How To Write a Book, 10 Simple Steps
Posted: Wednesday, August 29, 2007
by Bob Burnham
Expert Author Publishing
Writing a book can take as little or as long as you decide it should take. I know people that can write a full 200 page book in less than a week, and they still have time to eat, sleep, breathe, and even brush their teeth!
Of course I also know people that, ten years later, are still working on their quick and easy how to book.
Here are ten simple steps on how to write a book fast:
Step One: Choose your Subject. You can write on a subject that you find interesting or you can write on a subject that you have an expertise in. What ever subject you write on, there must be a demand for the information contained in your book.
Step Two: Determine your book’s audience. Who is going to read your book? To ensure that you have an audience for your book, and people that are going to buy it, make sure that your book fills a need. If you’re writing a book about basketball you can write it for coaches to improve their teams or players to improve their skills.
Step Three: Choose your book’s title. The more compelling and focused your title is, the easier it is to write the book. For example, a book called Coaching Basketball is fine enough but not very compelling. However a book called Coaching Basketball. 30 Steps, Tips, Secrets and Drills to A Winning Season is a comprehensive, compelling, and focused book title.
Step Four: Write the back cover copy. Your back cover copy is your sales letter, a condensed version of it, also known as an elevator pitch. You have about 150 words to tell readers why they should buy your book. Offer a brief description, promise, and a list of benefits.
Step Five: Determine your book’s length. Many ‘how to’ books land somewhere between 200 and 300 pages. If you are writing a 200 page book, and assume that each chapter will be about 10 pages long, then you know that you have 20 chapters to plan.
Step Six: Write your chapter titles. Once you know how long your book is going to be then you can plan your book’s structure. A 200 page book has 20 chapters, each ten pages long. Write down your 20 chapters, they don’t have to be in order. Once you have the subject matter for each chapter, you can amplify them into compelling chapter titles by using the same exercise you used for your book’s title.
Step Seven: Break each chapter into 10 or more subtopics. To make the writing process even easier, take a few minutes to write down 10 or more points that you want to cover in each chapter. Each point will take up approximately one page.
Step Eight: Decide how much time you have to write every day. If you write without stopping, and give yourself 5-10 minutes per subtopic, it will take you approximately 50-100 minutes to write a ten page chapter. That means that if you can devote an hour to an hour and a half a day, your 20 chapter book will be done in 20 days.
Step Nine: Write. This part is up to you. You may actually have to make time in your day to write, by getting up early, staying up late, or skipping your lunch with co-workers. Do whatever you have to do to write every day.
Step Ten: Edit. Editing is another one of those book writing phases that seems to take years for some authors. I think they’re using the term as a synonym for procrastinating. Editing shouldn’t take you longer than 5 days maximum!
For Your FREE MP3 (Value $97.00)
How To Make A 6 Figure Income Writing & Publishing Your Own Book
Go To: Writing a Book
Bob Burnham Entrepreneur, Consultant and Author of '101 Reasons Why You Must Write A Book'
For Information on How to Write and Publish your own book go to Expert Author :
http://www.expertauthorpublishing.com
Read More On: You Can Write A Book
This Article has been viewed 13,457 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (7 total)Excellent article! I will be checking out your free Mp3.
Great article. Well done.I like a lot of your tips however I think that eight is totaly unreasonable.
Very informative article and it came just in time for me...Thanks a lot!
i love this infoI love this artical too. I want to write a book in my class. So this gives me perfect tips. i will be definetly recomend this artical for my freinds!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Awesome. Im 13 and im really interested in making a young adult book and this helped alot. it not busy trying to promise you broken things that will never happen. it nice and straight forward. thank you
i loved this artical ,i want to write about my past, present, an future ( my life) an this gave me alot i can use for my artical thank you
Thank you... This article has great information that will help me with my book...
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.