You never know where your next opportunity is coming from.

That’s the story PRC CEO Tara Powers told on The Writer on the Side podcast with Hassan Osman. She talked about how she was asked to write her best-selling Virtual Teams for Dummies book.

It’s a very different story than most first-time authors.

In short, Powers didn’t set out to write a book. Rather, she was seeing more virtual teams in her consulting work so she decided to conduct her own research on the topic. When the data came in, she started writing about it. A lot.

“It was really compelling,” said Powers. “For example, we could see that there were significant differences in how executives and virtual team members felt about the effectiveness of virtual teams.” Those very different opinions are what Powers termed the ‘Perception Gap.’ Read more about it here.

She wrote articles, blog posts and research reports and she published them on LinkedIn and other platforms. PRC already had a strong following on LinkedIn and her posts generated a lot of interest. It caught the attention of Wiley, the publisher of the Dummies series. They liked the quality content they saw and they asked Powers to write a book.

“How could I say no? It was a wonderful opportunity,” said Powers. “It was hard to run my business while writing the book, but I am so glad I did!”

Check out Powers telling her story here. And check out more information about virtual teams at virtualteamacademy.com