From Idea to Publication: A Step-by-Step Guide for Aspiring Authors with Write Choice Services

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is gonna be a good one. Today on the show, we have an old friend, Tim Morrison, who is the president of Write Choice Services. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Morrison: Well thank you. It’s good to hear your voice again, to be with you.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to get caught up for folks who aren’t familiar, tell us a little bit about Write Choice Services. How are you serving folks?

Tim Morrison: Write choice services is a writing company. We are not ghostwriters, but what we do is we work with people who are writing their someday book or their first book, or maybe their fifth book. We edit and coach them as they write their product so that by the time they’re done writing, they’re writing has improved just significantly. They write better, they write more comfortably, and they can approach a publisher without any fear.

Lee Kantor: So what was the genesis of the idea of the company? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Tim Morrison: Well, it was it was already established by Janet Litherland, who lived in Thomasville, Georgia, and more than 60 years ago, Janet was my high school chorus teacher in Greenville, Pennsylvania. And we just stayed connected over the years. And when I moved to Marietta, Georgia, we reconnected and Janet asked me if I had a particular kind of sermon. And I said, how many do you want? And that conversation led to my becoming part time worker with the Write Choice Services. And then Janet was going to simply retire, shut the company down. I said, wait a second, let me buy it. And so I did. And, um, it’s just been, it’s been exciting to work with. Most of my clients are first time writers. Got a number of repeat clients, but Janet had the idea of let’s, let’s help people who want to write a book produce a really good product.

Lee Kantor: So over the years has kind of the demographic change on who wants to write a book or is it kind of the same type of person?

Tim Morrison: It tends to be the same type of person. Now, I’ve helped well over a hundred people literally from around the world. Um, I’ve had people in Europe all across the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and, and they all just, they have this hunger to write. Most of them want to lift up something that they have become a specialist in, so to speak, in the work that they carry on, or they’ve had an incident in their life that they want to share. One of my clients lost a twin at birth, and she and her husband knew that they were going to one of the twins would live and one would die. Well, Natalie wrote a book all about that journey, what it was like, how they dealt with it afterwards. And she subsequently wrote two more books dealing with that. I have a client who developed some ideas on how to save money, especially for people who are starting out in the world. And the one thing I remember him saying to me and then putting in his book is you look at these people who are trying to find money and you look at their body and they’ve got tattoos everywhere. He said. I love tattoos, but if you don’t have enough to eat and you have a tattoo, you need to realign your your thoughts. And he wrote a whole book around that concept of how do we save money in pragmatic and practical ways. So it’s life experience that people want to share now.

Lee Kantor: Um, I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of people who approached you wanting to write a book, but didn’t pull the trigger on it. I think that’s a quote you just used a few minutes before we started, but what separates a person who goes through with it and takes the action and does the work to write and become an author, as opposed to the folks who say they’d like to someday, but it’s never the right day.

Tim Morrison: Oh, I love that because that’s the right phrase. And I probably used it already that everybody has a someday book within them that they just know they want to write. The ones who do are the ones who find a coach, quite frankly, or someone to walk them through the process. Um, you know, I believe that most of us still have nightmares from all the essays we wrote in high school, and they would come back with all kinds of red ink. And so we still carry that. And that keeps us from writing today. But I encourage and that’s what my company does. We encourage people who have that dream of writing that someday book of sitting down and doing it. And if if we help you, which we do, we give some outline suggestions, ideas on how to write. Then those people will in fact write. But the other piece is it’s not cheap. You know, Unfortunately, it costs five, six, $7,000 to publish a book and that may or may not include. If you use our services to help you get the book written. And then we’ll steer you towards publishing company. That’s just a lot of money, but I have Write Choice Services has come up with the product that enables people to write a book and have it published, and buy a few copies for around $3,500.

Lee Kantor: So you helped them get it out of their head onto paper and then eventually published in some form?

