How To Write Your Book Series: Tips from a best selling author

You may not have a finished product that’s ready to face the world, as in a print book, for instance, but you will have enough of a manuscript. The hardest thing when writing the book is to get it finished. And there’s a reason why writers feel satisfied when they pen “The End” after that last word.

This series aims to give you the motivation to start, continue and end. (I know that’s a tall order, right? But it’s possible since I am writing this book in a week. No choice. I don’t have that much time. You probably don’t have much time either. Which is why one week is not too long a time to commit and hunker down.

If you have an idea of what you want to write about but have not angled it, niched down, I call it, and your idea is sort of obtuse, I will help you to narrow your topic.

Not only that, this series will help you find the right positioning so you can wiggle into a crowded niche—there are three that have the most voracious readers and people waiting to hear a solution—and settle into your own sub niche in a wide blue ocean. When you carve out your own segment out of a larger space, and do a good job, you actually own it, and people start to see you as the leader.

Then you really have “author”ity in that space. (You can see the word "authority" comes from being an author, right? Yet another reason to write that book, and get it published!

If you have no idea what to write on…no problem all you have to do is answer a half a dozen simple questions and it will bring you down the right path. The questions are farther along in the series.

No time to write? (Later I will post a whole article that deals only with finding time—as if time's lost and must be found. LOL! That module is at the end of the series.)

My aim is to to get you to write 3000 to 5000 words in a day. Because if you wrote that many words a day you’d end up with a 21000-word book—at least. In a week. If you hunkered down and aimed at something close to 5000
words, you end up with a hefty 35,000 word non-fiction book. (I'm primarily a fiction (novelist) myself, and may do a fiction series in the future.)

So, the first step to writing is to outline your book, and then flesh it out. I provide three approaches.

Develop tips to overcome writer’s block.

A real time waster because when you sit down and write you want to do just that...write…not stare at a blank page, scratch your head, then get distracted and …well, you know you get discouraged, then you abandon the project for the day. You don’t have that luxury since you are writing your book in a week.

Also your motivation will wane if you get sidetracked, and weeks turn to months. So it’s better to go intense, focus for a week, and then finish the project. Thank me later for this advice.

Think that’s not possible? Let me show you how. Once you get the hang of it you will even find writing your book to be therapeutic. And you will start to crave for time to write.

(There’s a reason why people journal (old fashion blogging), and have been doing so for centuries.)

Understanding the “why”

Understanding the "why" will help you with the “how to.” It will get you motivated...push you over to go from"I'm going to..." to "I'll do it."

Before we write a word, we need to ask ourselves "Why are you writing?"

Dig deep.

It’s like having children. If you want to have a child, and you know all the reasons why--the joy, the untold promises a child holds, even when things get tough-- you know deep inside this is what you want no matter the trouble, the struggle, the pain, because it's bigger than yourself.

Some people write because they have no choice, something in their constitution compels them to write. They have ideas, imagination, opinions they must put down on paper. They may not be talkers much, but writers they must be.

If you are anything like this I suspect you already have a journal, or a blog. Maybe even a manuscript hidden under the bed somewhere.

But this may not be the only reason why you must write that book.

I also suspect a person of this nature writes volumes in Facebook posts, and comments on blogs, forums, and yes, again, Facebook, and now on Steemit--and yay! gets paid for it. If you are this person think about how you can harness all that energy spent on writing and direct it to writing a book. In a week you will have something to show for. A book in hand is worth a hundred comments on Facebook, or even on Steemit.

A tip

Next time you write a post, copy and paste your post onto a Google sheet titled comments on topic "ABC"… whatever that may be. You will start to see a trend on things you comment on. Things you are the expert on.

But does it mean this is the topic you want to choose to write your book on? Not necessarily. Later we will do a Niche Test and see if this topic will produce a book where readers are already waiting to buy.

Another tip

Instead of spending your time and energy writing Facebook posts and comments you can use that time to write a book, and cut out snippets of your book and post these instead. Now at least you are doing it for a business which you can grow and bring in income. And best of all, a book can outlive the most timeless post.

For instance, I can use some of the sentences, tips, and short cuts I am including in this book as Facebook Posts, on forums, on Steemit comments, etc..

