facilitators to inform the book.
25:37
I had wonderful conversations with facilitators all across Canada. I couldn’t use nearly as much as they gave me in the interviews that I did with them. But those people are the quotes that I have interspersed throughout the book.
25:52
And I really appreciated my meetings with those folks to help, I guess, confirm that I was on the right track in my expertise in the field. And I also really did learn a lot from them along the way because they told me other things that I hadn’t considered yet that I was able to integrate either through their words in the quotes or in just adding extra sections in or revising pieces as well.
26:18
So my interviews with the other facilitators was a great boon to my own professional development at the time. The other thing that I didn’t plan on but noticed along the way and definitely looking back is that the research that I did to mine my own experience, to read other things as I was researching the book and trying to get my thoughts together about the field, really, about the content of the book,
26:46
I learned so much around just getting clear on where my influences were in my career. What were those pivotal transformational moments that I had had up until that point in learning how to be a learning designer and a facilitator?
27:04
And I was able to spend that reflective time thinking about those people, those processes, those books that I had read, and that had really been pivotal in influencing my practice and my own growth as a facilitator.
27:19
I don’t know if I really would have realized some of the impact those people and those resources and those workshops that I had attended had. I don’t think I would have realized that if I hadn’t really been sitting with my own experience so much writing the book.
27:37
So it helped me appreciate all the things that had happened to me along the way in my career and weave that into the book as well. So that was a really happy circumstance that happened that I didn’t predict.
27:54
You might be wondering, well, what happened, Beth? What happened when you published the book? Did it impact your work? Did it impact your business? And I will say, yes, it has impacted all of that. It’s impacted my life in various ways.
28:10
I suppose it’s given me a pride in myself that I did a big thing that I’m really proud of. And I am able to sit with that and just be pleased [laughs] and proud of myself that I was able to do this really, really big project.
28:27
It was hundreds and hundreds of hours in my case to work on this book. And it was a big thing. And not everybody finishes that kind of thing, but I did. And I feel good about that. And so I’m so glad that I did it in that particular way, just having a milestone kind of project that I finished in my career.
28:47
And for my business and my work, it’s been very, very useful. When I started to think about writing a book, I knew that the thing I wanted to do was to have the ‘book as business card’, they call it. So that was one of my purposes, that the book would support my company and my work.
29:08
And it would be like that calling card that people could get to know me a little bit through the book. It would maybe legitimize myself a little bit in the field. And it could always be that thing that clients could tap into, that people I didn’t know around the world could tap into to be able to benefit from it.
29:27
And that exactly has happened. I’ve had great feedback from people all over the place who have benefited from reading the book. A lot of you have told me that you keep it on your desk to use and to reference as you’re working on your workshop designs.
29:42
And there is no better compliment that you can give me other than that! To say, wow, it’s still sitting on your desk these few years later after it’s come out and it’s still valid and it’s still useful.
29:56
So that ‘book as business card’, it has worked for me. It became a thing that I could say in my bio and I’m proud of it. And I’m proud that I had had the career up until that point that allowed me the knowledge to be able to write a book and use it to propel the rest of my career.
30:15
And hey, I just like to write. It was just a fun process. I loved doing it. And as I’ve already told you, I’m doing it again with a second book, which I’ll tell you more about when the time is right for that one.
30:27
I’m not quite ready to share what’s going on with that one just yet, but just know that…I guess that’s the best argument for did I like the process? Because yeah, I’m doing it again. It’s a few years later. It takes a while to just kind of come down off the first one and live your regular life for a while and then maybe make space to do it again.
30:47
But I enjoyed it so much and want to get back in there and do another one as well. It probably won’t be as big as the first one as I was talking about earlier, but I have a great idea and I’m excited to share a next book with you.
31:03
Thinking back about Scrivener actually, I got my idea for my second book when I was working on my first one. So if you are starting to write a book and you are thinking, well, this particular topic, maybe it doesn’t fit in this current book that I’m writing. Maybe I should save that and that could be book number two, please do that.
31:25
And if you’re using a tool like Scrivener, all you have to do is save that research and those notes and that initial writing in a new Scrivener file and you will just have the start of your second book already.
31:38
And I did that with this one. I started keeping notes for my second book back in 2019 when I was working on the first one and I’ve been keeping notes in that Scrivener file these last four years since then and now I’m ready and have already started to begin to work on that one.
31:57
So don’t lose that work. Just start a new Scrivener file or wherever you’re working and keep it for yourself and then that will become your next book. Well, thank you so much for listening to me share with you about some of the things that happened to me and that I made happen during the research and writing of Design to Engage.
32:19
If you are thinking about writing a book or if you are writing one right now and you think I’ve missed something or you want to share a story with me about what’s happening with your book writing process, I would love you to reach out.
32:31
One of the things that I will say is that I didn’t actually talk about my book writing process a lot while I was going through it. This is so weird because actually I’ve found that a lot of people say that they’re writing a book and they don’t actually finish it. And maybe it’s just people in my life, but people get kind of skeptical around people saying that they’re writing a book and I find that people didn’t really want to talk about it with me.
32:55
Not to say I don’t have really supportive people in my life but I just found it was a weird thing to talk about at the time and it usually never went anywhere when I mentioned I was writing a book. [chuckles] So I don’t know if that’s just me.
33:07
You might have really supportive people that you can turn to that have a keen, keen interest in your book writing process and they are willing to have long conversations with you about it. But if they are not, feel free to share with me one of your ‘wins’ that you’re experiencing right now in terms of your book writing process and I definitely will write back and give you some kudos to keep you going. Because that was always helpful for me, when I had that interested person that I could just talk about it a little bit with and also learn something perhaps from them along the way as well, as I shared.
33:39
So good luck with your writing process if you have something like this that you’re working on now or maybe this inspires you to go and do something about it in the future. And I hope this has been helpful for you today.
33:55
[Episode Outro] On the next episode of the podcast, I talk with Wouter Smeets. Wouter is founder of the company called Life Centric Work Lab. This is a company that helps people redesign their work to enrich their life.
34:10
Wouter and I have a great conversation about working for aliveness instead of productivity and we centre our conversation on issues that are relevant to we facilitators, whether we work for ourselves or work for someone else.
34:22
Join Wouter Smeets and I in the next episode, we’ll see you then.
34:28
[Show outro] Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too.
34:39
To find the show notes, give me feedback or submit ideas for future episodes. Visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!
