Is There a Book Inside You?: Writing Alone or with a Collaborator

With this step-by-step plan, the reader will learn how to break the topic down into easy-to-attack projects; how and where to do research; a process that makes writing easy; how to improve material; how to evaluate publishing options and how to develop an individualized and workable plan.

Mindy Bingham is the author or co-author of 17 self-development and children's books. Choices, A Teen Woman's Guide to Self-awareness and Personal Planning, first published in 1983, has sold over a million copies so far. Challenges, the boys' version, was released in 1984. A teacher's guide, foreign rights and a lot of well-placed book reviews soon followed. With more ideas than time, Mindy learned how to team up with a professional researcher/developer and a professional writer to produce her phenomenally successful books. Mindy is also the 15-year director of the Girls Club of Santa Barbara. Publishing began as a mission, turned into a fund-raiser and became a going business. Now she runs her own publishing company, Academic Innovation, in Santa Barbara.

Dan Poynter fell into publishing. He spent eight years researching a labor of love. Realizing no publisher would be interested in a technical treatise on the parachute, he went directly to a printer and "self-published." The book sold, the orders poured in and he suddenly found he was a publisher himself. Since 1969, he has written and published 74 books on subjects ranging from skydiving to hang gliding to computers and publishing. In the publishing field, he is widely known for his best selling The Self-Publishing Manual, How To Write, Print & Sell Your Own Book. He is a frequent speaker at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, the Maui Writers Conference and many other industry events. Dan runs his own publishing company, Para Publishing, in Santa Barbara.

Mindy and Dan were prompted to write this book because so many of their friends, noting their success, approached them for the secret. Now they are revealing to you the inside story on how to write a book, alone or with help-the good life of being a published author.