In this short article, I explore one of the benefits of writing your book in public: having a timeline of changes.

Writing a book in public and keeping a trace of every feedback piece makes it possible to create a sort of "timeline" of inspirations and changes for every piece you write.

Instead of keeping it just as a tool to interact with the community before the book launch, I've decided to include this idea in the next book in the "Service Principles Series". There I'll include a link to each principle that allows people to see the timeline of changes, feedback and ideas that helped form this specific principle. 

The benefits of this timeline of changes

Building my book in the open with such timelines has a few lovely benefits: 

1. It makes the invisible visible: In a way, by doing this, I'm trying to reveal the hidden backstage to the book's readers. 

2. It motivates people to write: I'm trying to show people that writing a book is no different from building a service. You make a prototype, and you make it evolve slowly and surely with feedback and time to reflect. 

3. It motivates me: working a full year on a book where each principle is a short, tiny text can feel like a waste of time. But when I see all the work that is behind each of these principles, it makes me realise that I didn't lose my time.

4. It even helps google: I now have a large body of text available for search engines to scan. 

Lessons learned

Here a few lessons I learned while doing this:

• Use social media to get feedback

• You'll get feedback from many different sources (social media, people commenting directly where you write in the open, friends' ideas shared over a beer). It's your job to keep a screenshot, trace or copy of any feedback you get in one shared location.

• Its good to leave some time between drafts to forget about the idea and come up with a fresh pair of eyes and re-read what people said. You'll be way less emotional about it.

Written by Daniele Catalanotto on Friday 21st of October 2022.