Early last month myself and my co-author Peter Mancell pressed publish at Amazon for our new book, Your Investment Philosophy: A guide to managing wealth and protecting it from fraudsters, marketers and doom merchants. It was relatively uneventful, mainly because our primary audience was our own client base who we intended to give the book to.
However, just because we had quite humble ambitions, didn’t mean we weren’t going to publish the best product we could. As far as we were concerned, it had to pass the read/look/feel test, and be a robust book in every way.
Peter had written an investment philosophy for the financial planning business and licensee he owns, and I work for. It was about 30 pages. He came to me one day and asked could I do something with it. What he wanted was a more engaging document. For a long time, we’ve given away Dan Goldie and Gordon Murray’s book, The Investment Answer to prospective clients. We’ve also given away David Andrew’s book Wealth With Purpose. Both are fantastic books, but with a change to our investment philosophy in mind, I asked why don’t we have our own book?
Peter thought it was worth pursuing, so on day 1, we just cut right to it, and it was immediately called “Your Investment Philosophy“. I went away and put together a skeleton based on Peter’s investment philosophy. My number one goal? Beyond producing a high quality book, was to have the book under 100 pages. Why? We deal with retail investors. No one wants to spook them with 400 pages. Something simple they can understand and engage with, maybe read in an afternoon.
Soon we had six chapters. Now I don’t want to bore you too much, but this probably started in mid to late 2020 and we finally hit publish in September 2022. Writing with someone means there’s a lot of starts and stops along the way. Peter’s a lot busier than I am, so when I did a redraft it may take a while to see his changes, then in the meantime I’d be fiddling and changing things.
Occasionally the the book would just sit for a few weeks, even a month. When you revisited, you’d find something else that needs addressing, or you’d think of something else. It’s like a sculpting process. Six chapters expanded to nine, with Peter suggesting a flag planting chapter about factor investing. I think the idle time was beneficial because you don’t just get ideas at a computer. Most of your writing is done as thinking while you’re doing something else, like walking or at the gym.
Editing
Eventually you’re happy with the shape, but the knife needs to come out. We were doing all the work ourselves, we even trusted ourselves to edit the book. That could be dangerous, but at some point you have to be ruthless and acknowledge less is more. I cut around 20% out and we didn’t lose any of the message. Sometimes you get caught thinking “oh that will be a good idea” usually it revolves around one too many anecdotes or overexplaining something.
After my ruthless editing sword, I handed it to the pickiest person in our office. You know how there’s always that one guy who puts up his hand? That was our guy. Positively, he handed back a draft with less than 10 red pen or question marks.
The true editing godsend is read aloud in Microsoft Word. I sat for probably 2 and 1/2 hours as an American robot man read the book back to me. I attempted to remain as dispassionate as possible. While I heard 7 mistakes, I also heard something else: clarity. It was easy to listen to. The book seemed to flow.
Amazon
At the beginning we had no idea how we would publish the book. The writing process dragging on became a godsend because late 2021/early 2022 Amazon introduced print on demand to Australia.
I signed up to kindle direct publishing, then stumbled around the site. Eventually I realised my existing word document wasn’t going to work. I downloaded one of Amazon’s word templates, in this instance 5.5 x 8.5 in, as this was the size we wanted the book, then set about reformatting the whole book. This part was the most laborious because we have around 40 charts/graphs/tables in the book. Copying them into a new word file with different margins etc blew them apart. A lot of reformatting went on.
If you are planning to do this, I’d recommend signing up to KDP first, getting the template for the book size you want, then writing in that file. You will have a better idea how things look and what the page count is from the start. You’ll have the chapter breaks added as you go. Admittedly, if you’re not using images/charts etc it’s probably not a massive deal.
I used publisher for the cover. When you have your design in the right dimensions, it’s a matter of uploading to amazon and seeing how it looks. Same with the manuscript. Upload, see if it looks right. If not, then change. Simple.
The real test is the physical proof. We learned a lot by having the book in our hands. The size of the title needed addressing, the spine wasn’t quite center and the description on the back wasn’t center. We also found some of the charts weren’t sharp enough. I’d tried to speed up the formatting by screenshotting the graphics, I noticed they weren’t as sharp as anything embedded. I fixed that too.
Being able to send out a new proof for $4.88 was great. We went through 3 proofs as we did a little more editing and tidied up loose ends. The paperback was complete.
The last step was the ebook/kindle. I downloaded ebook formatting tool amazon provided and realised it was beyond me. The time it would take wouldn’t be efficient or money well spent. I went to fiverr, found abdul_moiez who did a fantastic job in quick time.
Not wanting to boast, but I’ve read the book multiple times and I’m actually impressed by it. I think I have a detachment from it because the writing happened so quickly, then the editing parts dragged on for so long. In reality though, as we admit in the book, there’s not a lot new in it. It’s a lot of takes on other peoples’ work or investment data we’ve pulled together to make a common sense investing guide in our own voice.
We’ve had some compliments on the look, which is good, I’m no designer. I just bought a stock graphic and went with a clean and simple design. Again, I did the cover and forgot about it for a while, so it seems removed from me. If it was handed to me I’d think it was published by people who do this for a living! Also, amazon produces a quality product.
The only change we’ve had to make since publishing was the finish. Initially we went with the matte finish, but the second lot of books we got back had handling marks on them, and we have a white cover. It became apparent with more handling white matte wasn’t going to age well. We changed to a gloss cover and it seems much more robust.
Oh yeah, I didn’t quite get it under 100 pages. It’s 118, but you don’t get everything you want in life!
Anyway, get yourself a copy, or search “Your Investment Philosophy” on your country’s Amazon.
This represents general information only. Before making any financial or investment decisions, I suggest you consult a financial planner to take into account your personal investment objectives, financial situation and individual needs. Don’t make financial or investment decisions on the basis of blog post or sourcing advice from internet forums, if you’d like a introduction to investing, please consider reading Your Investment Philosophy, which offers an evidence based primer for building your own investment philosophy.
