If you’ve always dreamed of writing a book but haven’t yet made it happen, you’re not alone. In fact, while 81% of people say they want to write a book, only a few manage to get it done.
I used to be “one of the 81%” and now I’m “one of the few.” While I’ve been a writer since 1993, I didn’t write my first book until 2014. At this time, I’ve written and published 11 books, with more in the works.
If you’d like to see similar results, I recommend the following:
#1: Develop a Plan for Beating Procrastination
Prolific author, Shelley Hitz has cracked the code for going from procrastination to publication. In fact, she went from struggling to get a single book published to now having published over 35 books. If she can beat procrastination, anyone can! She’s had so much success in this area that she wrote a book, and created a course, Procrastination to Publication, that’s worth checking out.
In addition to my recommendation to enroll in Shelley’s course, I suggest at a minimum, doing the following:
- Write a short book first. The great thing about the Kindle platform is that it’s not uncommon for books to be short, some as short as 10,000 words. (Some are even shorter than that, but I recommend writing at least 8,000 words.)
- Break the task of writing your book down into small steps. For example, you could think of your 10,000-word book as a series of blog posts, and write the book one “post” at a time. If a typical blog-like segment is 500 words, it will take 20 sessions to complete a 10,000-word book. If you wrote one per day, it would take you 20 days to write your book. Taking weekends off, it would take less than a month. That doesn’t seem very intimidating, does it?
- Be accountable. I find coaches and other accountability partners really help me to get things done. I also am accountable in other ways such as by creating a sales page for my books and putting a countdown timer on the page.
#2: Develop a Process for Writing Books
Processes make everything easier. They are simply a series of steps that when followed, lead to the desired result. For example, if you follow a recipe, you end up with something good to eat. Depending on your cooking skills, you may be able to throw things together without a real plan, but the results of doing so are hit or miss. The same is true of writing a book. If you have a process for writing a book, you just follow the process step-by-step.
When writing your first book or two, you may not even know what to include in a process. In that case, I recommend following someone else’s process and then as your experience level increases, tweaking the process to suit your needs. Shelley Hitz has free training that shows her step-by-step process for writing books fast. You can check it out here. It was the starting place for me for developing my own book-writing process.
#3: Hire a Writing Coach
Nothing lights a fire under your butt like hiring a coach. A coach can help you in many different ways. For example, a coach can help you develop or tweak your process, answer your questions along the way, and hold you accountable. A coach is the best way to ensure you actually get the hard work of writing your book done. You’ll still have to write it (unless you hire a ghostwriter, which is a completely different thing!), but a coach can help you stay on task as well as avoid costly mistakes. On occasion I offer author coaching. You can check out my current availability here.
Your Turn
What about you? Have you struggled with writing your book? What tactics have helped you the most? Share your experiences with writing books in the comments below.
