How did I think of writing a book and how did it happen.
First of all, I love to read and I also love to write. I used to write as a child and continued as I grew up. Blogging caught my fancy as it was a low entry barrier and an easy way to express one’s thoughts and share with a lot of people.
I had been blogging for a long time, wrote regularly on a personal blog for quite some time which was generic life topics, I wrote parenting blogs and also on Diversity & Inclusion in the circle of women initiative we had in our account. We had organized a blog-a-thon as part of an internal agile conference, TCS Agile Café in 2017-18 where I started blogging on knome on agile mindset to give a boost to the event, and that actually led me to blog on that topic on LinkedIn from October 2018.
In 2019, I thought of writing a book by collating the blogs and started thinking about all different aspects important for agile mindset. Of course it took me a long time to finish all those blogs, get feedback from people and so on. I went on blogging till May 2020 on all topics relevant to the agile mindset and collating it together. Further I also added examples in the form of stories for each of the topic along with some tips and techniques on each.
Well I thought now I have all the content and writing the book would be a so simple! However it took me way longer even post having the content. Collating it together, coming up with themes, reviewing the content, reducing it, reviewing again, checking the language was not easy. Especially when we got locked down with nowhere to go over weekends, all travels banned, I told myself, See looks like God wants to tell you that this is the right time for you to put focus and get that book out. If not now, when? So all of my lockdown weekend mornings and evenings were compiling the book together.
My publishing journey
The publishing process once I started working with the publisher was fascinating. Thinking of blurb, summary of why the book is written, author introduction, key words, the way the book gets copy edited, type-setted was a completely new experience.
My book starts by setting the context about what is agile mindset, why is it important to have an agile mindset and then proposes a four stage approach to embrace it, that’s what the magic refers to. For each of the concepts, I do a deep dive on what it means, why it is important and put it in the context of agile teams. Then I talk about success or failure stories from my experience while bringing in mindset change for that particular topic.
I sincerely hope people enjoy watching it and find it simple to understand and interpret. Response I have got so far is pretty encouraging, so lets see how it goes. Looking forward to your feedback and comments!
You can grab a copy of my book here:
(India) https://www.amazon.in/Agile-Mindset-Ma-g-i-c-Stories-trenches/dp/1636067131/
(US) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1636067131/
Paperback: (India) - https://notionpress.com/read/agile-mindset-ma-g-i-c