The majority of science-fiction is filled with political critique, and I enjoy all of it, but if I buy a book about space marines fighting aliens and instead get a book about space marines killing poor people and then feeling guilty about it, I’m going to be disappointed.
During my tinnitus research, I noticed that many of the books had a few initial good reviews, and then the following reviews savaged the authors. If you write a book about curing tinnitus, your cure better work.
Look at the promises made on other sales pages and add those to your outline. Make sure that you can meet each of those promises, and you will get loads of five-star reviews from happy readers.
One-Star Reviews
People either love or hate most books. The five-star reviews tell me everything I need to know about the book. They will point out the best aspects of the book and how the audience connected. Sometimes the top reviews will be about the main character, the personal stories or the scientific footnotes.
A five-star review is written by a reader who felt the book met all the promises on the sales page. The book kept its word, and now the reader is sharing that with the world. The five-star reviews reveal the content that your book absolutely must contain to compete.
The one-star reviews, however, reveal opportunity in the market. My goal with every book I write is to turn all the one-star reviews for other books into five-star reviews for mine. They tell me the sections that were missing from the other book; the promises unfulfilled and the questions unanswered. These dissatisfied customers are a gold mine.
If I can satisfy the competition’s happy and unhappy reviewers, I have a book that can dominate the market.
A one-star review gave me the idea for my subtitle.
Less than ten percent of the reviews for a successful book will be one-stars. Don’t think of this as appeasing the smallest segment; you are creating a superior product.
A wise author plays the same game with their own books. This book will get some bad reviews. No matter how good your book is, somebody will hate it. Instead of getting upset with the reviewer, a good author uses that review to improve the book. If a reviewer complains that the book doesn’t cover something they expected, add that to your book.
The beauty of controlling your publishing is the speed with which you can change and update your content. I can update a book and push the content to all of my platforms within twenty-four hours. That’s how quickly I can adapt to a bad review. You don’t want to give your future competition any easy opportunities down the line.
Building a Skeleton
The research process can be incredibly detailed, and I go far deeper into my techniques on my website, but you have enough right now to put together a pretty great book. I think of my mind map as a monster. The inner layer begins with the keyword research and the promises my book will answer. This is the brain of my monster.
My second round of research creates the table of contents. I create the skeleton of my monster and organize the structure of my content. Sometimes a few bones get out of place, and the mind map makes it very easy to put them where they belong.
Once the skeleton is in place, I get into my “deep research phase.”
Instead of reading sales pages and the table of contents, go deep. Read the top books on Amazon. Go through the best courses on Clickbank and Udemy. Whatever you do, do NOT copy and paste someone else’s words into your book. You never want to plagiarize. But you do want to see what’s out there.
If you research this deeply, you will be a pretty good author. But we want more than pretty good; we want to achieve greatness. To go deeper, read the top forums on your topic. Find the questions that people ask the most often, and add that content to your book.
With every book, product, and article you examine, ALWAYS find the original research. I use Google Scholar every single day. Modern blog posts often footnote poorly. Sometimes they mention the school and year where the study was performed. It takes a little digging, but I want that source material.
Take the time to read the introduction and the conclusion of the original researchers. Many of their conclusions get twisted as bloggers and reporters copy each other. Some research is run through a game of Telephone before you find it. Telephone was the game I played as a child where each one would whisper a message to the child next to them. By the time the message passed around the circle, it was nothing like the original.
Once you’ve found that core research, take a look at later articles and research on the subject or by the same authors. If you can see through the fog, you can create some brilliant content.
Here is an example of Telephone. During World War II, the Pope actively fought to save as many people from the German tyranny as possible. He was considered a near-saint at the time, and after World War II the Russians hated him for that. They launched a disinformation campaign to convince the world that the Pope was pro-Nazi.
You will not find a single article written before 1950 that speaks ill of the Pope. Every single piece sings his praises for fighting so hard to save so many people.
But now you see stories, even in fiction books, that call that Pope a Nazi. These authors fell for a piece of Russian propaganda and made the story worse and worse with each retelling. Anything other than the original study or source material is always suspect. As with everything else, you can find the source material for this Pope story at ServeNoMaster.com/orbit.
Putting it all Together
Once you have your deep outline and references assembled, you are ready to move forward with your book creation process. The more material on your mind map or outline, the easier the actual writing process becomes. If you run into writer's block, the most likely culprit is incomplete research.