Once you have your book fleshed out, you can tweet sentences from your book, and you can use a whole segment as a blog post, for yourself or as guest posts. (It must be for relevant blogs of course.) You can even repost sections of a book you have written for influencer bloggers who may share the same space you have.

You can also read a portion of the book and create a podcast out of it, or even make some slides and do a presentation and post this teaching on YouTube,or DTube. Or create a webinar from it. And even share the slides with your watermark on the LinkedIn’s Slideshare platform.

So it’s more than a double whammy when you write your book. You can use it for so many platforms, and marketing purposes to market yourself and your expertise. A book means you score!

Some people write a book on a given topic because they had gone through some fire in their lives, a winter’s storm, which they had overcome. Life had thrown them rocks and instead of being buried under a pile of stones they had learned to not only live with these harsh realities, but had found ways to get over, overcome, and reigned triumphant over it.

Maybe you went through a divorce and had to raise two boys on your own, but you did such a good job they grew up smart, and stable.

Maybe you couldn’t have children and learned the ropes of how to adopt from overseas. The legalities, the social problems an older child could face, the psychological issues of adapting to a new environment.

Maybe you had a child that suffered from anorexia and you learned how to find the signs that signal a relapse and how to help the child get over this hump.

Or you find recipes and nutritional information to help the child recover and create lifelong good eating habits.

Research Tips To Ensure Success

Because the reality is life is full of humps and your pain, your frustrations, your struggles are not unique. You can find out if there are enough people out there suffering through the same ordeal (using the Google Keyword Tool—if you want to learn how to get started on this I will have a tutorial on this), and your book can not only be a process of healing for you, but it can help others as well.

Another alternative to the Google keyword tool is KeywordTool.io

I know of numerous writers who wrote books and were discouraged when they didn’t see sales enough to sustain a living.

And if we just look at numbers of books sold, it can be discouraging. Because the truth is they are the authority in their field. They know the subject matter. Maybe they have not only been schooled in the topic but they had work experience or some special skills and they wrote about their specialty.

Yet when they launched the book, they heard... crickets…. Why?

The book may be excellent but some of the problems they featured or stressed on may not be the right subject matter they should focus on.

For instance, they may have a niche with rabid fans, like people who love horses. But it could be that they didn’t position the book to answer a frustration point.

Perhaps the title isn’t right--making the title too broad is usually the problem.

Or the cover design is a washout. Or maybe the book blurb doesn’t hold a strong enough promise. Or the most common one is that they dumped everything they know into the book, but never really narrowed down the main issue as to why people would want to buy and read the book.

Should they stop writing in this niche?

Certainly not. They are the authority in the field and there is a strong base of ready fans. But positioning is crucial for success. In everything.

(We will also discuss how to get around this in another module titled, “Positioning” later in this series. (Positioning is a subset of marketing.)

Should you stop writing about a particular topic if you see no traction in your book sales?

The question again is, “Why do you write?”

If you write because it’s therapeutic to write, (and it is,) and income isn’t your focus, then keep writing. There’s a reason why people have been writing diaries, and journaling through the ages. There’s nothing like getting those thoughts, ideas, and even worries on paper—or computer. And most journaling is done in the evening because it relaxes the mind to do so before bedtime.

But you may want to write a book for other reasons. Like making the impact you want.

Perhaps you write because you want to leave a legacy behind, or you wish to gift this to you children--even if you do not have any yet.

For instance, if you were a ski instructor your entire life and you learned so much from it, you want to share all that you’ve learned with others. (That’s your legacy.)

But let’s say you want to monetize this, how do you do it? (We will touch upon this in another later post)

Some may write only to have significance.

For instance, now that I am almost an empty nester, having raised my kids for over twenty years, I noticed that my children seem to respect moms who have a had career more than moms who don’t.

The reality is that the culture and prevalent society regard income producing careers more than the job of being a housewife and mother. It’s a reality and your kids too do not live in a bubble. So writing a book may be your way of establishing significance to your immediate family, your children, as well as to your friends and peers.

But honestly though, the best reason to write a book is to grow your existing business or to determine a new one. It's a way to explore opportunities, or establish and showcase the expertise you have.

Whatever your motivation, writing your book will be a rewarding journey, and once your book is published it will outlast...even you.