Tim Morrison: Yes. What we do is we ask we ask our people to provide us with what’s their working title, a 150 word synopsis of what the book’s going to be. And every book has one of those. It’s on the back cover or it’s on the front flyleaf of a hardcover. And it tells the reader what’s inside the book. And publishers want that because they want to know that the person who wrote the book knows what’s inside the book. We asked for a table of contents, or at least a list of topics that you want to address. We asked for a description of target market audience, and I know you’re familiar with that because that’s what BR is all about. Other people look at us a little weird, but we need to know who you’re writing to. And it’s not anyone who it’s got to be. We’re writing to women between the ages of 25 to 30. We’re writing to parents who have lost a child were writing to. Because if you don’t have that, your writing is going to be all over the place. So we have people do that and then we asked them to give us 15 pages of the writing, and we critique it and were able to identify what their strengths and weaknesses are, whether they have a really good idea of where they’re headed. And then we work with them until it’s all done.

Lee Kantor: Now, once they kind of go through that gantlet and they’re ready to begin, is there, um, are you kind of an accountability partner or are you kind of saying, okay, every day write 500 words? Or do you put them on some sort of a, a path that they can, you know, just make this part of their day rather than when the muse strikes?

Tim Morrison: We, we are not accountability partners. We assume that the muse is going to bite at the appropriate time. What we do is we give a guaranteed price for our services so that there’s never a clock ticking Anywhere. Uh, because we don’t want people to feel like, is the editor trying to get billable hours or not? No, we just do that. But what we do is, okay, we’ve edited 15 pages. We see what your strengths and weaknesses are. Now read through our edits, go through the next 15, 20, 30 pages of your manuscript and apply all those things which we’ve taught you in the next 15 to 50 pages. And we keep doing that back and forth so that by the time the writer has finished his or her manuscript, it’s had the effect of maybe being edited essentially 5 or 6 times because the writer is always learning new mistakes. Uh, how to get over them, how to apply to the writing. And so they become a really good writer. And that motivates them because they can see how they’re improving.

Lee Kantor: So how do you know when a book is done? It seems like that they can go on forever because you’ll have a new thought or a new idea or some new thing has occurred.

Tim Morrison: Oh, believe me, I’ve read some manuscripts which I thought went far too long, but that’s one of the other things we will ask the client right up front, how many words or how many pages do you think your book’s going to be so that they have an idea? And one of the things we know from the industry is that first time authors should write, should have a book around 150 pages, and I think that’s like 37,500 words. So we tell them that and they can aim for it. Um, we also asked them, how many chapters are you going to have? Do you think, how many topics are you going to write on? And if they say, well, I’m going to have six chapters, so how many pages do you think you’re going to have? Well, I’m going to have 100 pages. Well, six into 100 goes. What about one like 16 times? So if you’re having six chapters, each chapter should be about 16 pages. So we used the mathematics simply to help the writer have an idea of do I have too much or too little? Can I take five pages from this chapter and put it over here? So we give those tools to help them have a sense so that they they know when they’re done. And one of the other things I often do with my clients is to say, write your last paragraph. Now, oftentimes they’ll say, well, I haven’t even written the first one. I said, that’s fine. Write what you think the last paragraph is going to be. What do you want the reader to walk away with when they close the book? And I usually have good success when they do that. And then then their job is okay, get to that last paragraph.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re working with your clients, do they come to you maybe with an expectation like this is going to be a best seller or I’m going to become rich or like, do they understand kind of the reality of publishing and being an author, or do they come with, uh, maybe, um, expectations that are a little off?

Tim Morrison: Yes. Uh, most of them come with a lot of hope and high expectation. My intent and purpose is always to keep them holding on to those high intent. But to help them have reality. Um. I say I, I, I have written and had published eight books. The royalties from my eight books and their specialized kind of topics, but the royalties from those eight books allow me to take my wife out to dinner twice a year at, um, Ihop or Cracker Barrel or O’charley’s or something like that. Part of that’s because I, I don’t really market vigorously anymore. I don’t need to. But the reality is, no, you’re not going to get rich quick.

Lee Kantor: So if they’re not doing it for financial purposes, what are some of the reasons why a person should invest the time and resources to become an author?

