Posted by on Sep 20, 2011 in
Writing Books Writing a book and expecting to make money from it via traditional publishing makes horse racing look like a safe, secure business. Of the hundreds of thousands of books published in English every year, very few make any money at all. Moreover, traditional publishing takes years. From the time you get your book idea, to its publication, there’s at least a two year gap, possibly much longer; if you can find a publisher, that it.
Depressing? Yes, traditional publishing is depressing for the vast majority of writers. With the rise of “instant publishing” however, you can increase the odds that you will make money writing a book.
What’s instant publishing? It’s blogging.
Blogs have shaken up traditional publishing — while newspapers, magazines and books continue to make money, the traditional publication model is looking shakier by the day. If you’ve yet to make the acquaintance of the instant publishing method of blogging, get up to speed. You’ll be glad you did.
Here’s how to use blogging to write your book, and sell it too, in three steps.
1. Blog Your Book Idea and Proposal
Compared with selling a book, writing a book is easy because you’re the only person involved. You either write, or you don’t. When it comes to selling your book however, you’re at the mercy of agents and publishers… unless you blog.
The big benefit of blogging is that you can test a book idea before you spend a year in writing it. Blog your book idea, and your proposal. If your idea generates buzz, you’ll get a publishing contract.
2. Keep Blogging As You Write Your Book
Your publisher will expect you to market your book, both before and after publication day. Use your blog to build an audience. Your publisher will love you. (This love, by the way, can turn into further contracts, so it’s worth cultivating.)
3. Blog to Get Readers As You Write Your Book: an Audience Sells a Book
Keep blogging as you write. Your audience is your greatest asset. So there you have three steps to using instant publishing when you’re writing a book. Blogs are a boon to authors; make good use of them.
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Tags: Book, Freelance, Instant, Publishing, Sell, Using, write, Writing
Posted by on Jul 21, 2011 in
Writing Books In his 2001 book about writing non-fiction, Damn! Why Didn’t I Write That?, author Marc McCutcheon says that it’s not hard to make a good income: “you can learn the trade and begin making a respectable income much faster than most people think possible”.
The good part is that you don’t need to write your book before you get some money. You write a proposal, and a publisher will give you an advance, which you can live on while you write the book.
Writing a proposal is the smart way to write a book. It’s the way professional writers sell non-fiction. Selling a book on a proposal is much easier than selling a book that you’ve already written. A book proposal is a complete description of your book. It contains the title, an explanation of what the book’s about, an outline of chapters, a market and competition survey, and a sample chapter.
A book proposal functions in the same way as any business proposal does: you’re making an offer to someone you hope to do business with. It will be treated by publishers in the same way that any business treats a proposal. A publisher will read your proposal, assess its feasibility, cost it, and if it looks as if the publisher will make money, the publisher will pay you to write the book. When you’ve sold your proposed book to a publisher, your role doesn’t end with writing your book. You’re in partnership with your publisher to ensure the book’s success. If you do your part, both you and your publisher will make money.
You and your publisher: a partnership
The publisher’s business is selling books. The company acquires books which it hopes will sell, and sell well. Your publisher is putting up the money to publish your book, so you need to approach the project from his point of view as well as your own.
You need to know about “returns”, because the challenge of returns makes publishing different from other businesses. Publishers sell books on consignment. Publishers ship books to bookshops, and if a book isn’t sold within a certain time period, it’s destroyed. The bookseller strips the cover from the book and sends the cover to the publisher for a full credit. This is the “return”. If a title doesn’t sell, the publisher takes a beating. As you can imagine, publishers are no more keen to lose money than you or I.
What does this mean to you as you write your book proposal? It means that your proposal needs to emphasize the ways in which you, as the writer, will take responsibility for the book’s success.
You will try to ensure the success of your book by gauging the marketplace. You will work out who the likely buyers of your book might be, and the reasons they will have for paying good money for your book. You’ll assess the competition for your book. You’ll work out ways in which you can promote your book, so that people hear about it. You’re in partnership with your publisher, and if you’re prepared to take responsibility for that role, the publisher will be much more likely to buy your proposal.
Why write a proposal first?
All non-fiction books are sold on proposal. A book proposal is much easier to sell than a complete book.
Here are some of the reasons:
It’s easier to read a 20 or 30 page proposal than a 400 page book;
It’s easier to make changes in the book’s concept at the proposal stage;
With a proposal, the publisher, in the person of your editor, can take ownership of the book. It’s like bespoke tailoring: the editor feels that the book has been specifically written for the publishing house.
Even if you decide to write your book first, you’ll need to create a proposal once you’ve written it. No agent or publisher is interested in reading an entire book to assess its viability. That’s the proposal’s job: to ensure that your book has a niche in the marketplace. As you do your research for the proposal, you’ll work out whether or not your book is likely to sell. You can shape the book at the proposal stage, much more easily than you can when it’s a huge stack of print or a giant computer file.
Sometimes you may get an idea for a book, but the idea is amorphous, it doesn’t have a real shape. You may want to write several thousand words to see whether the book becomes clearer in your mind. But write the proposal before you write more than ten thousand words, because your book must target a specific group of buyers.
How do you write a book proposal?
You write a proposal step by step. In my guide, we’ll work on your book proposal together. Each chapter has tasks for you to complete. Once you’ve completed all the tasks, you’ll have a book proposal which has an excellent chance of selling.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
(Day One) Getting an idea for your book.
(Day Two) Developing the idea and expanding on it. Assessing the market. Who needs this book? What’s the competition for the book?
(Day Three) Writing the blurb. Outlining your book.
(Day Four) Researching your book proposal, and fleshing out your outline.
