by Dave Haslett
If you can manage three sessions in the morning and three in the afternoon, you’ll get a whole hour of speaking time each day. That might be the equivalent of two chapters.
Let’s see how much more productive you’d be compared with a typical professional writer:
If you speak at a rate of 150 words per minute, you’ll produce 9,000 words per day. A typical professional writer produces an average of 1,000 words per day.
A good full-time writer can produce the first draft of an 80,000word book in eighty days – or just under three months. The same book would take you about nine days.
Becoming more marketable
It pays to spread your name around when you’re writing a book. You want your future readers to become familiar with you, to learn to trust you, and to like you.
If you haven’t written any magazine articles yet, now would be a great time to start. When they’re published, you’ll instantly gain expert status. Writing these articles needn’t involve much work; just use extracts from your book as you write it.
If your book has already been published, make sure the magazine mentions it at the end of each of your articles. This will boost your credibility even higher amongst the magazine’s readers. And, of course, it will be a great advertisement for your book.
If your book hasn’t been published yet, mention it in an article as soon as it is, and ask the magazine to mention it at the end of every future article of yours that they publish.
If you’re trying to get a publisher to accept your book proposal, sending him copies of your published magazine articles will boost your chances significantly. The more prestigious the magazine the better. And the higher its circulation the better too. But don’t worry if you can only get published in a small-circulation magazine at first – we all have to start somewhere.
As you continue writing books and articles, your reputation will grow and your name will become more widely recognised. Keep sending articles to bigger and better magazines too, but tailor them specifically for their readers.
Boosting your credibility
If you look at the short biographies on the back covers of most nonfiction books, you’ll notice that many of the authors taught the subject at some point. If you aren’t quite there yet, you need to bring yourself up to their level of credibility.
As we discussed earlier, if you know your subject well enough to write a book on it, then you should be able to teach an evening class or workshop on it, even if it’s only for a week or two. You can then claim with complete honesty that you’ve taught the subject.
Most colleges and community centres publish spring and autumn schedules of evening classes. Contact the organisers to see if you can get yourself added to their next schedule. You’ll need to prove you’re an expert, of course. If you don’t have any formal qualifications in the subject, show them copies of the magazine articles you’ve had published or previous books you’ve written. You’ll also need to devise a set of lesson plans. These can either be taken from your current book or used as the basis for your next one.
If your book has already been published, you could make it the set text for your class, so all your students have to buy a copy. It might only be a single class with a dozen or so students, but at least it’s a start.
The book of the course
Let’s say you currently teach your subject and you’re planning to write a book based on your lesson plans, as we discussed above. By the end of your book, you want your readers to understand the subject just as well as the students on your course.
There will be some differences, of course. For example, if you write the book after the course has finished, you’ll know what worked and what didn’t and you’ll be able to correct any issues. You might also be able to go into more depth on certain topics than you had time for in class. On the other hand, those who attended your classes might have had more hands-on experience. You could include the same exercises and experiments in your book, but there’s no guarantee that your readers will do them. In fact, most of them won’t.
Those who do the exercises will get far more out of your book than those who don’t. That means they’re more likely to recommend it to other people, which means more sales and better reviews. So it’s worth coming up with some ways of getting your readers to do the exercises.
Perhaps you could give them a reward if they send in photos or examples of their work. The reward could be a bonus chapter, a special report, or samples of materials that you get free from the manufacturer.
Your book could feature some of the work that your students produced in class. Take photos of them in action and show them proudly holding the finished results. If they won prizes for their work, photograph them with their work and their prizes.
Make sure you get the students’ permission to use their photos and images of their work in your book. Most of them will be delighted, especially if you send them a signed copy when it’s published.
Writing with authority
Your tone of voice and writing style are hugely important when writing non-fiction. You need to write with genuine authority and sound like an expert.
Think about the best speech or presentation you ever heard. Could you give one as good as that? If not, why not? It’s the sort of level you should be aiming for. You should be just as authoritative as he was: command attention, be entertaining, be memorable, speak (or write) straight from the heart, and do all the other things that make a great speaker (or writer).
It’s worth taking a class on how to be a great speaker, even if you never intend giving a speech. The things you learn will help you add authority, engagement and power to your writing. This technique works particularly well with the one we looked at earlier, where you write your book as a series of speeches. But even if you plan to write or type your book, it’s still worth doing.
If you can’t attend a speaking class, there are plenty of books available on how to give a good speech or presentation. But you need to do the exercises in them to get the results you want. Just reading them won’t make you a great speaker.
