This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2245.
Three tips to write a book in English with Urien Comer.
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Have you ever wanted to write a book in English?
Today, business consultant Urien Kommer shows us how he did it with three key tools.
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Hello, Yuri, and how are you today?
Welcome to the show.
I'm doing really well, Lindsay.
Thank you for having me.
Very glad to have you here.
I'm going to take a minute and introduce you to our audience, and then we will get into our chat.
So everyone, today I have Yurian Kammer on the show, who is an organizational change expert based in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Not sure if I got that right.
Probably not. That was that was perfect.
Not too bad. All right.
We say Utrecht, right, which is like this weird, weird thing.
So yeah. So that's fine.
Excellent. And over the last decade, Jujan has worked as a speaker, an author and a consultant.
He co -founded Unblock, a modern management consultancy that works with leaders worldwide.
And he recently published his latest book called Unblock, Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization.
Welcome again, Jurian.
I love the fact that you are really involved directly in the business world, especially as a consultant.
You probably see a lot in the business world on a daily basis.
Yeah, it's different countries, different cultures, different company cultures.
So language is always the thing I wrestle with and tinker with.
I know. Just off the top of my head, just one question about consulting I want to ask you before we get into writing.
What would you say is the biggest theme that comes up as a consultant when you help companies?
What's one of the major themes that tends to come up across industries that professionals tend to struggle with or want to improve?
Is there one theme that comes up broadly?
Yeah. So depending on who you ask in the organization, if you start at the top, people will say strategy execution is very difficult.
If you go a step down, people that are in the front lines, they're suffering from meeting overload.
Okay. You know, just being drowning in meetings.
And if you're somewhere in the middle, people will say that decision making is very slow.
And those three things are interconnected, as you can imagine.
Interesting. I think a lot of those themes are going to resonate very well with our listeners here, whether they are working in English or their native language.
But today we're here, Uriana, to talk about writing, specifically writing in English.
Now, Uriana, English is your second language.
However, you speak very fluently, near native in my mind.
And I know that you wrote a book in English.
Can you tell us a little bit about your latest book, Unblock?
Yeah, so Unblock is all about unblocking organizations and helping leaders overcome some of those challenges.
I already mentioned three of them, and there's three more in the book.
and uh yeah it's a practical guide for for leaders they want to accelerate results and um you know get better i see and was there why did you decide to write it in english that's my first question for you yeah of course yeah so i've been working internationally uh across the globe uh for a long time
only about a third of the people that follow my work um are dutch okay um and two -thirds are are in the rest of the world.
A third is roughly US and UK and there's a third outside of that as well.
Okay. So it made sense.
Uh, English is the language, international language of business at this point in time.
So it did make sense.
Was that, was this the first book that you wrote in English or was your previous book also in English?
So the previous book I wrote in Dutch first and then I translated and made it available in English.
Um, and this time I, I, I just wrote it in English.
I only wrote it in English.
And I'm still considering if I will ever translate it to Dutch or not.
And one factor is that most people that work in the Netherlands and work in business, they also read English.
So they're fine with that.
Absolutely. Did you feel like anything was lost having to write it in English?
Were there any nuances that were harder to convey when you made that decision to write in English?
Not so much, actually, because a lot of the material and a lot of the clients I work with, that's already in English.
Although it was sometimes harder to express myself, right?
If you really want to convey an idea, it's always easier to do that in your mother's tongue.
So sometimes I had to kind of figure out like, how do I say this?
What's the word? Like I don't have the real word for it.
But yeah, but I think like a lot of the business words are already, you know, there's a lot of jargon in the work we do.
Yeah. These special words and like these business type words.
So it might even be harder to translate them to Dutch because the Dutch people also use the English version sometimes.
Yeah, I love that. So the why here is, you know, we're thinking about writing a book or writing anything, going to the method of writing it in English could open up doors and send the book global, right?
Rather than just within our own country, that sounds like a really good motivating factor to push ourselves out of our comfort zone.
Don't you think, Jorianne?
Absolutely. And these days with the tools that are available, with Amazon self -publishing, you can upload a PDF and everybody in the world can buy your book.
Like that's a good thing about these days.
I love it. I have a feeling some of our listeners might be curious what we're saying today.
There may be a dream that they've been just pushing under the rug and ignoring.
They've always wanted to write something in English, whether it's a report or a book or a novel or something.
I have a feeling some of our listeners have that dream.