(Day Five) Writing a proposal query letter. Sending your query letters to agents and publishers. (You send the queries while you’re working on the proposal. This helps you to gauge reaction to your work.)
(Day Six) Writing the proposal.
(Day Seven) Writing the sample chapter. Revising your proposal.
Tags: Book, Easy, Introducing, Proposal, Revolutionary, Sell
Posted by on Jul 29, 2010 in
Writing Books Is your book manuscript compelling? Tell the truth; could it use some work to make it crisp? Yes. Here are some tips to make your book writing pull readers in by the collar. Also, you’ll discover how to write a book that keeps them reading to the end. Make it compelling enough and your book readers will tell all their friends about your great book.
Use the tips below to help you write your book like a pro to finish stronger and sell longer:
1. Use shorter sentences.
Slash your sentences to under 15-17 words. Don’t bog your readers with complex sentences. Remember multiple phrases slow your reader’s comprehension. Make it easy. Get to the point fast.
2. Write compelling copy.
Write for the 8-10 grade level. Reward your readers with benefits for them. Clear, easy to understand copy makes your reader want to read your book to the end. Fill your writing with what’s in it for them. They’ll come back for more and tell all their friends.
3. Write with specific details.
Avoid generalities. Engage your reader’s emotion with specifics. Let them experience color, size and shape. Instead of, “Complete your degree online fast to increase your income.” Say, “Complete your master degree online fast so you can upgrade your lifestyle, get vacations, health insurance and other corporate benefits.” Specific benefits create a stronger pull than the general benefit of increased income.
4. Slash adverbs within your book.
Go through and cut words like openly, suddenly, very that tell the reader instead of show the reader. Circle all the (ly) and very words. Pull out your thesaurus and replace them with power words that show emotion or describe.
5. Write your book coherently.
Does your book make logical sense? Test it; make sure it sounds natural by reading it aloud. When you don’t understand something, your reader will misunderstand too. After it’s passed the self-editing process, pass it on for peer editing.
6. Make your stories and/or dialogue believable.
Don’t make it read like a long boring speech. It will put your readers to sleep just as a long winded speaker does. Make your short stories reflect real life situations. They will breathe life into your book and keep the reader reading.
7. Enlist your friends and associates for peer-editing.
Send them small sections at a time and ask for feedback through a mini-survey. Value their time. Make them feel special. Remember to reward them with a free article or special report for their efforts.
If you don’t put these How to Write Your First Book tips into practice you could end up with a dull boring manuscript. Instead, you could take my advice and attract a host of ezine publishers, other web sites and book readers searching for more of your material?
The best part is they’ll come prepared to pull out their card and buy because your writing caught their attention and kept it. Now go; write your first book like a pro to finish stronger and sell longer.
Tags: Book, First, Like, Longer, Sell, write
Posted by on Jul 28, 2010 in
Writing Books Did you know there are about 1.5 million books in print at any one time in the United States alone? Furthermore, there are over 195,000 new titles published each year in this country.
Many aspiring authors feel their book would be lost in the sea of books already in print? May I be honest? That feeling is correct if you don’t target your potential book readers well.
To write your book to stand out in a crowd, you must write it for a targeted audience interested in your book’s topic. Identifying a (niche) targeted audience is really hot in the marketing world right now and rightly so.
Simply put, to target a niche market or audience in your book’s topic area: Identify a problem/solution and research your competition. Then develop a different approach. With all the books in the world on your topic, it’s not enough to know the solution. You must present the solution in a different way than existing books do.
Develop a way of making your book different. You need a different viewpoint, a niche, or a different spin on perhaps the same information. Examine the problem again. Look at the solution your book solves with the goal of coming up with a way to present your knowledge differently than existing books.
Here are several ways you can do this:
1. Market Segment. You can develop a niche by focusing on an occupation, sex, or age group, i.e. Lose 14 Pounds in 2 Weeks: A Guide for the New 30 at 40, Lose Weight Safely Before, During and After Pregnancy.
2. Experience Group. You could write a book for people experiencing the same thing at the same time. For example, Fit at Forty: A Exercise Guide for the New 30 at 40 or Newbie Mothers Eating Healthy.
3. Broadening Market. Consider appealing to a broader market: Lose 14 Pounds in 14 Days: A Guide for Working Class Men & Women.
4. Focus. Attack a big problem by emphasizing a particular tool or technique that you have experience with. For example, show how heart attack survivors can lose 14 pounds in 2 weeks by eating only fish, white meats and walking 10 miles a day.
5. Program. I love this one. Base your solution on the way you solve a large problem by breaking it into steps, i.e. Write Your Best Book Now: A 7 Step Program for book writing.
6. Expertise. Base your niche on your market’s previous experience with a topic, for example, “The Last Business Book You’ll Ever Need!”
7. Goal. Organize your existing information around benefits of achieving the goal: Free Again, Healthy Again!
8. Affinity. Perhaps you have a relationship with a high visibility organization that has benefited from your ideas. You can reframe your knowledge by leveraging off your association: The Bank of America Financial Program or the Southern Methodist University Weight Loss Program.
You might notice in each one of the above examples of the same market, the contents of the book would probably be the same! The books would contain the same basic ideas, suggestions, tips, etc. For example, all the books about diets would probably stress the importance of eating right, choosing the right foods in right portions and daily exercise. Yet, each book presents a different viewpoint targeting a different market.
Be bold; have no fear about approaching the same subject as existing books. Focus in on your unique ideas and viewpoint. Remember, according to the writer of Ecclesiastes, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
Even, Bernice Fitz Gibbon said, “Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were only thought up only little more than a century ago.” So start today; make your book different, make it count and make it yours. Write your significant book to stand out in the crowd and sell.
Tags: Book, Crowd, Sell, Stand, write