Sometimes a coaching client or reader will send a link to a book that they like. They send me a book with a beautiful cover and a bunch of awesome reviews. This is wonderful, but there are books with hundreds of great reviews that haven't sold a single copy in months.
If you want to write a book that gets loads of fantastic reviews and then doesn't make a penny, then you can certainly model those books. You can replicate their process to your heart's content. If you want to be a poor, tortured, starving artist, that's great, but I don't teach that. I don't teach people how to be tortured artists; I teach people how to be financially successful artists.
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Don't Invent the Wheel
Researching begins by looking at the categories that are popular and the ones that relate to whatever you want to write about. Look in your desired category at the books that are doing well there. Your book should be similar to these if you want financial success.
If you want to write a book that's completely different, that no one's ever written anything like before and it's unique; if you are using different formatting in the book and if you want to use weird fonts to express your creativity, there is a 99.99% chance that your book will completely and utterly fail financially. But maybe you will feel superb at the end because you did something weird.
When I talk to people who want to be a coaching client of mine (I do have a small coaching group) and they tell me that kind of stuff, I always say that we can't work together because your idea is terrible, and you'll never make any money. You will fail financially, and then you will want to blame me and yell at me.
Instead, we want to look at what the masses want. In whatever space you're going into there are a few things you need to look at. Look at the type of book titles that exist in your space.
How are the titles structured?
Are there subtitles?
How long are the books?
In some spaces, the book needs to be under one hundred pages, and in some spaces it has to be over four hundred. The rules and expectations are different for every category. They are not universal.
The rules for science fiction are not the rules for shape-shifting romance. These differences are critical. As someone who has written in many categories, this is something I have learned to master. I'm often a gun for hire; when someone has an autobiography that they want to put out, they often bring in a ghostwriter like me.
The romance category is very different from the self-help category; parenting is different from computer programming. All of these different categories have different rules, patterns, and expectations. If we want to succeed, we need to understand the rules. The way chapters are formatted will be different. The way books are structured is very different in each genre.
63
Give the People Bread and Circuses
I always strive to give people what they want.
The simplest way to be financially successful in any endeavor is to find out what people want and then give it to them. That's the reason I'm writing this book now. When I first wrote Serve No Master, which is my vision for how people can quit their jobs and find financial success in online marketing, I had a different plan for the order of the other books in the series.
With that book, I want to help people replicate my experiences. It's a big picture book, an inspirational book, and it is step one in this entire process.
There are tons of ways to make money online. To choose the right path for you requires some understanding of where each path leads. That is phase one.
The second book I wrote in this series, Breaking Orbit, is all about how to write bestselling books and make money as an author and to build a business from your books.
Now, this is the third book in the series, and it is all about how to write quickly. This will magnify the success you achieve from Breaking Orbit.
Each of the books in this series takes you in a different direction, and I chose to write this book next because my research showed that how to write fast is a pretty popular topic on Amazon. It's way more popular than some the other things I was looking at.
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Adapt to the Unexpected
I was looking at a couple of choices, and I was going to write a book about emailing next. But then I did my research. It's so fascinating to me that people do not read books on Amazon about how to make money from emailing, although, for most independent entrepreneurs, 90% of their income comes from emailing.
In direct response marketing, courses on emailing are very successful, and they make a lot of money. Just because something's popular outside of Amazon does not mean it will be popular on Amazon. And that's something that I learned in preparing this book. My research has shown me that more people are interested in this topic than email, so that's why I am writing about this first.
Eventually, I will make the email book, but it certainly won't be book three, four or five in this series. Books four and five are already mapped, and I am already brainstorming their titles and cover images.
There's a balance between what you want to write about and what people want to hear about, and the more you pay attention to that balance, the more you can achieve success. It's very hard to be successful writing about something that no one cares about or writing for a genre no one enjoys.
65
Build the Scaffolding
Research is about finding your audience, but it's also about:
finding out what people enjoy
how chapters are structured
how long the books are
what people like about those books
what type of books do well
what type of books don't do well
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Be Your Best Customer
You should read books in your category. Whether it is fiction or nonfiction, read those books and get a feel for the “beats” of the story. It's very hard to write if you don't read. It's very hard to write a movie if you've never seen a movie. How many tattoo artists have you seen who have no tattoos?