A great speaker’s authority and expertise are self-evident. He clearly knows his subject inside out and backwards. You could ask him any question and he’ll not only know the answer but could discuss it with you at great length – or so it appears.
He speaks confidently, clearly, and loud enough to be heard at the back of the room. He doesn’t rely on notes. He can tailor the length of his presentation from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours at a moment’s notice. He has absolute conviction in what he’s saying. The audience sits up and listens, enthralled and excited, and leaves the room feeling exhilarated, inspired, entertained and motivated.
That’s what you should be aiming for in your book. Your readers will love you for it.
Dr. Dave’s New Writing Revolution
How about coming up with a brand new technique and putting your name on it?
Set up your own little niche in the market with absolutely no competition. You’ll get to do all the TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and online interviews you want. You could travel from city to city or country to country giving interviews, workshops and lectures, and selling a ton of books along the way. You’ll put your expertise, reputation and authority right up front where everyone can see it. And you’ll use your own name (or a pen name if you prefer) as your brand.
One of the best examples of this was Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution. Dr Robert Atkins made a fortune, sold millions of books, and was never out of the news thanks to the controversy surrounding his “Atkins Diet”. If you ask people to name any diet today, the Atkins Diet will still be at or near the top of the list. He could have put his name on all sorts of related items – exercise equipment, fitness videos, food products, and so on – and people would have bought them by the truckload because they recognised and trusted his name.
You could do that too, and become the big name in your subject or industry.
See if you can come
up with a controversial technique that some industry experts passionately support and others vehemently oppose. The secret is to have more supporters than opposers. It also helps if you have one or two A-list celebrities on your side. Publish your book, send copies to the most vocal experts on both sides of the argument, and let them fight it out among themselves – preferably in the media – while you watch your book sales soar.
If you have a journalist friend, he could help trigger the whole thing by writing the first article about it and talking about the “controversy” – even if there isn’t a controversy at first.
If you don’t have any friends who are journalists, it’s worth finding one. I volunteered with a local charity and became their spokesperson and press officer. I was in regular touch with the reporters at the local newspaper, and they became good friends. They were hungry for local news and were interested in my books and other activities, as well as my work with the charity.
Few local organisations interact much with the press or the public, leaving everyone wondering what’s going on. This can lead to false rumours that can damage the organisation and those involved with it, and generate bad feeling in the community. It’s well worth volunteering for a charity or local group and handling their press and media communications for them. It only takes an hour or so each week to do the job well, and it benefits both you and the organisation you represent.
Once the story about your “controversial” technique is in the news, you could give occasional “exclusive” interviews where you give it your full backing and call those who oppose it “idiots” – or words to that effect. This should fuel the debate for another few months and push your sales even higher.
You’ll earn yourself a bit of a reputation, of course, For being notorious and outspoken. But that can help sell books too!
Exclusive news stories help sell newspapers, so if you become well known, it’s worth asking for a large fee for giving the interview.
As you’ll be making so much money from book sales, consider donating some of your earnings (plus your fees from the interviews) to a well-known charity – and make sure the press and media know about it. As well as supporting a great cause, this will keep the public and media on your side. It will also remind potential readers that your book is still available, in case they haven’t bought it yet.
You could make another large donation just before your next book comes out, as this will earn you more valuable publicity. Make sure you mention your new book in any interviews you give.
Magazine articles
Many of the techniques in this book can also be used to write magazine articles quickly.
As with non-fiction books, it’s best not to write the articles yet. Just come up with some great ideas for articles that would suit each publication you’re targeting, and send query letters to the editors.
It will be slow going at first. Unless you have a good track record, only one out of every twelve query letters, on average, will lead to an acceptance. If you send out fifty queries each month, you should only expect about four to succeed, so you’ll need a lot of ideas. Things get a lot easier once the editors get to know you and they learn that they can trust your work.
As you’ll need to send out so many query letters, save time by setting up a template in your word processor with most of the details already filled in. You could have a template for each publication you’re targeting. Each time you use it, you’ll just need to change the title and summary of the article you’re proposing.
Most editors accept queries by email, but it’s important to find out their names, rather than addressing them as Dear Sir or Dear Editor. If you don’t know their names, it proves you haven’t done your research and you don’t know the publication or its readers well enough to write for them.
Paste the text of your query letter into the main body of your email message rather than attaching it as a separate document. This makes things easier for the editor, and it’s less likely to be blocked by an overzealous anti-virus filter.
The next step
In the next chapter we’ll look at some modern technologies and clever techniques that can boost your productivity further.
13. You have the technology
You might be wondering how long it will take you to physically type your book, so let’s have a look at some numbers, using an 80,000-word novel as our guideline.
