Fascinating, informative, inspiring interview with Nick Snelling of the highly successful blog www.culturespain.com about how he makes a living writing while living abroad in Spain with his family. Nick is the author of four books – Taking the Heat, How to Sell Your Spanish Property in a Crisis, How to Buy Spanish Property and Move to Spain – Safely and his next book, for November release – Laptop Entrepreneur. Nick’s next book shares how anyone can get to grips with the internet and can create a lucrative career from home anywhere in the world. This interview is crammed with tips and takeaways. Don’t miss it.

Listen to the show here

OK, my blog is in danger of turning into the Alan Paul Show, but with good reason. His book is great and it is due out next week, on March 1st.

So, in his honour, today’s post was penned by Alan and explains how his memoir, Big in China, was conceived, gestated and finally born.

Yesterday’s post was my review of a memoir that frankly, if you are an expat and want to write your own life story, you must read.

And two weeks ago Alan shared the story of how his blog became a column at the WSJ and then a book published by Harper Collins.

Here is his book trailer:

For the next episode in the Alan Paul Show read on . . .

You call this fast? The long, slow birth of a book.

I wrote my book Big In China really quickly. I know this is true because everyone says it is so, but the process has felt anything but fast to me. Now, after a lot of hurry up and wait, the real countdown has begun. The book launches on March 1.

I signed my deal with Harper Collins in mid-November, 2009 and turned in my first draft on April 1. Four and a half months may sound like a short time to produce 70,000 words summarizing three and a half action-packed years, but I had been thinking about the book for a long time; had already written several chapters; and had spent months reading through my source material — almost 100 Expat Life columns (link to http://tinyurl.com/289kaz2) and thousands of blog posts (link to www.alanpaulinchina.blogspot.com). And for a guy used to spending a couple of days  or a week on a story or column, logging onto the same file for months on end was a different experience, at first disorienting and ultimately deeply satisfying.

The book went through four drafts, each sent back and forth with my editor at Harper Collins. My wife Rebecca, an ace editor and the only other person who really knew the story, was also weighing in, as were several valued friends who read chapters and provided precious feedback.

After all this, and after the book was formally accepted, I got word last fall that bound galleys were in and ready to be sent to reviewers. It was just under a year after I signed my contract. I went in to the Harper offices to write personal notes to some of the people who had agreed to consider writing endorsement blurbs.

I didn’t quite realize that a bound galley was actually, you know, a book; I was imagining a spiral-bound computer printout. A friendly publicist walked me into the conference room, where I stared slack-jawed at the pile of books waiting for me. I played it cool until she left me alone in the big room, sitting at the head of a long, empty table. Then I sat there motionless, ignoring the Sharpies and note cards in front of me, just staring at the books. Tears formed in my eyes, my heart began to thump and I felt the blood whoosh in my ears.

I had been thinking about this book for four years and actively writing it for a year and now here it was. All those words I had typed, read, edited, rewrote in pixels and on printouts were now… a book.

Writing can be pretty lonely and plenty unnerving and to see my book as a book was an overwhelmingly wonderful sensation. The mere fact of its existence validated a lot of decisions I had made; it told me that I wasn’t crazy all the times I blindly followed my instincts trusting that good things would happen.

I started reading the galley of Big In China on the train home that afternoon and experienced some very different emotions. “Oh my God, this is real,” I thought. “I am really putting this out for the public to read.”

I had some doubts and insecurities — not about the writing but about putting my private self and family life out there in such an open way. I was also a bit horrified that a handful of lines that I always thought I’d get back to tweaking were going to be in the book. But all of that was okay. I just kept looking at the thing and thinking, “It’s a book.”

Now, months later, Big In China is sitting in warehouses and making its way to stores. Preorders a re being packed. It’s almost time for the world to meet my baby.

To read an excerpt of Big in China, please visit www.alanpaulinchina.blogspot.com

This story is adapted from Big In China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising A Family, Playing The Blues and Becoming A Star in China (Harper Collins). Available March 1 in all formats. Copyright 2011 by Alan Paul. For more information, please visit www.alanpaul.net.

Today, I am delighted to welcome Alan Paul to my blog as a guest blogger.

I am always telling my students that if they want to be taken seriously as a writer they need to blog. Alan’s story says it all.

His book, Big in China, is published by Harper Collins next month.

Over to  Alan . . .

I sat at my dining room table in Maplewood, New Jersey with my wife Rebecca and our dear friends Craig Winkelman and Jane Beck. It was July, 2005, and they were there for a goodbye dinner; in a few weeks my family of five would be moving to Beijing.

