Earlier today, I was helping a friend with her book.

She incidentally was among the early customers of my guided author program that I started as an extension of my day-long workshop for first-time authors.

Her book took a lot longer than we had thought.

Over time, I have introduced processes that make the book writing much faster. Like now, with new authors, I don’t move forward without creating a concept draft. Think of it as vision and mission statement of your book. I also take a lot more time (5 to 10x time) these days on outlining than earlier scenarios. This makes sure that we don’t spend a lot of time in back and forth after freezing the outline.

But there is something else that has a big impact on how fast and how well you will write your book. That factor is how long and how often you work on your book.

You need to be one with your material to write a good coherent book. This is not possible if you space out your interactions with your book months apart. That’s why scheduling regular sessions with your writing coach can be a big help.

I have done it with a first time author in the US that I am working with currently. And, within a month we have a super solid outline and some really good material for the book.

Regular interaction with your book is important because when you continuously work on an idea and start to understand it well you get in the state of flow and more ideas come to you. And, ideas feed books more than anything.

For my digital marketing book, I dedicated a full month to writing without anything else planned or scheduled. And, within 3 weeks I had the book manuscript ready.

I am not asking you to drop everything you are doing and write your book. But if you are serious about it then do it often and don’t go without writing for more than 2-3 days in a row.

If you don’t write often for some reason, at least take a good look on parts of your manuscript and make a note of what you’ll write when you do it next. You’ll see that you’ll write a better book and do it faster this way than if you do it when inspiration strikes.