 Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash Today, we will continue our discussion on finding or making time to write your book. I want to encourage you to remember why you wanted to start writing a book and remind yourself why it is important to complete. We have too many people in our world that don’t finish what they start. I have been guilty of this myself.
One of the best ways to make sure you meet goals is to actually make them and WRITE THEM DOWN! Today’s goal will be to set a word count for your book. The average word count for a book ranges between 40,000 to 90,000 words depending on where you look and who you ask. A 6 inch by 9 inch book will typically have approximately 300 words per page. That will average to about 130 pages. This gives you plenty of pages to cover your material. It allows you to have your name on the spine of the book (101 pages minimum for a book on Amazon). It’s also long enough to cover your topic and short enough to keep the reader's attention. Set a word count for each time you plan to write! Let’s just use 40,000 words as our target number for your next business book. Now, let’s say you want this book to be completed in the next 6 months, and you only want to write 3 days a week. 40,000/24 weeks = 1700 words a week 1700/3 days = 570 words per day 570 words per day will get you to 40,000 words in 6 months with just 3 days of writing. To give you some idea of how long that should take you each day, this blog is around 300 words and took less than 15 minutes to write. This is not a lofty goal and can be completely easily with a little bit of consistency.
0 Comments
One of the most common complaints I hear from people about writing their books is that they do not have enough time. They are working a 40 hour job, running a side hustle, and raising kids. Or they are busy working and traveling. Whatever the problem is there are ways to find time throughout your week to write your book.
Over the next few weeks I will be highlighting several ways to fit your writing in even if you have the busiest schedule. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or your own tips for finding time to write. Spend 10 minutes of your lunch break daily writing your book. The last thing you probably want to do on your lunch break is work on something else, but this is a great way to add in more productive time to your day and get ahead on your writing project. This will require a little bit of planning to make sure the time is spent wisely instead of being flustered on knowing what to write. Make the process as easy and automatic as possible.
 Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash I have self-published 6 books in the last 2 years, had 25 clients publish in the last year, and helped over 850 others start their books. One of the biggest questions I get all of the time is “What about marketing?’'. I have an easy answer for you! You are in charge of your marketing! Traditional publishers are only going to market a limited amount of books each year, and odds are that your book isn’t going to be one of those books! This can be a great realization for someone who was thinking that they would find a publisher and the work would be over. You are in complete control of your book when you self-publish! You get to chose the cover. You get to chose the title. You get to chose everything. You even get to chose how your marketing is done. In the next few paragraphs I’ll give you some simple steps to marketing your book. I would like to add a disclaimer that all of my books and the majority of my client’s books are on Amazon. Step 1 Always publish a paperback and a kindle (Ebook) version on Amazon. Publishing a kindle version allows you to run a free promotion and push your book to #1 New Release with the write steps. Do this. Make sure you have picked the best category of for your book! Set the price for your kindle at $1.99 or below. Tell everyone who wants to support you to buy your book. After one week set your price at $9.99 for a couple of days before running your free promotion. This starts a “bat” signal for bloggers and reading sites to send out to their email lists about books that have had a major reduced price and are now free. Set your book to free. Step 2 Let the press know about your book. You can schedule a press release on www.webwire.com for $37. The first book I listed on Webwire was seen by over 176,000 people. Webwire is easy to work with, and they show you exactly how to do the release. They also have other, more expensive options to reach your audience. Step 3 Be social! Use your personal social media to promote, promote, promote your book. Post about it. Share it in your stories. Do videos and talk about your book! Great a public group for your audience. Step 4 Interviews. Use your new tool to get on podcasts, radio, and television to promote your book. There are probably millions of podcasts at this point, and many of those podcasts need guests. Getting an author can be a great addition to a podcast. They will talk about you and your book. They will make you look like the expert you are! You will most likely get to leave a link and mention your book so their audience can find you! Step 5 Give it away! Give your book to people around your town. Send copies to influencers! Send copies to anyone and everyone who it could serve. Give books to people and highlight the parts that will best serve them! No matter who publishes your book, it is ALWAYS your responsibility to make sure it is successful. Please reach out to me if I can ever help you with your book! Watch this video to get a little more info on book marketing! It was made for physical therapists in mind, but will work for anyone!  Photo by My Life Journal on Unsplash I have self-published 6 books in the last 2 years and helped get 25 others published in the last year. One of the biggest tools for publishing those books has been the skill of mind mapping. I heard of mind mapping on a podcast helping to solve student debt issues, and remembered learning it at some point in school long ago.
Immediately I started mind-mapping everything! I was using them to schedule my week, my social media content, Facebook live videos, and just about anything else I could do. What my mind maps lacked in elegance, they made up for in practicality and usefulness. It was a natural transition from my scheduling needs to writing my first book. I am a physical therapist who now helps people write and self-publish books, so my first book was about getting rid of neck pain. The mind map started with a mind dump first. I would write down everything on the page I could think of about neck pain. I wrote down anything I thought would help someone feel better. Then, I wrote down anything someone might ask when in pain. Next was equipment needed, stretch, exercises, posture, etc. Step 1 The first step of mind mapping is to map out what you want to write about. This step is great because you probably know a lot of things you didn’t even realize you can teach someone else. Whether you’re a medical professional, a plumber, or a stay-at-home mom, you have something to say people need. My best advice is to pick a topic that you’re knowledgeable about, passionate about, people tell you you should write about, or a topic you want to research. You get extra points and the book will be better if you can find a topic that intersects all of those at some point. Step 2 Decide what you want to write about on the topic you chose. Whatever you pick you have to know who you are writing to and where in the story they are coming in. For instance, if you were writing about American football to a football fan you wouldn’t need to tell all of the rules of the game. However, if you were writing about the grammatical rules of Spanish for a non-Spanish speaking person it would be crucial to start at the beginning and leave nothing out. Step 3 Remove the fluff! Once you decide on a topic remove all of the parts that someone else wouldn’t need to get the point. I don’t need to know everything a plumber knows to fix my toilet. I don’t want to know everything they know either. I just want the steps to get it fixed without spending too much of my valuable time on the project. Don’t assume someone wants to spend any more of their time reading your book than they have to spend. Most people just want the bullet points. Step 4 Turn your mind map into your book’s outline. Once you’ve removed the fluff, you are ready to get the outline done, The outline is the road map of your book. You wouldn’t leave on a cross-country trip without a map or your GPS. You shouldn’t write your book without a map either. Once you know what you’re writing, who you’re writing for, and how in-depth to go in your book you are ready to set your outline. Take the top, bullet points from your map, and make those into your chapters. Then, you can outline each chapter. If you did a great job on your initial mind map, this will be simple. Mind mapping is a great first step to go from dreaming about writing and publishing a book to getting it done. Don’t worry about getting any of it perfect. Perfection is one of the enemies of production. Start producing your book and you will have a published book in no time. |
Jeremy Sutton
Each blog is designed to help you publish your book, grow your audience, grow your brand, and make more money! Archives
October 2020
Categories |
RSS Feed