Writing about public financial management

For the last six months I’ve been writing a book about managing public money. The title won’t be confirmed until the manuscript is accepted by the publishers but for now it is International Public Financial Management: the Essentials. I’m writing it for CIPFA, based on their international public financial management qualifications. There are four different levels of qualification depending on which of the twelve modules are passed. Here’s a snapshot of the topics covered in the syllabus and if you want to know more about the qualifications just click on the image..

The experience of writing this book is different from writing my first book, Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector. In the first book I was free to deviate from my initial outline of the book. I could decide to write more about one topic and less about another if I felt that would be best for the book. Even when it came to the second edition I felt able to go further than a simple updating of the tables and references and could rearrange the chapters or sections within chapters. As a result I think the second edition flows better than the first.
With this new book I am constrained. The modules determine what the chapters are about and the content I am writing has to fit with the syllabus. Having said that, each chapter still has to be a manageable size (8,000 to 10,000 words) so a lot of time is spent deciding what to include and what to leave out. 
I’ve enjoyed the challenge of writing this book. I’m close to the finishing the manuscript. After submitting it there will still be work to do regarding the editing process and checking the proofs but I hope this book will be on the shelves by the autumn. I’ll write some more about the process over the summer.