Some people are tempted to research and write at the same time. Going back and forth between learning and creating will slow down your process. Your brain has to switch between creating and receiving information constantly. These switches will cost you lots of time.
That is why the research sections of this book are so long and come first. An hour spent researching will often save you ten when writing.
9
Becoming an Author
Choosing the right name for your author is crucial. Do you want your name permanently attached to this topic? Will your audience respond to your name? Most movie stars change their names. They know that the right name can magnify a career.
You might want to write a series of children’s books and a series of books about physics. You want to isolate those two series from each other using pen names. I’m using my real name on this book, but I have used many pen names in the past.
When someone clicks on your name on Amazon, they get taken to your author page. If they see a bunch of books that don’t make sense together, you might turn them off. Imagine clicking on the author profile of your favorite romance author and seeing a bunch of children’s books. You aren’t going to buy any of them, and you are going to be confused.
In general, I prefer to use a pen name. It puts some space between you and your author identity. It provides a layer of security and privacy as you get bigger. It allows you to create a persona that matches your audience.
Choosing a Pen Name
To choose a pen name I head over to the census website. The federal government keeps a list of the most popular names from each year and each decade. During my research in a market, I get a feel for the age of my author. Some of my authors were born in the seventies, and some were born in the fifties. I choose an age that will increase sales of my book and improve the connection to my audience.
You want a pen name with two first names, like Michael David. Everyone in your target age bracket with know a Michael or a David. That feeling that they know someone with the same name will give a little boost to your sales numbers.
Go through the list and combine popular names of the correct age. Then check to see if the website for that name is available. You want to own your author’s name as much as pos
sible. If I can’t get MichaelDavid.com, I move on.
Owning the domain name for your author will make life a lot easier as you grow. I started this book telling you that we are building a business. This step is the foundation for that business. When you have twenty books and are trying to sell coaching, you will be very disappointed when the only website left is The-Michael-David.net. You know that nobody will ever spell that right, and you will lose a lot of customers.
The Importance of Gender
How many people would buy a romance novel or a book on breastfeeding from a male author? Would you buy a book on male puberty written by a woman?
As much as we don’t want to admit it, the gender of the author affects sales in nearly every market. The only way to overcome having the wrong gender for a market is to put Dr. in front of your name.
Do not do this when creating a pen name. If you aren’t a doctor, then your pen name isn’t either.
Choose the gender that sells best in your market and you will see a bump in sales.
Choosing Your Author Image
To get an image for your newly invented author, you can go to a stock image site and buy something for a buck. A large proportion of the author images you see on Amazon were purchased this way. Many of the books on Amazon are now by pen names, and many authors prefer to maintain a layer of anonymity.
Your other option is a drawing. There is a trend among romance authors to simply have a drawing for their profile picture. They don’t even bother using a photograph.
You only need one picture to use across all your social media locations, so choose one that you like. And in case you decide to check right now, yes, the picture on my Author Central profile is me. This book is not written under a pseudonym.
Foundations of Greatness
Part of becoming a successful author is planning for the future. This book is about much more than launching a single book; this is about building an entire empire around your book. You are going to create a real business here, and planning for the future is crucial.
Sometimes people go on television to talk about their new product. They get way more attention than they expected and their website crashes, or they run out of stock. They lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars because they didn’t expect or prepare for success.
That is not how I operate or how I teach.
Before you launch your first book, you want to put your secondary properties in place. Set up your website and social media accounts. This is a demonstration that you believe you will succeed. You don’t have to build out the properties just yet, but controlling the names will be important.
Imagine if you have a successful book and somebody out there grabs all the social media names and the website. That would dramatically hurt your business. You don’t want to leave yourself vulnerable to something like that.
After you launch your first book, you will have time to build out your pages more. For now, we just want to stake our claim.
10
Tools of the Trade - Writing
I don’t know if I’m the fastest writer in the entire world. There’s always somebody better. But I do very well. I started writing this book today, and I’ve already pumped out nearly twelve thousand words. Many days I generate twenty thousand words.
A big part of writing fast is having the correct foundation.
You now know my research process. With a deep outline, writing the actual content is a breeze. You just fill in the space between each point. The creativity is no longer stressful. You know where you are and where you are going.
With a great outline, you need a great tool to take advantage of it. There is no word processor better than Scrivener. I write everything in Scrivener, from books to blog posts to book descriptions. I’m writing this book inside of Scrivener right now. I sing the praises of this product on my podcast, on my blog, and in my other books.
