304. Where to Find Them
305. Action Steps
XXXV. Honored Reviewers
306. Trusted Friends
307. Early Readers
308. Fix Every Mistake
309. Sometimes it Hurts
310. Seeking Criticism
311. Action Steps
XXXVI. Hiring an Editor
312. Dollars to Donuts
313. The Final Edit
314. Action Steps
XXXVII. Wisdom for New Writers
315. Listen to the Feedback
316. Author or Seller
317. Are You Not Entertained?
318. Build the Editing Habit
319. Trust Your Instincts
320. Roll with the Punches
321. Smooth is Fast
322. Action Steps
One Last Chance
Found a Typo?
About the Author
Books by Jonathan Green
One Last Thing
FREE GIFT
Thank you so much for buying 20K a Day. As my way of welcoming you to the family, I have a special gift for you. This is a long book and I put together a Top Secret Cheatsheet with all the most valuable information. You can grab it by clicking this link.
ServeNoMaster.com/cheatsheet
Part I
Welcome to the 20K Revolution
I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it.
- Sir Edmund Hillary
1
Lighting Up the Bat Signal
It's four in the morning and my phone rings.
"Jonathan, it's an emergency. We need your help! Our business partners have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in our new product launch, and our writer let us down."
All I can say to him is, "Why did you call me at four in the morning about a book? Surely this can wait til the morning?”
"The book goes live in 72 hours. We need something to sell, or we are going to lose all our relationships, and people will lose massive amounts of money. They've invested in advertising for all these campaigns. Everything is already put together. You're the only one who can do it, and we are going to pay you a huge amount of money to get it done."
2
Write Fast, Get Paid
Being able to write 35,000 words in less than three days is a unique skill set, and it's one of the things that separates me from most other writers out there. I get these calls, and I get offered huge sums of money as a ghostwriter because I can do something no one else can do.
But today and in this book, I'm going to show you exactly how I accomplish that very task. I will take you on a journey that will show you how to become an efficient and highly paid writer in a very short amount of time. On average I write around 20,000 words a day, without suffering through eight-hour shifts.
My measurement of success is from the beginning to the end of the project, and the average ghostwriting project requires 35,000 words. I like to get those done working two hours a day in a Monday through Friday stretch; so, in about 10 hours of writing, I can crank out those 35,000 words.
Now, with this desperate emergency project, where they were willing to pay triple my already exorbitant rates, I have to write, edit, finalize everything, and send it to their formatter with enough time for it to be ready for their big launch.
This was not an Amazon book; it was a direct marketing book. In the direct marketing or direct response world, things are formatted a little differently. Books sell for a lot more; instead of two or seven dollars, this book was going to sell for $47-$67.
That is some serious money. Very few writers can deliver top quality work in such a short time frame, but when you develop a reputation the work never stops.
3
The Busy Writer
I always get offered more jobs than I can handle, and I have a job right now that I'm behind on. I don't have time to do it, but it's in the queue. There is always a list of jobs that I have lined up.
I never have to worry about finding work as a writer. I am very diversified, and while I make a living from selling books on Amazon, I also write books for many direct response companies. I sell some training courses directly through my website, but I also make a great deal of money as a ghostwriter.
People bring me on for exciting projects. Just this morning, I negotiated an amazing project that's paying me a very nice amount of money to work on a video game website; to work on designing and improving the structure of their site and creating products about video games and leading an entire team. They have a large team there, and I'll be making some massive changes to help them break into a new market; all because I have a reputation as someone who finishes on time.
4
Average Joe
Now you probably think that I am the greatest writer in the world; that I have this incredible level of talent. But the truth is, I'm not a very good writer.
I am very average, and if you go to any university-level writing program in the world and look at people who are getting their Master of Fine Arts, probably every single person in that room is a better writer than me. They are eloquent, they know how to wax poetic, and they use breathtaking and luxurious terms. They're masters of metaphor, and their grammar is flawless. They have all of these fantastic skills.
One of my friends is such a good writer, it makes me want to cry. He's so talented that it makes me very envious, and very rarely am I jealous of something. When I see someone write at his level, I just think, "If I could write like this, more people would connect with my message."
He writes five hundred words a week. In the time I've known him, he has finished one book and half of another. In the same time, I have completed over fifty projects.
