Writing a Book on Community

Book projects are never an easy journey, here’s my story

Last month, I made it my mission to finish a book that has been years in the making. Now that I am nearly at the finish line with second draft edits, I thought I would share the Introduction to my book.

“Community-in-a-Box” is about the process of launching and growing communities. That is something that has been part of the connective thread of this blog over the past three years and a central theme of my career for the better part of a decade.

So without further ado, here is the Introduction and the story of how I started this book project and the long, winding road to the finish line.

This book is a labor of love and a bit of catharsis. It is a nuts and bolts, how-to book interspersed between the pages with the blood and guts of what it took to learn the ropes of community building. I spent as much time ruminating and reminiscing on the journey as I did writing the content.

The typical way to structure these types of books is to put the story first. Each chapter is some funny vignette or heart wrenching lesson learning, all stitched together with some narrative thread. In the process, somehow a few nuggets of sound advice and practical information get shared along the way.

That is not how I approached this project. In fact, this book is a bit of an accident. It started off as the 18 page operations guide for launching new chapters of the…