Let me warn you before I begin that this is a rant. Today’s episode is a rant. I hope to keep it within the five minutes, but it may well go over because this is something that makes me very angry and I really have to talk about it now before we go much further. 

I talked earlier about the possibility of talking your book, either just speaking it yourself into a recording device or having somebody interview you and record it. And that is a perfectly legitimate way of getting to your first draft. I use it myself with my 90-Minute Author clients. However, there are many unscrupulous people out there on the internet, who will tell you, ”Oh, it’s easy to write a book. You don’t have to be able to write, you just talk your book and then you have it transcribed and you tweak it a little bit, and there you go. You put it between two covers and you have a book.” 

This is a lie.

What you have is what I call an imitation book, or I heard somebody else call it a book-shaped object. It looks like a book, but it’s not. It’s a tweaked transcript and they are not the same thing at all. 

Think about this. Have you ever gone to the movies and when the credits come up at the end, sometimes it will say “adapted from the book by so and so”. That means that somebody has taken the printed word from a book and adapted it into a script that’s going to be a video product, a movie. That’s adaptation, because the words are different, the way it’s expressed is different. When you record a spoken message such as your book and have it transcribed, you then have to adapt it to the printed word, into book form. This is a very specialized branch of editing. It’s something not every editor does well, so you have to be careful. Fortunately for my clients, it’s a special skillset I have.

I ghost wrote a book some years ago for a fellow who did a podcast. And in his podcast, he interviewed people and the podcasts were about 15 minutes long, and I had to take a number of these episodes and adapt them into book form. Now, when you do a podcast and you interview somebody, the way to keep it lively is to keep moving from one subject to another, and then kind of circling back. That works beautifully for a podcast. It does not work in a book. A book has to be written in the order that the reader will take the information in logically, so the audios had to be adapted and changed. 

The same thing goes for your book. A tweaked transcript is not going to do you any good because when people read it, it’s annoying to read. And some people have said, “Well, you know, you just say at the beginning of your book that this was originally an audio interview.” Well, you know, that’s a cop out. If you want to be a true author with a book that you can be proud of, this is not going to cut it. Certainly go ahead and talk your book or be interviewed and have the audio transcribed. No problem with that, but you have to make sure that the next step is taken by a competent professional who can adapt and edit the material into book form, so that it doesn’t sound like a transcript with the umms and ahs taken out.

I’m sorry if this has run over the time, I’m sorry to give you a rant, but I do feel very strongly about this and I hope you won’t make this mistake. I hope that when you take your transcript audio and have it transcribed you will then make the investment in the next step, so that your book will be a book that you can be proud of, not an imitation book that will turn your readers off and damage your professional reputation.