The average person can type about 40 words per minute (wpm). At that speed, it’ll take you 2,000 minutes (33 hours) to type your book. So you’d need to type for just over an hour a day to finish your book in a month. That doesn’t mean a solid hour of typing every day, of course. You could split it into three or four mini writing sessions where you spend five minutes thinking about what you’ll write and the next fifteen to twenty minutes typing it out.
But what if you learnt to type properly and increased your speed to 100 wpm? Now your book would take 800 minutes (13 hours) to type. If you wanted to write it in a month, you’d need to type for 25 minutes each day. If you typed for an hour a day, you’d finish it in two weeks.
What if you could type at over 200 wpm? You can’t physically type that fast, but there are other ways of getting the words out that quickly, which we’ll look at later. At that speed, you could type your entire book in around six hours.
In this chapter, we’ll look at some ways of getting your words onto the page at 100 words per minute or faster. We’ve already noted that it’s possible to do this just by learning to type properly, so we’ll look at that first and then we’ll consider some other options.
We’ll also look at some tools and techniques that will make writing your book easier. They won’t necessarily help you write it any faster, but they’ll enable you to write more – and better – books in less time.
Let’s learn to type faster
There are plenty of free typing tutors online. A quick search for “typing tutor” will find them.
If you prefer learning from a book, the one I recommend is Touch Typing in Ten Hours by Ann Dobson.
I learnt to type using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. This computer software has been around since 1987, is available for Windows PCs and Apple Macs, and gets better with every version. It analyses your typing style, spots problems, and gives you personalised lessons to correct them. It also has several built-in games that motivate you to type faster.
If you practise for fifteen minutes a day, your typing speed should increase by around twenty-five percent in two weeks. With further practice, you could eventually reach speeds of over 120 wpm, matching the best professional typists.
When I learnt to type, my speed increased from 43 wpm to 75 wpm in about three weeks. After a couple of months, I reached 90 wpm – fast enough that people would stop at my desk and watch in amazement. As I could touch type, I didn’t need to look at my keyboard or screen to know that what I was typing was correct. To be able to type at that kind of speed with one hundred percent accuracy, while looking out of the window and watching the squirrels, is a fantastic feeling – and you get a lot of writing done.
As you don’t look at the screen, you don’t stop to correct any errors. We’ve already seen that doing this can destroy your flow and slow you down. Of course, if you can type with 100 percent accuracy, there shouldn’t be any errors anyway.
I’ve found that unless you consciously practice typing regularly, you quickly lapse back into your old habits. I recommend practising for fifteen minutes at least once a week to maintain your peak typing speed.
Keyboards
A decent keyboard is essential for fast typing. After all, you’re probably going to spend a lot of time pounding those keys. Two or three drafts of a typical novel will require at least half a million key presses, so you’ll need one that’s comfortable.
You don’t have to use the keyboard that came with your computer or laptop. If you have a desktop computer, you can replace the keyboard with a better one – just unplug it and plug in a new one. If you have a lapto
p you can plug an external keyboard into one of the USB sockets. Wireless keyboards are also available, including ones that work with smartphones and tablets. If you get a wireless keyboard that’s Bluetoothenabled, it should work with just about anything.
The quality of keyboards has improved significantly in recent years, but it’s worth visiting a computer store so you can try a few. You want one that you can adjust to a comfortable angle, and which has just the right amount of softness, firmness, springiness and clickiness. You also want the keys to be the right distance apart for your fingers, and they should have the right amount of depth (or “travel”) when you press them. You might want one with a wrist rest or a gentle slope, or you might prefer one where the keys begin right at the front edge.
If I’m using my laptop, the built-in keyboard is perfectly fine. But when I’m using my desktop PC, I prefer a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard, which is angled to fit the curve of my wrist and the shape of my hand. The typing position is much more comfortable than a standard keyboard – though it took me a while to get used to it.
Here’s an interesting test you should try. Let your wrists go floppy, then place your hands on your keyboard with your thumbs on the spacebar and your index fingers on the F and J keys. Let your other fingers fall naturally wherever they like, with no tension or twisting. Which keys are your fingers on? Probably not the “official” typing keys on the middle row: A S D F for the left hand, and J K L ; for the right hand.
When I try it, my left fingers are on A W E F, and my right fingers are on J I O ;. Now put all of your fingers on the middle row where they’re supposed to be. You’ll notice that you need to bend your wrists and move your elbows outwards; it feels uncomfortable and unnatural. With a Natural keyboard your wrists and elbows remain in their natural positions. When I discovered this test a few years ago, I immediately went out and bought a Natural keyboard, and I still use it today.