Question for Steve

Gill Gittings

Hi steve
I would have sent you a pm about this but your inbox is full.

I am thinking about writing a bookleeping or accounting book. I know you have published a book and just want a few pointers on how the process works and how you get a publisher ect.
Thanks in advance.


Gill

Steve Collings

Hi Gill,

Writing a book is a huge task and requires as many sacrifices as studying for your exams does! A subject such as accounting is vast and you need to decide whether you are going to write about (for example) small company accounts and the requirements of such or write about accounting standards, as I did, or bookkeeping. It's also important to define your target audience at the very start of the project. Is it for students? qualifieds? auditors? bookkeepers? that sort of thing.

There are publishers that will take on work without any sort of agreement but you will be required to make some sort of investment. At present I am writing a title for a well-known publisher (I can't mention them at the moment as I am not sure the implications of doing so). Their process is quite stringent and requires the author to submit a proposal which then goes in front of a Board who then decide whether or not it is viable. If they consider it viable, you and the publisher will agree a deadline for submission of the manuscript and they will then send you an agreement to sign. They will also send you details of the word count and the format it must be set in e.g. margins, tables etc.

If you have not got experience of technical writing, then I would not advise you to go straight in and write a book - you should really start off by writing articles and submitting them to various websites for consideration. Some websites will sub edit the articles (as we do on AccountancyStudents) others won't. What this does is sometimes generate feedback from your readers - sometimes good, sometimes bad. Even the most expert technical writers receive negative feedback, so you must be prepared to receive that, but not everyone in this job can be pleased! You must, however, be prepared to take this feedback on board.

Technical writing is not something that many people find easy to do and indeed some people are quite reluctant when approached to submit an article, despite being experts in their field. However, once you are used to writing the articles and dealing with feedback, this will then give you the confidence to understand what it is your target audience wants, which will help with the first step in my opening paragraph.

Good luck with your venture - start small and slowly grow.

Best wishes
Steve

Gill Gittings

Thanks so much steve. I am currently studying ACCA at the minute but always wanted to write a book. Do you think I am being overly optimistic? Would you take articles off a student for your site?

Thanks for your help.

Steve Collings

Hi,

Well again it would depend on your target audience. If you are at a FE college then maybe you could contribute an article to their student newsletter. AccountancyStudents tend to commission articles from tutors and other qualified accountants as students want paper-specific articles.

Indeed, if you are doing ACCA exams, then you would definitely not have the time to write a book - or even articles - at this time with exams coming in a couple of weeks! In addition, depending on where you are up to with your studies, you may not even have decided on a specialism as yet. I know when I was a student, it took me right up until the finals to decide on what I wanted to specialise in (and it definitely wasn't costing - that was decided at AAT level!!)

If you have not yet qualified, then I would suggest you concentrate on your exams, then getting post qualified experience in whatever specialism you decide is best for you and then think about writing professionally. A good friend of mine is a tax author for some pretty high level titles and she has said to me that she would have liked to have gone into financial reporting writing, but her career took her into tax writing which she loves, so you just don't know how things will pan out!

Good luck in your exams.

Regards
Steve