So Juryan, can you tell us, you mentioned that you have three tips on how you accomplish this, right?
You didn't just sit down and just write the book one day.
You had to use tactics and strategies to get this done.
Can you tell us what was one tactic that you used to do this?
Yeah, the first one is to get the right tools in place.
So what really helped was to use Grammarly as a writing assistant, just to make sure that what I was writing was cohesive and and didn't contain lots of spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes.
It's just like a writing assistant.
And I kind of, I sometimes complimented that by using ChatGPT to unpack different ways of saying things.
Like, Grammarly is great, but ChatGPT can go a little bit beyond and just, you know, you can just put in a few phrases and like, I don't know, like, I want to have five different ways of saying this.
Can you help me out?
And then they will give you ideas.
Amazing. Okay, so using some kind of assistant, maybe combining what a dream team grammarly and chat gpt yeah right yeah i love that idea yeah i've played around with grammarly a little bit the email plug -in where it will correct uh you know if you're making you need a comma or something or a period
or something is misspelled in in an email even though i teach english sometimes i make mistakes we are all about connection not perfection here we all make mistakes it's normal um and so having that assistance do you also use Grammarly in your emails too, or any other capacity.
Yeah. Yeah. In my emails, in my, in my social media posts, like it's, it's everywhere in my, my plugin.
And that's helpful, that's helpful because I sometimes just, you know, I write something down and it doesn't come out right, but I think it's okay.
And then Grammarly just gives me a better version.
I'm like, oh yeah, that's, that's better.
Let's use that. Yeah.
That's so smart. I love it.
So look, this tool is so available.
It is so easy to get started with Grammarly.
We've talked about it before in the show.
So that is a great first tip, Urian, to go ahead and install Grammarly and use that as a tool, get used to using it before you start writing whatever you're going to write in English.
What would be your second tip, Urian?
Yeah, I relied heavily on beta reading, meaning that I collected people that are interested in my work and asked them if they were willing to read early versions of my manuscript.
Yes. You can do that using Google Docs and opening up your document, but I actually used a platform which is called helpthisbook .com which is a tool that allows you to even with lower thresholds than Google Doc like Google Doc for some people can be difficult to use but yeah, there's ways to do it and the main thing
that I did like here's a new chapter tell me what you think and tell me what part is confusing tell me what part you love tell me what part you have a question about or you have a different experience about and that's important because a book is only helpful if it actually resonates with the target audience
that you have in mind.
Yeah. And in terms of language, it's important to use the right word.
So if I use an example that is just – that's easy for, I don't know, people in the U .S.
or in Germany or in the Netherlands to understand, but people in Italy are like, I don't get this thing.
That's really important to know as early as possible.
Right. That's a really good point, especially for nonfiction books, right?
Exactly. Business books where you're probably bringing in case studies, I would imagine, into your books.
Yeah. Case studies, examples.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
I wonder if people use that for fiction books as well.
I'm curious because it's a very different process.
Do you know if people use beta readers for fiction books?
Probably, but it might be different.
It might be a different process for doing it.
I really used it to figure out, is my book working for readers?
Does it give them value and how much value is every section giving them?
And in terms of language, there's so many different examples you can use?
What are the examples that resonate with my audience in Europe versus in other places?
Oh, that makes so much sense.
So it's not just about the concepts in the book.
It's about the way you're conveying it because you're writing in English as a second language.
It becomes even more important to make sure this is truly resonating or did something get lost in translation, right?
Exactly. Yeah. And if you go even further, like the title and the subtitle of the book is oh yeah is some of the hardest writing i've ever done like not you know i've had over a thousand variations um really i think there's like the the curse of these tools especially like chat gpt it can generate so many
options that you get overwhelmed um and i've used some versions which um you know for example move the needle is an expression that yes um resonates with some people in terms of getting better business outcomes but other people are like i don't know what move the needle means.
Like don't put that on the title because I'm going to get confused what the book is about.
Right. So you couldn't use an idiom like that.
You couldn't use a business idiom like that, but that really resonates with an American business audience, but maybe not a British audience, or maybe not an Indian audience or other audiences around the world.
That makes total sense.
Interesting. So you said you generated a thousand different title options.
Yeah. I got completely lost in that.
I did use, I did use some polls on LinkedIn to show different options and to get some feedback.
And I mean, the problem with feedback, I mean, feedback is awesome, but you can also drown in it.
In the end, you have to make your own choice.
