These are the words of Deb Cheslow, Balboa Press author of “Unrealogical: Real People, Remarkable Stories of Transformation.” If you’d like to learn more about Deb you can visit her author website, Facebook, or Twitter. Download the Balboa Press free publishing guide to receive more information.
Do you, like so many people, just KNOW that you have a wonderful book trapped inside your brain, but you just don’t know where to start?
I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard people tell me, “I have this great idea for a book, and I’m going to write it… SOMEDAY.”
Why wait until this elusive SOMEDAY? Why not NOW?
Right now you have information, experience, and advice that could help thousands of people throughout the world. What are you waiting for? More time? More money? Chances are very good that if you’re waiting for more “anything” to come along before you start writing your book, you’ll never do it!
I’ve written six books over the past seven years and I follow the same pattern every time. My “never-failed-me” formula for writing a book is “Aim – Fire – Ready.”
Step 1: Aim: What do you want to write about? What’s your topic? What information do you want to convey? Draft a rough outline as a start and add to it (or subtract from it) over the next week. Resist the urge to keep refining it or you risk falling into the trap of “getting ready to get ready” and never actually start writing the book.
Step 2: Fire: Announce your book! Tell people about it. Commit to having your book published by a certain date. Blast it out on social media. Create some accountability in your writing process that results in forward momentum. The best accountability I can think of is to actually sign a contract with a publisher.
Step 3: Ready. Once the proper level of accountability is in place and you are feeling that positive pressure to produce, you’ll get ready along the way. It never fails. The act of making a decision and announcing it to the world is a powerful force.
Now, start WRITING!
Don’t worry about writing in the precise order of your outline (you can move things around later). Just focus on the subject you are writing about today (you can add transitions and make everything flow together later). Don’t let the scope of the project overwhelm you. I once read a great piece of writing advice that said if you write one page per day you’ll have a 365-page book in a year – that’s a pretty substantial book! Just chunk your writing project down into manageable, daily action steps.
You DO have a book inside you just waiting to get out – I think everyone does. Use Aim – Fire – Ready to break the inertia of “someday.” Start writing now!
Balboa Press authors who’d like to share a 350-600 word experience related to the self-publishing of their books are invited to do so by emailing blog@balboapress.com or using the submission form on the Guidelines page. We may not be able to use every story, but we will read and consider them. Balboa Press reserves the right to edit stories for content, grammar, and punctuation accuracy; as well as for space.