I’ve put together a series of videos here about the eight rules for speakers who want to publish a book. This is one of my three-in-one bite size training videos where I give you three tips about a particular point. The point for today’s is number eight in our sequence which is, that there is no right time to write a book.
Just make a start.
A lot of people think that writing a book is a very difficult and onerous task. They don’t have to really.
If I said to you, you needed to write five three-hundred word emails in a day (that would be enough to introduce an basic idea with a couple of supporting points), could you write five of those in a day? I think you could. You wouldn’t think that was desperately onerous.
If you did that for over the course of a month, the equivalent of that writing, you would actually have a book in the region of a hundred-sixty to a hundred and eighty pages (depending on images and tables and all those other things that might pad the book out a bit longer).
It’s really not onerous.
That’s why you don’t need to be looking for this right time where there’s a “big empty space” that you can fill with typing away at the keyboard because those times don’t really exist do they? You’re already doing that – the only thing is the words are not contributing to your book, it’s just general writing. Imaging the minimal effort it takes to write those short emails in a day, and imagine those words are becoming your finished book!
Just make a start.
Have confidence.
You know your stuff.
You can elaborate on points” in your sleep” because you’re an expert in what you know – so just make a start.
Just do it. Set milestones.
I spoke about the importance of having a book outline. So why not look at the outline and think “I’m going to cover these three points today”, “those two points tomorrow”. “I’ve got a bit of an empty weekend, I’ll try and cover ten points over the weekend”.
You only need forty to fifty major points to write a book that’s of a suitable length to position you as an expert.
It doesn’t need to be a big THUD-factor monster at a thousand pages. It can be lean, mean, small perfectly formed; a great quality book, less than two hundred pages. (Set those milestones!)
Again it makes it feel more manageable and you’re not overwhelmed with the amount of work that being an author might entail.
Also it’s important to be accountable. I’ve talked about getting your outline reviewed by other people because they’re going to ask you, “Hey how’s your book going? How much have you written now?” They’re going to be joking about it and asking you about it. They’re going to be curious because Brian Tracy did a study and he found out that eighty-seven percent of people that he interviewed wanted to write a book. I don’t know eighty-seven people in my immediate circle of friends that have written a book.
They’re going to take an interest in what you’re doing. They’re going to ask how it’s going. They’ll be wanting to write their own books in a way when they see what you’re doing. Get some accountability in there to help keep you on track by letting others know. You could also do things like do a little pie chart and as you complete another chapter fill in another section, another segment in your pie chart so you can see your making progress. These are great motivational tools. It’s something that I use with my book students to help them stay on track and see that they’re making progress on the days when they might feel it’s not as easy as some of the others.