Oh, you have to have a center of gravity or a gut feeling a bit of that within yourself, right?
And also to understand what is your vision for this book?
Because everyone has their own vision for your product.
Yeah, exactly. Interesting.
Interesting. Okay. I love this.
Well, I like your approach because it seems like In my mind, my bias towards writing books is that people are in their office with a pot of coffee and just communicating with their editor for a year at a time.
And maybe that's how some people do it, but now we have these incredible tools.
We can crowdsource the creation of the book, in a sense.
Yeah, so smart. What would be the third thing, Jorian, that you did?
Yeah, closer toward the end, actually toward the end, when the first version was complete of the manuscript.
and then i get got on to readsy which is a platform that allows you to hire freelancers that are really that are helpful for for book product for book production oh interesting um and um i found a professional editor um however um when you find you know there's thousands of professional editors out
there and i was really looking for one one that was um i think in the she was u .s native she was born in the u .s okay lived in the uk but did a lot of editing for international audiences very global that that was so important because because she wouldn't add any you know pop references or film references
that in other places people don't know about right um and she was really good at spotting some of those things so that was helpful yeah that is so important who you hire to be on your team it really matters and their perspective how open are they what are their blind spots that's one thing I've become
more and more aware of blind spots and do people recognize their blind spots the second time or the third time they come up so important I love this I love this so just to summarize did you want to say something else Arian yeah I wanted to add like what was surprising to me that was the first time I
learned that that was actually the process is that she would she made a style guide so so of course i have i had to tell her do we use british spelling or american spelling right but even further it's like when she was working on the first few chapters she figured out how i like to phrase things and uh
sometimes she wanted to change something and i pushed back and said actually no i'd love to say it in this way and she created a style guide for herself cool um which then helped us you know get the whole book uh through so that is so smart so she was process oriented, right?
Yeah. And I think, I think what I learned from that is that there's no, there's no one right, correct way to write, to write English.
Like there's, there's styles and yeah, I didn't know that.
So that was interesting.
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So what did you go with in terms of spelling conventions?
Did you do UK, US or a blend, create your own kind of blend of the spelling?
No, for me, a blend wouldn't work, I think.
I I mean, even the word organization, you cannot spell it with an S or a Z across the book.
So we went for US -based spelling and that's because that's how I write, funny enough.
But she had some things in there about things being sometimes informal.
It's also about quotation marks, like where to put them.
Because there's choices there.
I didn't know that it existed.
When you use Grammarly, it will tell you there's one right way.
you know, it will correct it.
Yeah. But you can have, you have variations, like do you put the dot inside or outside of the quotation mark?
Right. Some of those things.
Yeah. Do you know if when you install Grammarly, I'm curious, I don't know, can you choose UK English or US English?
Do you know if that's an option?
You can. Okay. Okay, perfect.
And I'm not sure there's many other options than that.
It's pretty binary.
Yeah. Got it. Okay.
This is good. I feel like I've learned a lot and I really think that our listeners, again, if for our listeners, I'll speak directly to our listeners now.
Everyone, if you have a dream of writing a book or writing something, maybe it's a murder mystery novel, you know, think about writing it in English because the journey would make you a better speaker in the end.
And it's just a journey that where you could push yourself to grow as a person.
You're on any final pieces of advice or words of wisdom when it comes to writing in English for our listeners?
Yeah, I would say with the tools that are available these days, don't let it hold you back.
It's really not that hard anymore.
You can always still write drafts in your own language and then throw it through ChatGBT to get it translated.
But in the end, writing in English does have a lot of advantages.
And as a final advice, do get professional help before you publish, which is the editor part.
Yes, 100%. So resourceful.
I love this. Irian, where can our listeners find you online if they want to reach out to you or would like to learn more, maybe see your book, take a look at your book?
Yeah. So my book is at www .unblockbook .net.
It's on Amazon. And if people want to connect with me, the best way to do that is through my LinkedIn profile.
Excellent. Wonderful.
Well, thank you for coming on and letting us know about all these tips and tricks for writing in English.
And I'm excited to see your next book.
Do you have any plans for another one to come out?
Or are you just taking a break for now?
I think it's a once every five year thing for me.
So I'm definitely not ready to write my next one.
Okay. Not quite there yet, but you'll get there.
I'm sure. Right? Yes.
Thank you, Lindsay.
Thank you, Aaron. Have a nice day.
Bye. You too. Thanks.
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