Quantity is a quality all of its own.
The important thing about finding that speed for you is the balance between speed and quality. If you write fast and the book sucks, it's not going to do you any good.
5
First Impressions
There are plenty of writers who approach me wanting to work for me or work on a project together, and then I find a grammatical mistake in the first sentence of the sample they send me. They send stuff riddled with errors.
I make a lot of grammatical mistakes in my rough drafts; we all do it. I know you feel like I'm saying I'm perfect, but I would never send out a writing sample without doing the grammar check first.
6
Three Fears
As a demonstration of what I can do, I am going to take you on a journey. In this book, I'm going to show you how to write even faster than I write. I'm going to share some very amazing and very exciting things, and they can change your destiny.
The three biggest issues we face are fear that you're a terrible writer, the fear that you're too slow, and fear that when you do write something, no one wants to read it. Those are the three fears, the three limitations that hold everyone back.
We can't cover all three in detail in this book, and you know if you've seen my other books that I cover a lot of material about how I outline and strategize books in Breaking Orbit and Serve No Master.
I have already written a book all about how to become a bestseller, and this book is more about the process of writing and writing excellently. Because I want to give you a very real experience, I am writing this book in a different way than every book I've written before.
7
Shattering My Comfort Zone
I’ve written all my previous books by hand, and when I say I write 35,000 words in a week, that's me sitting in front of my computer typing. But this morning as I was going through the outline for this book and thinking about my strategy, I realized that I need to go outside of my comfort zone.
I live on a tropical island, and right now I'm sitting on a dock staring at paradise.
Every week I generate an enormous amount of audio content. I sit out on the same dock every morning around 5 AM and record podcast episodes. I produce a podcast fi
ve days a week.
I also record videos all the time. I'm in the middle of recording a giant video course that I've been working on for a while all about networking, forming connections, and how I found the partners and people I do business with, to help people grow in that direction. I thought to myself that I should dictate a book as I've never done that before.
I've dictated on smaller projects, and for some of the books I've written in the past, I've dictated a few chapters here and there. I use Dragon Dictate. It's the only real option for dictation software on your computer.
But then I thought that I don't like that process because I sit there in front of the glowing monitor tearing into my eyes, and I'm always correcting mistakes, and you have to speak the punctuation. It just doesn't fit my workflow.
There's a transition period where you have to learn to dictate to your computer. At the end of every sentence, you have to speak the punctuation. The transition and learning period annoys me. Writing that way breaks my flow because I am constantly correcting mistakes and going back to fix punctuation.
8
Pushing Boundaries
My entire income is controlled by the words I write. The transition period of learning to dictate into my computer slows me down too much. Every word I write generates money and controls my revenue. I make my entire living from what I write and what I say. My whole business and my entire life's work comes from my ability to write books, so slowing down for a month or six weeks to learn this software is going to cost me loads of money in lost time and lost opportunity.
I'm not a very patient person; I want to get things done fast and want to get things done efficiently. I already have a system that works well.
9
Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
With this book, I'm doing something different. I live on this tropical island, and I want to be outside all the time. I love being outside, and sitting inside writing on my computer is a little bit depressing. So why not do something amazing instead?
While sitting here watching these incredible waves and enjoying the blazing sun on my back, I am recording this book outside right now. Usually, I don't record audio during the day because I'm worried about background noise, but I'm not recording an audiobook. I can edit this later on myself.
I don't know how the final process of creating this book will go. There are two possibilities for how I will convert this audio into text. I will either use Dragon Dictate to transcribe, and then I'll have to go through and edit all the punctuation myself, or I'll use a professional transcriptionist, and they will transcribe everything and add in all the punctuation.
Those are the two choices now.
10
Transcription Secret
One little piece of advice when using a transcriptionist: they charge per minute. When I'm recording this, I have these long pauses where I am thinking for a few seconds. Those spaces are wasted time because I'm paying for the transcriptionist by the minute. They charge me whether I'm saying anything or not.
You can use a tool like Audacity to remove those silences. It's called “truncating the silence.” I have some screenshots on the 20K page showing exactly how I do it. You don't want to go overboard if people are going to listen to your recording. This effect can make the audio sound very choppy and will annoy anyone listening, but you can save yourself twenty to thirty percent of the cost of having someone transcribe your book.