It’s the centerpiece of my business, and I have put more than one million words through it. That’s the ultimate testimonial. Scrivener speeds up your process and allows you to create an outline inside your document. Focusing on one tiny section at a time keeps you from feeling overwhelmed. The thought of writing an entire book and looking at a blank page is terrifying. Scrivener replaces that fear with confidence.
As you finish each section, you get a feeling of accomplishment. You turn the mammoth task of writing an entire book into manageable chunks. You can focus on writing one chapter at a time without getting distracted by the overall size of your project.
My entire business is built on this software.
It does have one weakness: the spell-check is garbage. Don’t rely on it.
During the writing phase, don’t worry about spelling. We’ll cover how to deal with spelling, grammar, and editing after you have finished your book.
11
Write Like the Wind
We are not creating something from nothing. That approach to writing is very hard and stressful. By outlining in advance, you are in a position for fast and efficient writing. Writing a book following this method is similar to playing the game "connect the dots." You have all the waypoints in your book mapped out already. As you write each section, you only focus on getting from point A to point B. Turning the overwhelming project of writing a book into a series of small tasks makes it manageable and achievable.
We have the skeleton of our outline and the muscles from our in-depth research. Now it’s time to sew the skin on this monster and bring it to life. Focus on one small section at a time and you will never get overwhelmed. Right now I’m only writing this part and not thinking about the next one. I’ll deal with that only when this one is finished.
Write your book one step at a time.
How Long Should My Book Be?
During the research phase, we looked at a lot of data. One key piece of information we gathered was the length of our competition. If all of your competitors write two-hundred-page books, then that’s the window you should target.
When I sat down to write this book, I set a goal of 25,000 words. That was my initial goal based on researching the competition, but from the way this is going, I think this book will be a lot longer. There’s just nothing I can cut out. I don’t want to hold anything back.
Do the best to meet the expectations of your audience. It is better to go too long than to go too short. If needed you can trim down the book-length during the editing process. Once you have your initial target word count, you can create a writing calendar.
Create a Writing Calendar
The average bestseller on Amazon is around ten thousand words long. For this section, let’s imagine that your book will be ten thousand words long. Take the days between now and your target completion date and divide by your desired book length.
If you wanted to write a ten-thousand-word book in thirty days, this comes out to just three hundred and thirty-three words a day. That assumes you write seven days a week. That is a little overwhelming for some people. If you just work weekdays, you can write your first draft in four weeks. That’s pretty great!
Part of creating a writing calendar is the hours you have available. If you can only write for thirty minutes per day, five hundred words might not be achievable yet. I have a longer and more detailed book about writing fast called “20K a Day.” It's coming out after this one, and I’ve already completed the deep outline. Together we are going to continue to refine and improve your writing process.
If you push yourself too hard, you can burn out and overwhelm yourself. Writing fast is a skill, and it takes time and practice to develop. I find that a target of five hundred words a day is achievable for first-time writers. Give yourself a two-hour block every day, or every weekday, and use that time to hit your daily goal.
Writing with a plan allows you to set up your book for prerelease properly, and you can give real dates to people.
If someone asks when your book is coming out, they will appreciate a real date a lot more than a vague answ
er.
Talk to Text
Not everyone is a maestro with the keyboard.
Most of us talk much faster than we type. There are many ways to create books using dictation. I have written several long blog posts breaking down the process and the technological options if you want to go down this path, but allow me to give you the highlights here.
The average person speaks between one hundred and one hundred fifty words per minute. If you record yourself speaking each section and chapter of your book, you can generate six thousand words per hour. You could speak your entire book in less than two hours. This is the secret technique behind those “write a book in a day” promises. I didn’t even make that promise on my sales page, and I’m still keeping it!
Tons of smartphone apps will record your voice and generate rough transcription for you. They aren’t perfect, but they are getting closer all the time. Macintosh comes with a built in transcriber, and there is some more expensive software out there as well.
Most transcription software stinks at punctuation, so you will have to spend more time editing your book. The time trade-off is pretty good, though.
Another option is to record your entire book into a voice recorder and send it to a service. The service I use costs $1 a minute and will transcribe with proper punctuation. They are about 99% accurate, so very minimal editing is required. This is a great solution if that is in your budget.
Breaking Orbit: How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following (Serve No Master Book 4) Page 4