5 Productivity Mistakes I Made When Writing My First Book

Thinking about them still makes me cringe.

Tim Challies was kind to endorse the book. Andrew Wilson called the book a “delight” on X (Twitter). Scott Sunquist, the President of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, says the book is “required reading for all people in or preparing for pastoral ministry and for those doing cross-cultural ministry work.” With these names and endorsements behind me, you’d think I had a flawless writing process. But I didn’t. The truth is, I made plenty of mistakes when writing my first book.

It’s hard to believe this month is the first anniversary of my first published book, A Call to Contentment: Pursuing Godly Satisfaction in a Restless World (Christian Focus: March 2024). It was a dream to become a published author, and I’m thankful that dream came true. While I have no aspirations of writing another book any time soon, I’ve had enough time now to reflect on the entire writing process, particularly the mistakes I made. Thinking about them still makes me cringe.

I tread lightly because I don’t want to come across as an expert in something I’ve only done once. But I’m assuming at least a few pastors following this newsletter aspire to write a book one day, and even established authors willing to learn from a less experienced author. Whether you’ve never written a book or you’re an award-winning author of multiple books, here are five mistakes I made when writing my first book.

5 Productivity Mistakes I Made When Writing My First Book

Mistake #1: Not having sufficient knowledge of the subject material before writing the book.

Duh, right?

You should know a lot about a book before writing one, right? I guess I missed the obvious.

There are four reasons why you might write a book:

A) Because you know a lot about the subject (knowledge).
B) Because you have lived out the material (experience).
C) Because you are passionate about the subject (emotion).
D) Because you are convinced others need to hear the message (need).

Ideally, you’d have all four.

I just had the last two.

While I remain passionate about the subject of Christian contentment, and I’m still convinced it’s a message the church needs to hear, I didn’t have sufficient knowledge about the subject before writing the book. I also struggle with the sin of discontentment in my own life. Of course, no man can perfectly live out what he writes. However, since I lacked knowledge on the subject when the writing process began, it was an uphill battle of knowledge acquisition just to figure out how to start writing the book.

I ultimately completed the book because of discipline and hard work, but I put myself under tremendous strain. I exerted tremendous mental and emotional energy on a project that could have been easier if I had an adequate knowledge base first. As a full-time pastor, trying to squeeze in time to write a book is hard enough. It’s more effective to write a book on sermons you’ve preached, articles you’ve written, or a subject in which you’ve built an overflow of knowledge in your mental reservoir.

Passion might get you to finish the book, but you’ll bring unnecessary pain in your life during the process without prior established knowledge.

Mistake #2: Writing a Christian Living book for my first book.

I barely even read Christian Living books anymore. Since I preach almost weekly, these days the bulk of my reading is biblical commentaries. I loved reading Christian living books back in my twenties, but now over a decade into serious reading, I just can’t stomach them anymore.

But there’s a business side to this, too. The Christian Living market is overcrowded. Some of it is gold. Much of it is junk. It’s hard to get noticed when there’s so much out there. When you write a generalist book, like I did, it’s hard to gain traction, unless you already have a large, well-established platform.

Mistake #3: The way I assembled the information.

During the research phase of writing, I did everything the hard way. Since I didn’t have sufficient working knowledge on the subject of contentment to begin with, I needed to read many books and articles on the subject. Here’s how I collected the info:

A) Read many books on the subject.
B) As I read, I highlighted and took notes.
C) I went back through the book and typed everything I highlighted.
D) Once I decided on the list of chapters for the book, I color-coordinated the copious amount of notes I had and assigned each highlight to a chapter.

Not the best use of time. I thought the more I strained myself, the better the book I would write. Nope. I cringe just thinking about how much work I put into it. A better thing to do would have been to use my Kindle to collect and utilize information. It’s much faster and easier to use Kindle along with other apps to store information.

When I told my seminary professor I was talking to a publisher, he gave me good advice: “More work doesn’t necessarily mean better results.” That stung, but it’s true. Worked on a book for two years? Bad news: there’s no guarantee that it will sell well just because you tried hard and you like the subject material. While working hard on a book is valuable, it is equally valuable to work smarter and strategically, and that I failed to do.

Mistake #4: Under-marketing the book.

In this day and age, publishers expect the authors to have an established platform first before giving them a deal. Not always. But most of the time. Whereas before a publishing company would handle the heavy lifting of marketing your book, now the expectation is that you do. And I did — but not enough.

I thought posting about it too much came across as prideful. I assumed one or two emails would be adequate. I didn’t ask people enough for Amazon reviews. I just tried hard to write a good book, and based on that effort, assumed things would take care of themselves. I should have been more aggressive with my marketing approach from day one.

Mistake #5: Not getting a Literary Agent.

I don’t want to shop around with a book proposal to random publishers again. It’s tedious and stressful. Unless a publisher pursues me, I’d prefer to get an agent, give him or her the proposal and say, “Here ya go — now please find me a publisher.” I want a middleman next time. Getting a literary agent will save you a ton of headaches. It is particularly helpful to get an agent if you want to write several books and not just be a one-hit wonder.

Learning From My Mistakes

If the Lord allows me to write another book, I know how to avoid energy depleters and time-wasters. I’ll probably utilize Kindle more for gathering and assigning information. I’ll be sure to pick a topic I’m familiar with. Hopefully, I’ll land with an agent and be more intentional with marketing the book. If wisdom in life is hard-won, then I definitely acquired wisdom from this whole process.

Get Your Copy of the Book Today

While I’ve got you here, I encourage you to grab a copy of my book, A Call to Contentment. If the endorsers are right, the book will be a blessing to you, and your purchase of the book would be a tremendous blessing to me.

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