Speak your book

Save Time and Focus on Your Talent

If the idea of writing and typing out your entire book is too overwhelming, you have an alternative. We’ll help you speak your book. Here’s how it works

1. Plan your book.

If you start speaking spontaneously, you’ll likely end up with a big ole mess. Take time to plan your book before you start speaking. During a SPARK Publications’ Strategy Session, you’ll get help articulating your goals for the book and the key takeaways you want to give your audience. (If you’re reading this, you’ve likely already had a Strategy Session, or it’s on your calendar.) You’ll also need an outline or at least a table of contents to guide your next steps. If you’re writing a business book, start by listing the questions you’re most often asked by customers. If you need help even creating the outline, we can help with that as well.

2. Record your book.

Once you’ve done the initial planning, you have several options for getting the book out of your head.

• Ghostwriting: We’ll connect you to a ghostwriter who will work with you to produce your manuscript. This service starts at $10,000 and will provide you with a manuscript ready for professional copyediting.
• DIY: Get a voice recorder—either a handheld (available on Amazon for $35) or an app on your phone—or dictation software and record yourself speaking your chapters. You could be speaking to an empty room, or you could record any live speeches on your topic. If you went with the voice recorder, use a transcription service like Verbalink to transfer your audio into a Word document. Once you have the transcript, go through it at least once to clean it up because spoken sentences don’t always translate well to the written word. Costs will depend on what recording option you select and how long your audio is. Transcription services typically charge by the minute.
• Hybrid: Using your outline, SPARK Publications will interview you. We’ll record the audio, work with the transcription service, and do the first pass of cleaning up the transcript. This service starts at $5,000 (the minimum investment for a 30,000-word, 120-page book) and will result in a first draft of your manuscript with recommendations from an editor on things that need improvement.

3. Edit your book on your own.

With a cleaned-up transcript in hand, also known as your first draft, you will need to spend some time reading and editing your book to make sure it delivers the key takeaways you planned in your Strategy Session. Some reorganization and rewriting may be necessary to get the book as error-free and structurally sound as you can make it on your own. It will then be ready for an editorial analysis.

4. Edit your book with our help.

Once your manuscript is as ready as you can get it, send the Word document to SPARK Publications. We will edit your text for grammar and style and send you a redlined version to approve or reject the changes.

The end result of this process is a clean, fully edited manuscript ready for layout and design, also known as the fun part.