I've only ever seen one in my entire life.
To become a great writer, you need to be a great reader. I read a book every single day; sometimes it takes me two days to finish a book, but generally I read a new book every single day. I have a busy life, but my favorite form of recreation is reading. This makes sense because I'm a writer.
I am primarily a nonfiction writer; ninety percent of what I write is nonfiction, but 99% of what I read is fiction.
I don't like to mix business and pleasure.
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Outresearch the Competition
As you begin your research process, look at what people like now. The beginning of the journey is looking at Amazon, but we want to be better than that. We want to be fantastic writers, so we want to go further than the competition. I might not be able to out-write most authors in the world, but I can research them under the table.
In your research process, you also want to go and look at forums and look at reviews to see what the audience is saying online.
What do people who read these books say?
They will post about what they liked and didn't like about the other books. "I loved this about the book, but I just wish this type of storyline would get written..."
Hearing what people want is very valuable because then you can create stories and get inspiration from their ideas.
If you're a romance writer, just go to the romance fan forums where they talk about romance books. People always talk about their favorite storylines and themes. This will provide you with fantastic direction and inspiration. When you write a book that meets someone's desires, you can message them directly to say they inspired you. You have a prebuilt fanbase that will write you raving reviews and spread the message for you. Creating this amazing connection for nonfiction is just as important.
What are people's biggest problems? In writing books in the relationship space, the thing that surprised me more than anything else was that almost everything people talk abou
t on forums and websites is long-distance relationships.
It's amazing to me that in this technological world this is the most common lament. From my research, I know how important it is to cover this topic in my relationship books. Even though only a small percentage of relationships are long-distance, people in this situation have a higher proportion of angst than people in close relationships.
People in long-distance relationships feel more stressed. Everyone always reminds them that long-distance relationships fail ninety-nine percent of the time. When they hear all this negativity over and over, their paranoia grows. They become more and more worried and read more books on the subject and post on forums more often. Their pain point becomes magnified every day.
Understanding the psychology of your audience makes it easier to connect with them. The more you are writing directly to someone, the easier it is.
This is just the beginning of our research process, our big picture research. For both fiction and nonfiction, you want to look at other books out there. If there are popular documentaries or popular movies that are inside your genre, watch them; get a feel for the types of stories people like and what people respond to.
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How Long is a Book?
One of the first questions I get asked is how long should my book be, and I always say however long the other books in your category are, that's how long yours should be. You should be what people expect. If you're in a category where all the books are five hundred pages and your book is only one hundred pages then you have to explain why. Your message should be that I can teach you something just as important as those bigger books in twenty percent of the time; I am more efficient.
In fiction, it's a little bit of a harder sell. I won't even download a fiction book that's too short.
Even though I'm a Kindle Unlimited member, I would never download a fiction book under one hundred pages. It's a waste of my time because I'll read it too fast. I'll finish in less than an hour. I need a book to last me a whole day.
I don't want to read just a book today. I like authors with a long series to read. I love to read science fiction books, and if each one in your series is over two hundred pages, I will tear through your entire catalog. I will read all of them, even if there are fifty books in your series. If you have a series like this, let me know, and you'll get a new fan in me.
When thinking about how quickly we can write a book, we need to perform a little basic math. Start with how long the book will be. Then take a look at how many hours a day you have available. Once you know how many words you can write per hour, you can estimate when you will finish each book.
Sometimes I am a little shorter than my initial plan. I wanted Serve No Master to be 100,000 words, but it ended up around 93,000. I wanted Breaking Orbit to be 25,000 words, and it was 43,000 in the end. I went way over on that one!
If a reader buys and reads both books, it evens out in the end.
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Let's Get Cracking!
I decided for this book I'm not going to do any word counting or targeting because I'm not sitting in front of the computer. Instead, I'm writing this while sitting on a dock.
I have my outline next to me, and I keep checking to make sure that I cover the things I want to cover in each chapter. This is a new experience for me. I want us to both experience new things together and accomplish great things together and for you to see that I'm willing to put my neck out and go outside my comfort zone at the same time as I'm teaching you how to do it.
