Write Your How To Book - 15 Tips On Getting Started Writing A Book
It’s always hard getting started writing a book. Here are 15 tips to get you going on your book:
1. Before you start know who you are writing for. Spend some time building up a character sheet on your target reader. Develop a detailed profile on them.
2. Before you start, identify what your target reader’s motivations are. Focus on their immediate problems. But don’t forget their pain points and dreams. Their motivations are how you will keep your reader reading your book.
3. Right from the start you need to focus on solutions. Write down how your book will avoid the reader’s pain points, solve their problems, or help them achieve their pleasure points.
4. Determine why you are writing. By identifying your motivations, right from the start, you’ll help to keep yourself focused on writing.
5. Create a great big sign. Or better still make several! Why are you writing? Use large letters, oversized pictures and whatever else you need to emphasize those points. Post them around your home where you can’t help but see them when you are doing something else. Post the biggest over your computer.
6. Decide how you will publish and market your book. The format and length of your book will be determined by the rules of the market you select.
7. Buy or develop a system for designing and writing your book. A good system will help to ensure you have a good book and that you finish it in a reasonable period of time.
8. Create a detailed outline using a cognitive tool. It’s much easier to build up your outline when you use a tool that works with your mind, not against it. Make it detailed down to the paragraph level. You can easily write a hundred words on a point you’ve already been given. But writing a chapter on a topic off the top of you head is very difficult.
9. Structural editing should be done on the outline not the finished book. Some of the older systems hold off editing until the whole book has been written. Unfortunately, you may end up having to make wholesale changes to fix problems. By editing while the book is in outline form, you can identify and fix structural problems while they are easily fixed.
10. Gift yourself with an office of your own just for writing. By having a specific space, you’ll train yourself to write when you’re in that space.
11. Schedule a specific time for writing. It helps stop you from avoiding writing. But it also helps set up a habit of writing.
12. Music will create a mood. Use it wisely. Baroque music, for example, is known to help thinking. Frank Sinatra or French blues may help you get in the mood for romantic writing.
13. Pain is not an aid to writing! Have the best, most comfortable chair you can. You’ll need it!
14. Avoid excuses to waste writing time. Turn off the phone. Close the door. Set rules for interruptions. Tell everyone you’re busy. Keep everything you need close at hand.
15. Write first, write fast, edit later. If you are always going back and correcting what you do, it will take much longer to write your book. And it will be an unpleasant task. By following this advice you’ll find you finish quicker, your writing is better, and you’ll enjoy writing more. So you won’t be as tempted to avoid doing it. Save your editing for the next day.
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Glen Ford is an accomplished consultant, trainer and writer. He has far too many years experience as a trainer and facilitator to willingly admit.