Craig and Jane are the creative forces behind rayogram, a brilliant web design and consulting firm. I have known them for 20 years and they have always been visionary and far ahead of the curve regarding anything technical. So I paid attention when Craig adamantly said, “You should start a blog to report from China.”

I quickly saw the advantages of having a site to upload my thoughts and pictures, freeing me from the responsibility of sending out mass emails, as I had throughout a look-see visit a few months prior. One email to everyone I cared about giving them the address would be sufficient; anyone who was interested could check in as frequently as they wanted. Craig took my laptop and together we went to blogger.com and registered www.alanpaulinchina.blogspot.com.

And the rest is history, at least for me; I never would have written my upcoming book Big In China (Harper Collins, March 1), if I had not started the blog.

Before moving to China, I had spent 10 years juggling assignments for Slam and Guitar World with domestic responsibilities, as the stay-at-home dad for my three children. Now, liberated from deadlines and with no need to hustle for work, I poured myself into my new blog. I initially viewed it as merely a means of keeping in touch with friends and family, but I quickly realized that keeping this public journal was transforming me, reigniting my passion for writing.

I began to treat the blog as a job, compelled to make daily postings. Writing so much for no money represented the economic emancipation that expat living offered, thanks to highly subsidized housing in a place where everything else cost radically less.

Back in the U.S., it felt like we were on a treadmill, struggling to bring in as much as we spent, even as our salaries rose. Now I was free to follow my muse, writing thousands of words a day just to tell the story I wanted to tell.

Just before graduating college, I self-published a book collecting satirical columns I wrote for the Michigan Daily under the pseudonym Fat Al. In a short introduction, I wrote, “If you can’t do it with passion, don’t do it.” I had tried to continue living by that creed, but it had become an ever-harder standard to maintain. Now, it   seemed attainable again.

Some people reading my blog back home noticed the changes.

“Something is happening to you, Alan,” my aunt Carrie Wells emailed from Maplewood. “I can feel it pulsing through your writing and it’s exciting.”

I knew what she meant but I didn’t pause to examine it, consciously pushing analysis away and pledging to live in the moment. After almost 20 years as a journalist talking to others, synthesizing their experiences and doing my best to tell their stories with honesty and integrity, I was now telling my own tale and the very process of doing so pushed me to keep seeking adventures.  This was key because sitting around those compounds is a fatal mistake for a newly arrived expat. In the middle of the day, after the men have left for work and the kids are off to school, they become an ocean of ennui in the middle of a vibrant city.

On my very fist look-see visit to Beijing I hatched the idea of writing a column about my life in China. After a couple of months in China, I pitched the idea to Bill Grueskin, the editor of WSJ.com, who was only marginally interested. When I offered to write three on spec, he said, “I’d be a fool to say no to that.” I doubt I ever would have made the offer if I had not been pouring myself into my posts.

I edited three of my favorite posts filled with excitement and fascination about my new life and submitted them, quickly receiving an enthusiastic e-mail letter of acceptance. The sense of possibility and reinvention I felt from my earliest days writing blog posts about my arrival in China was paying off.

Just a few weeks later The Expat Life debuted and it became a defining element of my time in China, as well as the basis for Big In China. But when I needed deeper, more incisive details while writing the book, I always knew where to turn: right back to my source material, my blog.

This story is adapted from Big In China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising A Family, Playing The Blues and Becoming A Star in China (Harper Collins). Available March 1 in all formats at all retailers. Copyright 2011 by Alan Paul. For more information, please visit www.alanpaul.net.

As from today, I become a kind of virtual writer in residence, or is that an ewriter in residence, at my favourite Hague based website, The Hague Online. Find me on the second Tuesday of the month, among the revamped sites collection of new columnists. I’ll be writing about whatever’s inspired me lately, like I do. This month it’s about winter weather. You may have missed the freeze that meant skating really could take place on the canals, but don’t miss my column. Find it in the Your Columns section here.

If you want some inspiration to keep you writing from the Expat Rollercoaster, make sure you don’t miss my monthly column at the Telegraph. My latest one was about being inspired by travel and how to write an effective journal. You can find it here.

People often ask me how I manage to motivate myself to write so much (yeah, 25 books is quite a lot!) and I tell them that I have found ways to force myself into it. This time I have made a commitment to write a fortnightly column for the Expat Telegraph – that’s part of the Daily Telegraph. Calling myself Expat Writer, and offering inspiration from the rollercoaster, I hope that will keep me on track and help me to remember that I am, above all, a writer. This was my latest commitment to myself. If you are committed to being a writer too, then perhaps you would like to commit to reading my column? Find the first one here. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.