Tim Morrison: Because it makes you an authority in your field. As a curious kind of thing, a lot of people who write a book or write because they have a different slant on something. Uh, maybe 50 people in their department or company or whatever do the same job, but they have found a different way to do it. And that enables and they write about that. Um. Again, if I go back to Natalie, there are a lot of books out there on what, what it’s like when you have a stillborn or a baby who dies soon after birth. But Naftali writes from the perspective of we knew this up front and we continued with this, and this is how we prepared. Another gentleman I had, he was from Switzerland. He worked in accounting and he was strong in computers and accounting. When. That wasn’t a real big thing yet. And he wrote about how he used the computers to make his workload easier. And he wrote that book. And my understanding is it really sold well in Switzerland and then spread out from there. But it allows you to say, I’m a specialist in this area. I can do this. You know, if you’re. Um, I had a the guy who took care of my car when I lived in Marietta auto mechanic. How can he stand out from everybody else? Well, he wrote a small book about what people should know about maintaining their cars and why and how and how frequently and what have you. So he had the interesting ability of being able to say, if people ask him, what makes you different from any other auto mechanic out there? He can say, because I’ve written a book about it. And that’s the thing. If you can write a book about what you do that’s different or makes a different kind of an impact that separates you from everybody else.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there any advice you can give that person who has that, uh, deadline of some day to move them to action today?

Tim Morrison: That’s the whole idea about what we do, and that’s why we ask the questions that we do. What’s your working title? What’s your 150 word synopsis? What’s your target market? What are your topics or your chapter titles? And once you have that in front, it’s pretty easy to start to write because you don’t have to write to everybody or anyone who you’re writing for this specific person. You’re writing to get this idea across. And so you’re focused.

Lee Kantor: Now, any advice for the writer who has maybe started but has gotten a little writer’s block?

Tim Morrison: Oh my, there are there are books written on writer’s block. Um, seriously, there’s a fascinating, you know, most people know about Chicken Soup for the soul. And there was one put out, I think, in the like 1998 called Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul. And that book is filled with stories of how people overcame writer’s block. For some, they say it’s butt glue applied liberally to your desk chair, and you sit. So you stay there until you get through it. For me, when I hit writer’s block, I go outside and walk. Other people will go watch a TV show. The challenge is we all run into it. We all have to find the way that works for us to get through the writer’s block. And I, I will also emphasize that we’ve got to get rid of that image of, um, the high school or college term papers that came back with red ink everywhere. We’re writing for ourselves and for an audience, not for a teacher who’s going to judge.

Lee Kantor: Now, if somebody wants to learn more about your services, um, is there a website? What’s the best way to connect with you or somebody on your team?

Tim Morrison: We have a website. It’s of course the w w w dot, write? And that’s spelled w r i t e choice services.com, writechoiceservices.com. And the website has a landing page. You can contact me through that or just send me an email directly at revtmorr that’s r e v as in Victor, T as in Tim Moore, r o r r at gmail.com, and I’ll respond to them right away.

Lee Kantor: And then on the website, will they learn about some of the books you’ve written? Like I know you have a book, write a book, change the world. Are all your books there?

Tim Morrison: Yes they should. They should be, you know, unless someone’s gone in and I didn’t know, but yeah, they’re in there and I have several books. Um, you know, my first three books have somewhat of a religious theme because I was in ministry at the time. The books I’ve written after that, the next 3 or 4 all deal with some aspect of writing. And the book that you mentioned, write a Book Changed the World is actually it was what my colleague and I determined were the best ten interviews that we did when we had a podcast with Business RadioX many years ago, and we put that into a book and that’s done well.

Lee Kantor: And that’s one of those things that, um, there’s a lot of ways to go about writing a book.

Tim Morrison: Yes, yes, yes. And, and what you can do with it because again, these are business leaders. One of the, one of the interviews we printed in, there was a woman who she and her husband sailed through the Great Lakes, starting in Lake Superior, all the way down to their winter home in in Florida. And what that journey was like and what they learned. And just absolutely fascinating. So and, and each one talks a little bit about how did they decide what they write? What were the challenges they faced? And it’s just a good book.

Lee Kantor: Now. Do you primarily work with nonfiction authors or fiction, or does it matter?

Tim Morrison: It doesn’t matter. I don’t work with fiction writers. I have a colleague, a contractor that works with me for me, who handles the fiction, and I handle all the nonfiction and business.

Lee Kantor: Well, Tim, it was great catching up with you. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Tim Morrison: Well, it was good to be with you again. It’s been a long time, but I celebrate what you guys are doing with Business RadioX.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you very much. I value our relationship and wish you the best.

Tim Morrison: I thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.