Imagine you are an author with a published book in 10 months.
Where do you start?
Write for next 6 months and send it to the editor to make it a masterpiece?
No.
You start by understanding the steps in writing, and publishing a book.
- Explore
- Write
- Edit
- Publish
- Promote
If you have an outside publisher supporting you then you can skip step 4, publishing.
Give about 30 days for step 1 and then 90 days each for the rest.
Explore: Look around, skim and read books, the kind you want to write yourself. You go on to Amazon reviews and note what readers liked about a book and what they did not. Use this to guide your writing.
Test ideas that you’d like to write about in short form. And see what sticks.
Then tweak. Keep what works, what is fun or fulfilling for you, and what engages readers. And, drop the rest.
Write: Once you know what is sticking, and what you want to write, just write. Give yourself a deadline and then clear your schedule to write every day. Don’t worry about editing yet.
Edit: This is how you elevate what you wrote. Because good writing is editing. You can get outside help for this. But do the first round of editing yourself. It will allow you to see if you want to change or rewrite some parts. Schedule at least as much time for editing as you did for writing. Because editing takes time and effort.
Here is a brief editing guide that you can use.
Publish: It involves more editing, internal design of the book, and cover design and also printing the books. If you have a contract with a publisher they will take care of these. You will share ideas or approve what they do. If doing yourself, look up freelancers who do it for you.
Promote: Great if you have an existing community or following already. If not, build a community on the side who will support you at launch. This has to start at least 3-4 months before the launch date.
From the community, get 50-100 people to become part of your launch team. They get advance copies of your book ahead of launch and then write reviews for you at launch. Those early reviews help push your book up in the rankings on Amazon and get you more visibility and sales.
You can take it a notch ahead and run ads to promote your book. And if you have resources do a book tour and appear on online shows.
This can continue for 3 months after the launch.
If you wrote a good book then and put in the work, the way I shared above, your book should get good recorgiation through these efforts and establish you as an author in 10-12 months, after you imagined being an author first.
How is that for quick results on a significant project.
A win I’d say.