Now I don't want to share that secret with my transcriber because they will be annoyed. So there's an excellent chance that I'll transcribe this part using Dragon so that she never finds out about my little secret.
11
What You Will Learn
I'm excited to have you with me on this journey. Anytime someone buys a book from me or grabs it via Kindle Unlimited (or maybe you even stole it) it means a lot to me; it means a lot that you're trusting me to help you develop a critical skill. We are walking down this path together.
You're going to learn how to accomplish some amazing things. The faster you can write, the more money you make. It's the simplest formula in the world. As you progress as a writer from getting paid per word to getting paid percentages of your projects, your growth transforms from arithmetic to geometric. Instead of going in a straight line, your income looks like a rocket ship flying up a parabola.
When you are faster, the benefit is greater when you're a percentage writer. One of the books I wrote and edited over the course of thirty-five hours generated over $70,000 in commissions for me.
That was the first book I ever wrote for someone else, and that's when I realized that writing is fantastic and writing fast is even better. That project paid so much money for so little work. That's when I fell in love with writing.
I'm going to show you everything that I do: the exact process that I use to write amazing and brilliant books. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey, and I can't wait to meet you at the finish line.
12
Additional Content
As you’ve already noticed, I just can’t fit everything I want to share with you in this book. For that reason, I’ve created a page on my website loaded to the gills with free additional information.
ServeNoMaster.com/20K
Any time I talk about pictures I’ve taken from my dock, blogging about my book creation process, or links to software that I use, you can find it on this page. This is the central hub for all the additional material for breaking the 20K a Day barrier.
13
Who Am I?
Before we go any further, I'd like to give you a chance to get to know me, an opportunity to understand who I am and where I come from.
Why should you listen to me? Why should you trust me when it comes to writing?
You deserve to have those questions answered. Anytime you go to someone for advice or wisdom, it's important to know that the person is an expert at what they do. In reality, I'm not much of a writing teacher, and I'm not much of a writing coach.
That's not really how I make my living. I make my living as a writer, and I decided to launch this project on the side just six months ago. I built a website called Serve No Master and began creating products and writing blog posts and starting a podcast.
I started this side project as a hobby because I want to teach more people how to have the same life that I have.
I live on a tiny tropical island. Right now I'm looking at crystal blue water and incredible waves. I can't see a single human in front of me. If I turn all the way to the right, there’s one person on the beach about two hundred and fifty meters away. If I look to my left, I don't see anybody. There might be people directly behind me, but I can't see them when I turn my head.
All I can see are beautiful waves and amazing clouds.
(I have placed photos from each of my writing sessions at ServeNoMaster.com/20k, including the magical day of the triple rainbow. I will be posting all links and extended content on this page.)
I live in the tropics in the South Pacific on this amazing island. All of my dreams have come true because of my ability to write fast, and I want to pass that ability on to you. Now that I've achieved all my goals, it's time for me to pay it forward and help other people reach their dreams because that makes me feel magnificent.
I've always struggled with different types of adversity in my life. People often tell me that I can't do the things that I want to do. When I graduated from my Master's program in London, there were 30 other teachers in the program. Twenty-nine other high school teachers surrounded me, and they all said they wanted to complete this degree so that they could get a five percent raise back at their old jobs.
When I said, "That doesn't interest me. I'm here because I want to start teaching at university level," every one of them said that was impossible. That no one would hire me because I was just twenty-nine years old. That you can't teach at a university with just a Master’s; you need a doctorate to teach at a University. They said all of these things, and four months lat
er every single one of them was teaching at their old positions at small high schools around the world. I was teaching and running a department at the 17th best university in the United States.
I don't know the current ranking, but that was the ranking that year. Eventually, that job fell apart. It turned out it was the wrong move for me, and my boss fired me after just thirteen magical days. When they fired me, they spoke words of death over my career and said that I would never be successful again, that my life was over.
They didn't just want to fire me; they wanted to sentence me to a life of poverty. And this is how some people get fired; sometimes your bosses are sad to let you go, and they are very nice as they show you the door, but sometimes bosses hate you and want to destroy your life for the rest of eternity.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 2