draft, you take the outline and record yourself speaking through it, as if you were teaching your knowledge to someone or giving a lecture. Then you get it transcribed, and then use that transcription as the foundation of your rough draft. STEP 1: PREPARE TO RECORD YOUR AUDIO Technology makes the logistics of recording your content incredibly easy. There are an infinite number of ways to record yourself and a number of services you can use to get that recording transcribed. Your computer or iPhone has a built-in recorder. You can use that easily. We recommend one service specifically, simply because they make everything so simple: Rev.com. The cost is $1 per minute, which is standard in the industry. There is also an app called Temi that uses AI to transcribe, and it’s only $0.10 per minute. The quality is lower than human transcription, but considering it’s 90 percent cheaper, that’s a worthwhile option as well. Because you are going to have your recording transcribed, be sure to create a quality audio file that will produce a clean and complete transcript. That means no background noise (like side conversa- tions), and a good enough microphone, placed close to your mouth, to cleanly capture everything you say. You don’t need anything fancy—iPhone earbud microphones are great. This should be obvious, but only record one chapter at a time, and one chapter per audio file. This makes the transcripts easy to manage. For a final book of 30,000 words, you’ll have around 10-12 chapters, and should aim for six to eight hours of interview recording. This means about 30-45 minutes per chapter. 154 · ThE SCriBE METhOD