Surely you've heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals and why they are beneficial to your business. S.M.A.R.T. goals are:
Let's take the concept of S.M.A.R.T. goals and apply it to book writing so that your book serves your business in the way you want it to.
Read MoreWriting doesn’t come naturally to every entrepreneur, and for those people, the thought of penning an entire book can be overwhelming — even if they know they want to write a book to grow their platform and have committed to doing so. If you stay organized from the jump, however, it’s not terribly complicated. Here’s the most important piece of advice I can give you: Build a daily writing habit. The sooner you do this, the better. (By sooner, I mean preferably before you start writing your book.) Writing is a muscle that gets stronger with use (an atrophies with no use!). A daily writing habit will train your brain about when it’s time to write so that you don’t waste your writing time each day. Day by day, the words will get written and the book will be built.
Read MoreIf you've been following the blog this month, you've seen me refer to my master checklist of self-publishing to-dos. You can grab that here. Writing obviously precedes publishing, but there are tasks that need to be done even before you sit down to type (or write, if you’re old school) the first word of your manuscript.
Back to that checklist for a moment: If you read the blog post that accompanies it, I talk about pockets of time. There are times during the publishing AND during the writing processes during which you’ll have pockets of time to move the big-picture process forward. Knowing when these are coming can be helpful.
Read MoreExactly when an editor fits into your publishing plan depends on a few factors, first and foremost what type of editor you want to hire. Remember there are three kinds of book editors: developmental editors, copy editors, and proofreaders. (Need a recap of what each of these editors do? Check out this post.) This blog doesn’t address proofreading, as that is generally a quicker process and it’s not as critical to book that service quite as far ahead as the other two.
Read MoreAs those who’ve written books will tell you, it’s a major undertaking, and one that requires organization. It’s one thing to look at a book manuscript in Microsoft Word, but it’s entirely different when you start to actually put those files together, in order, as an actual book. You might start looking at various books in your office or home and realize that there doesn’t seem to be a cookie-cutter approach to books. They don’t all contain the same elements. So how are you supposed to know what the heck to do? What’s required versus what’s optional? I’ve got the basics covered for you with this post about the book sections/pages I get the most questions about.
Read MoreEditing has been, for my entire career, my bread and butter. However, I received so many requests to enter the writing process earlier over the last few years that I added coaching to my services in addition to editing. When you hire a copy editor, your manuscript is written. You can still make big changes to its structure, but that’s often easier to do before or during writing. Or what if you want someone to help you flesh out the contents before you start writing? Or what if you need help defining your goals for writing a book to make sure that your writing supports said goal (or goals)? Or what if you need help knowing how to approach beta readers and obtain reviews? Maybe you need help with all of that, or maybe just one or two or those things. Enter a book writing coach.
Read MoreWhen it comes to writing, people generally fall into one of two camps. There are the people who love writing and do it whenever and wherever they can, and then there are the people who hide under their beds to avoid ever writing anything again. (Ok, I lied. There’s a third, small camp that doesn’t care one way or the other about writing...but they don’t matter here.)
If you’re in the second camp, it’s possible that you’re suffering from a writing mindset block.
Read MoreISBN is book publishing-speak for International Standard Book Number. It’s a 13-digit number that’s used to identify and track (for sales inventory purposes) every book that is published for retail sale. Many self-publishing authors don’t pay attention to it, but that can be a mistake. This post explains what you need to know about ISBNs and how they affect you as an author.
Read MoreWhat is it about that harmless little apostrophe that trips up so many people? People ask me often about issues regarding plurals and possessives (and especially the dreaded combo of a plural possessive!). The basic definitions are simple enough, right?
Plural signifies more than one.
Possessive signifies ownership and belonging.
Yet this is one of those often-confused aspects of English, so this week we’re going old school — as in, elementary (middle?) school English class for a quick grammar lesson. Ready?
Read MoreAfter hearing again and again that every business needs a blog, you finally took the plunge and added one to your website. You published some posts, and waited to be flooded with awesome new leads.
But nothing happened.
What went wrong? A blog isn’t “Field of Dreams.” Just because you built it, doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will come.
Read MoreDo you have questions about writing? Lots of creative entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and bloggers do. Here are some that I’m asked regularly enough that I thought, “Hey, that would make a good roundup blog post, Jodi.”
Read MoreChances are, when you’re writing a blog post or article, you save your notes in a Google doc or maybe even in Evernote. A book is much more complicated project to organize, due to the volume of material. Whereas you might save an article or two to read before writing a blog post, you might have 50 or 100 bookmarked for book research. A Word or Google doc can become unwieldy and overwhelm you when you realize just how much information there is to keep track of, let alone in an organized manner: articles to read, websites to look at, hashtags to search on Twitter, people to interview. Enter Trello.
Read MoreWhen writing roadblocks come up, you feel like the loneliest writer on the planet. I promise, though, that this happens to all writers — professional, first-time, whatever. The important thing is to have a plan to work around these creative blocks and get back to writing. So much writing advice tells you, “Sit your butt in the chair and get the words written. If your goal is to write 1,000 words, then sit there until you write 1,000 words. Period.” That sounds great in theory, but that’s not always realistic. Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not suggesting that, at the first sign of not knowing what word to write next, you throw in the towel for the day. (Sorry!)
Read MoreLet’s call a spade, a spade: A book is A LOT of words. Even if you, say, blog a couple times a week, a couple thousand words at a time, you're producing 5,000 or so words a week. A book, on the other hand, is tens of thousands of words. In other words, it’s a lot more words than you’re used to writing. That said, you’re producing 5K words per week (good for you!), so you’re in good shape to build a daily writing habit. It doesn’t matter WHAT you’re writing. It just matters that you ARE writing.
Read MoreSometimes you’ll see the writing process as having four steps: writing, revising, editing, and publishing. In that scenario, prewriting is included in the writing phase. Prewriting is a separate step from writing. I cannot over-emphasize that point! If you sit down to write 50,000 (or more words) with a topic and a few key points, but nothing else, you’re in trouble. Prewriting is the legwork and preparation to make the actual writing easier and faster. So really, the writing process has 5 steps:
Almost without fail during Book Brainstorm Sessions (my version of discovery calls) and even in initial conversations with new clients, I hear this sentence: “But I’m not a writer.” That’s the point where I smile and take a breath, and we have a chat about mindset. I bet if you’re reading this blog post, you’ve had that same thought (or even said it out loud). Simply put, if you’re going to write a book, you must shift your mindset from that of a business owner writing a book to that of a writer. When you’re done writing, you can switch hats back to business owner — promise.
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