MariaGreat Idea to Start Writing Your Book
Are You Stuck in Writing Your Book?
What holds most would-be authors back from publishing?
- It’s rarely because they lack talent in the writing department
- It’s generally not a lack of knowledge as it’s their expertise, experience or imagination
- and it’s definitely not lack of desire otherwise, the question wouldn’t be pointless.
For most people who procrastinate while writing a book, the excuse would most certainly be “time”. Now feeling the lack of time is the issue doesn’t mean you shouldn’t persevere. There are lots of ways around it, but for many, it’s discouraging. This also increases the delays and could end up with no book written at all in the end. 🙁
Most people are busy, especially service providers. We have clients to serve, a business to run, a family to care for. And if you are also spending time creating new training courses, marketing on social media, managing your team, etc.
So When Would You Have Time to Write a Book? you ask.
[bctt tweet=”The thing is… If You Create Content On a Regular Basis, You Probably Already Have Written Your Book” username=”mariaduckhouse”]
Honestly, think about it.
If you have a blog and you’ve been maintaining it for more than a few months, then you most certainly have already written all the content your book needs. All you have to do is organize it and give it a light edit.
If you don’t have a blog yet, why don’t you start one, blogging your book is even easier as you can plan your content around the topic of your book.
Here’s how to do it
If you were to use your blog categories as book sections and each blog post as a chapter.
The outline and separation would seem clearer and flow effortlessly.
From there you could easily organize your book by sorting all the posts by categories.
Then you could list the categories in logical order. You could also decide to only have one category per book. It’s up to you but you can see that the possibilities are endless.
Nota bene: make sure not to include or remove any content that doesn’t fit in with the book. So if there are calls to action in the original post, make sure it’s not in the book as it wouldn’t make sense to be promoting paid or affiliate programs in the book.
Once completed, you’d be left with is a rough draft. This draft might need editing to get the finished version of the book.
Our editing recommendations:
- To help with the flow between chapters, you might want to edit the beginning and the ends of your posts. this will increase the logical path and fluidity for the reader.
- For content: Enlist the help of a few friends or colleagues who you trust to share their honest opinion with you. Ask them to read through and note any content that is confusing or that could be explained in greater detail.
- One editing pass needs to be focused on removing any spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors – Don’t Skip It – It’s best to have this task outsourced as well. Especially because it’s difficult to spot our own mistakes. This is important because book readers are less forgiving than blog readers.
That’s it!
Review the Book & You’re Ready to Publish.
Now, you’re thinking:
“What?!? No one will read a book that’s repurposed from my blog!”
Think again.
Bloggers have used this method to write books for years and some of them are spectacularly successful. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net famously wrote & published his extremely popular guide to blogging, only by using the content he’d already written & published on his blog. He realized although the information was freely available on the blog, people who bought the book wanted the convenience of having it already logically organized in a document.
You could also blog your book, it’s very powerful. That’s what the author of “the Martian” did when he first published his book one chapter at a time on a blog. His book then rose to fame and ultimately became the movie. As you can see it worked out pretty amazing for him.
You see, writing your book doesn’t have to be hard.
Don’t let excuses hold you back from publishing your book.
Use the content you’ve already written, or strategically plan the writing of your blog so that you can turn it into a book. Either way, I know you are amazing, deep down you know you are too. Now let the world discover it too and get publishing! Because you have so much to give by offering us your unique perspective.
If you are wondering why you should write a book as a coach, consultant, expert, keynote speaker, thought leader etc, check out my blog post laying out a few of the benefits of having or writing your book.
Don’t you think? Comment below
Have a great week ^_^
Maria xx
https://mariaduckhouse.com | @mariaduckhouse | Mastering Mindset for Success
[bctt tweet=”Writing Your Book Doesn’t Have to Be Hard ” username=”mariaduckhouse”]
