Many people want to write a book, it’s that one “ultimate goal” that sits in the heads of many bloggers, entrepreneurs and even housewives. We get so inspired by the successful examples of J.K Rowling and Dan Brown, and we always have a feeling that only if we get our head around it and make some time for writing, you will be the next best thing in the punishing industry. Perhaps. But is i really that simple?
The problem is writing a book is such a gigantic task that many people don’t even get started from my personal experience there are two types of issues that can occur either you’ll never get started even though you’ve had plans to write a book 4 years or you actually write the entire book and get stuck with the last few sentences. Another common scenario is when you write a book and get stuck editing it to death. In precisely because writing a book is such a gigantic task it becomes too big and too elusive a project did not come to petition in most cases. How do we break this big task into small achievable chapters and not only we get started and finish it, but we perhaps move on to the next book as soon as we complete our first?
Inspiration.
I think the first and most important step towards starting is getting inspired make yourself inspired not only by someone else’s success but also by reading other books. Read a few books in the same niche as you’re wrong on the same subject that you’re planning to write your book on and get started writing as soon as you finish reading. You will have many fresh ideas circulating in your head, did you can rephrase and put in your own words or come up with even more new and exciting ideas of your own. Well, inspiration is often mixed with stealing or copying they’re not the same. I firmly believe that all the masterpieces we see today and it Maya have been having inspired by someone else’s work. The key is to get inspired and bring the best from your own experience.
Set the time for writing.
As obvious as it may sound, setting the time for writing is perhaps an essential step towards getting started. The problem is we get so caught up in our day-to-day chores that we don’t have the time to write. And the writing takes a hell of a lot of time. No matter how fast you type and how full of ideas you may be by the time you sit down with your laptop, at some point words are not going to come easy. Living the book writing to your free time means that you will never get started because considering our busy routines we will always have something else to do something that is urgent and something that is someone else’s agenda. Your responsibility is to take your own agenda into your own hands and prioritize it no matter what. You will have to sacrifice something, for example, the 2 hours of social media browsing before sleep. Or the few hours out with your friends having dinner drinking beer and making 0 progress in life. You have to discipline yourself and allocate time for riding you doesn’t have to be 5 hours a day, try to start small and make realistic goals. Even if you start by setting aside half an hour every day you will make enormous progress within a few weeks. Once you get into the process, you will come to a point when you want to add more hours to a riding time and the expense of social media and other time-wasting activities. The idea is to discipline yourself the first few days or maybe even weeks, and have specific working hours that just set aside for writing the first book.
Set writing goals
For me this is the most important but if I want to make any progress. I have a daily word count limit. And that limit applies to a minimum and not maximum! When I sit down to write, I always tell myself, today – I need to write a minimum of 3000 words. Unless a squeeze these 3000 words out of myself, I don’t go to sleep. I can take a break and come back to writing later on, but I never go to bed unless I’ve accomplished my minimum goal. Although you can play with this rule and if you had a lot of ideas today and managed to write 6000 words you can allow yourself a little break the next day or just write less, knowing that you still stay ahead of the game. Setting the minimum words goal is fundamental though because in most cases you already know how many words you want your eBook to have. If you tell yourself that 30000 is your approximate the goal, you would know that with such a tempo, you should be there in 10 days. Give yourself another three 4 days for editing and formatting, and it’s safe to say that you have your book ready in 2 weeks from now if you just commit to setting the time aside and stick to the words goal. However, it doesn’t have to be 3000 words, that’s actually a lot. If you’re a beginner rider and you’ve never written before or never reading a book start small even the 500 words limit is enough to get started. The idea is to commit to certain progress.
Speech-to-text.
Thank goodness we live in 2018 and writing isn’t what it used to be 100 years ago. If our grandmother and grandfather had to write with a plain pen on paper, and our parents used to type on a typewriter… we are, the young generation, have not only the luxury of computers but also the speech-to-text tools. If you have a mobile phone, which I’m dead sure you do, even the cheapest phone comes with the speech-to-text facility. This is that inbuild microphone button that you see all the time, but perhaps never got around to using it. All you need to do is press that microphone using any notepad app that allows you to record text and save it. Simply say that text out loud and save it. If it weren’t for a speech to text options, I would never be able to write so much in such a small time frame. 10 years ago, writing a 2000-word article took me about 3 to 4 hours, including editing. Today, with a speech-to-text app (I’m using the default one from Google), writing an article of this size takes about 20 minutes an additional 20 minutes editing. It’s absolutely revolutionary. Many apps offer this is a stand-alone option however from my personal experience using the inbuilt one from Google works best as they have excellent voice recognition even for foreigners who have trouble pronouncing difficult words.
Create your book from your blog posts
If you are a blogger and already have a prominent and successful blog or even many blog posts that never gathered enough deserve the attention you can do with many bloggers do. Take all your blog posts or at least the one that can make for a logical book structure. Organize them in some kind of logical sequence and (again, using any free software such as Google Docs) format them into an eBook. I did this several times in my life when I had a big dog which I felt was undeservedly “underread”. You can then either or for your ebook for free in exchange for visitors email address, or you can sell it for a small fee or even go ahead and publish it on Amazon. It will obviously be a little disappointing if all the continent of your book can be found on your blog and as soon as someone actually forked out $10, he will be a bit frustrated to see that all the content was already in there for the public. In this case, you can either consider deleting the blog post that didn’t gather any attention, so they are not public anymore. Or add something extra into your book so that people will actually get that feeling that they got something extra for their dollar.
Don’t get caught up in details.
Many people could have published their book a few years ago if they didn’t get caught up polishing the details. Well, I don’t deny that having an excellently written, perfectly formatted, and a flawlessly designed book is a great advantage if you try to polish it to perfection your risk never publishing your book. The problem is once you’ve spent a considerable amount of time writing and editing your book, it becomes an integral part of your life, sort of like your child you start caring about. You will get personally offended if someone criticizes your book or its design. You’ll get deeply insulted if someone rejects to publish it. And you may want to keep editing it changing forms adding or removing sentences. This process can take forever. I think and that so perfect yet published book is a lot better than a perfect book that sits in your drawer.
There are many people on Fiverr that offer to format and proofread your book. There are hundreds of free templates online that you can download and simply use it. Not only there thousands of free cover designs, but you can also ask your family or friends to help or again pay someone $5. Outsource the tasks you get stuck with, so have nothing actually holds you back or postpones your publishing date. I hope these tips were helpful and if you’ve had plans to start writing a book, you will realize that getting started makes the test halfway done.
Good one.