Kevin Snook – Book Journeys Author Interview – September 21, 2017

On this episode of Book Journeys, Maggie McReynolds interviews Kevin Snook, author of Make It Right: 5 Steps to Align Your Manufacturing Business from the Front Line to the Bottom Line.

Kevin Snook has been working in manufacturing for thirty years, and his feeling is that people being regarded merely as tools to get something done is “disgraceful.” His book might be intended for CEO’s and owners of manufacturing firms, and his main goal is for employees in manufacturing companies to be able to go home to their families at the end of the day, satisfied with the work they did, and look forward to the next day’s work. Kevin knows that such can only happen with a cultural change in most manufacturing companies, and that the mandate for such change needs to come from the top, hence his target audience.

While Make It Right is the second book Kevin wrote, it is the first one he has published, as the first one he made was a fable for his kids, designed for them to find “a different way to move forward.” As an engineer, he is always looking for a process to follow, so when he joined the Author Incubator he was pleased that the program gave him just that, a process which he found very helpful. Through the program, Kevin learned about how the editorial process works, and remarked that the process of discovery that he underwent while going through the program was interesting, as he pointed out that, as he went through the process, step by step, he learned something.

Kevin found that the advice to “keep writing forward” was an important one which helped him stay on track. For him, this meant following his inline – which is essentially an outline of his book – so that, when he sat down to write for the day, he would write out new material for the book rather than going back to material he had written previously to edit it, in a process that Maggie described as “episodic.” He also followed the advice to “trust the process,” and for him this paid off when he edited his manuscript after writing the entire thing out. In the end, all he needed to do was relocate parts of what he wrote to different places to enable the book to make no sense, and there wasn’t much that needed to be cut out.

Kevin remarked that he didn’t suffer from writer’s block, as he had thirty years’ worth of subject matter to draw upon, and he also admitted that the temptation was present for him to dump everything he knew into the book. He noted that a likely reason why people have difficulty moving forward with writing a book was that people don’t remain the same from one day to the next, which means that, whenever people look back on something they wrote, they would look at it through a different set of eyes.

To those who are thinking of writing a book, Kevin advises them to have faith in themselves, as they do have a message to share, and to find a process that enables them to get their message out into the world.

 

Listen to the Kevin Snook Interview on Book Journeys Radio

Interview Transcript: Kevin Snook – Book Journeys Author Interview – September 21, 2017

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Watch out for the next Book Journeys interview with another exciting author.