A large part of writing fast boils down to your research, and now you have a solid foundation on how to do that the right way. If you want to dig deeper into outlining, feel free to read Breaking Orbit, where I cover outlining and research in greater detail. You have enough of an idea now that we can move into the mechanics of writing fast.
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Action Steps
Where can you find great book ideas?
What should you learn about a category before you start writing your book?
How can you be sure that an audience exists?
Why is it worth visiting forums and blogs on a topic?
Part VIII
Four Thousand Words Per Hour
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a horse master. He told me to go slow to go fast. I think that applies to everything in life. We live as though there aren't enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.
- Viggo Mortensen
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Know What You’re Writing
Know your plan. Built on a foundation of great research, we want to have an outline that's as detailed as possible. When you are filling out a coloring book, you know where all the sections are so you can color that page pretty quickly. The lines are a great guide, but if you take that same page of the coloring book and mark each little section with a different color crayon to denote what color you want it to be, you can accelerate your coloring speed.
Spend two minutes of preparation before you start the primary coloring process. Just say to yourself, “This will be orange, this will be red, this will be blue, and this will be purple.”
By marking each of those different sections with a color, you have created a much more efficient outline. You remove part of your decision-making process from your creative process. Now, instead of looking at each area and deciding what color to apply to each section, you can focus on coloring.
When you separate out the decision-making process, you can simply go and color each part. You can make coloring faster, and the same principle applies to writing. The more detailed your outline, the easier it is for you to go through this process.
When you're writing fiction, saying, “I want these characters to have a conversation about rocks,” is not enough. It needs to be more. You need to know where the conversation is starting and where it's ending. I write all of my books using Scrivener, and all my notes for this book are in Scrivener as well. I have my iPad mini sitting next to me right now.
With my outline, I always know where the previous section ended where the next section is going to start. I break my books up into tiny parts, and you should do the same thing. Eat that elephant one bite at a time.
The more detailed your notes are, with what you hope to accomplish for that section, the easier it will be for you to write. We want all of the book and story structure decision-making separated from the writing process. Decision-making and writing are two very different processes.
I have already decided what each section of this book will contain. As I record each part, I look at my notes. I have a vast quantity of notes for each section, and I look at them and can see what I want to accomplish. Knowing what I want to cover, I record all those things. When I finish recording a section, I can remove it from my mind. It is complete. I then move onto the next little section and repeat this very simple process.
I don't have to think about the entirety of the book. I have no idea how many of these little recordings I'll end up doing. All I think about is the section I'm working on right now. (Editing note - It was sixty-one files in the end.)
We want to break up your writing project into as many small tasks as possible. The more you divide your process into small pieces, and the more you plan and build a structure, the easier the writing itself will be. We want to make writing easier for you so that the words flow very quickly.
Separating research and outlining from writing is key to that process. The same applies to each of your scenes when you're writing fiction. It needs to be more, not less.
Some of the people think that an outline is writing a title for each chapter. This type of framework might be twelve paragraphs that only describe the flow of your book. That's not the way to do it; we want to go deeper.
I have links to some of my favorite fiction outlining books on the 20K page. Everyone has a different outlining process, and that's separate from writing fast, but we do want to lock in our b
ig picture strategy right now.
When outlining fiction, you need to know your story beats; you want to know to sketch out the scenes and break them into the smallest pieces possible. We always want to outline as deeply as possible. The deeper you outline, the easier everything else is. If you saw the outline for this book, it would blow your mind. It contains over thirty thousand words of notes that my assistant put together to accelerate this process for me.
Everything else is so easy when you have good notes and a good outline; you don't have to worry about other things. It removes a lot of the stress of writing. It turns that big, overwhelming elephant into a single, manageable bite. All of these steps will make this process easier for you.
Sit down and decide what you're going to write about.
Decide how each scene is going to play out.
Decide which facts you are going to go use for each section.
You have to do those other things. I know that is not the glamorous part of writing. And it’s not even writing; it’s research. And research is about decision-making.
Trying to mix decision-making with being creative always leads to failure. You are attempting to activate two different parts of your brain simultaneously, and that will always lower your daily word counts. The number one cause of writer’s block is this exact glitch. Don’t let it happen to you ever again.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 8