090 - Top 5 Tips Get Started Writing Your Book Today!

I’m Nicole Gabriel, the host of the show. And, I’m happy you joined me here today! I’ve worked in the publishing industry for awhile now and I’ve seen many things over the years. I began my career in the advertising business back in the early 90’s. I’ve worked for all the top ad agencies. I began my career at McCann Erickson, then worked my way into J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, and then went over to the client side and did my time in executive management in all the American auto companies - General Motors, Ford, and (at the time) Daimler Chrysler. I was in the business back in the days of George magazine. I was there at the birth of the internet. I was on a few teams that built the very first websites for many in the automotive business. Some days it feels like it was another lifetime ago, but the basics of the advertising and marketing business are the same no matter the media used. I surrounded myself with brand management gurus and that gave me a wonderful understanding and foundation for how to market and sell just about anything in all of my entrepreneurial efforts going forward.

This being said, I’m a student first and a teacher second. I think many loose sight of the idea that a teacher is always a student. A teacher pays attention to what it is the student wants to know. There are many phases of awareness in the publishing of a book. The first phase is that of identifying yourself as a being worthy of telling a story, sharing an experience, or affecting the outcome of someone’s life. I remember the days where I began studying yoga and made the leap from student to teacher. My teachers told me that if you want to learn something you read about it, if you want to understand something you write about it, but if you want to master something you teach it.

Think about that for a minute. You can go about your life reading others work or you can make the leap into writing the work others read. This is a giant leap in itself, but to write something, it also means that you’ve set up a platform by doing your due-diligence (researching, practicing, trying, failing, re-working). As you work through your content you are planning. So, what are you planning?

Lets talk about 5 tips to get you started on writing your book today!

We’ll start with shifting up your attitude. Yep! You heard me! To manifest anything in life you can, you will, and you already have written a very successful book that people want to read. Here is a tool for changing your voice commands. Now, of course, when you change your voice you are re-programming your thinking. You get the reality you vibrate with, so let’s first restructure your wording.

TIP #1: Change Your Voice Commands - Body, Mind, And Spirit

You are moving from…

• I can’t
• I won’t
• It’s hard
• I don’t Believe
• I’m a skeptic
• I don’t like

You may begin to work into…

• Try
• Trying
• I can try
• I’m trying
• I will try
• I will attempt

But, this thinking will command you to block yourself - you will be in your own way. There is no “try”, there is only “do”.

You are programming the future using these words…

• I can
• I am
• I believe
• It is done
• I can do it
• I can do anything

This is now programmed to be what is really coming into your life now when you become a creative manifest-or. You can use this same thinking when you are writing and it will keep you focused on the now verses the dramas and traumas of the past. You can reflect on those as you write to reflect on a lesson, but they won’t be as emotionally charged when you change your voice. With a newly focused voice you can and will move into a projected path of achievement for the future. You will think in terms of the goals you have set forth for your book going forward and begin to ask “what can my book do for me right now?”

TIP #2: Write With Future Thinking in Mind

As I have said repeatedly in my message - know the “why”…why are you writing in the first place. When you are clear on the why then you can better predict an outcome. If you are simply writing to clear up a past beef you won’t get very far. Again, this is past-thinking. The past will draw up all the wounds. The story of what you’ve overcome might be awesome but now what? What are you going to do with what you’ve learned from this experience? Are you planning to help others? If you simply want to tell a story, then by all means do so, but you will also not have anyplace to go moving forward. It’s not that you are locked there, but a book is a wonderful opportunity to showcase your intentions. If you’ve…say come through abuse, then tell your story of abuse, but then tell the reader how you overcame it and how you can help them. Are you setting up a healing center to help others? This is just such a super opportunity to plug that next step that I don’t want you to miss out on it. Got it?

TIP #3: Align All Marketing

Social media - you can’t start too late here. At the same time you don’t want to start before you have finished writing. You don’t want to market your book before you have it in hand to sell it. It’s truly ok to hold onto it for a month before you launch it. Sometimes there are kinks in the printing or shipping system so you want to just work through all of that before you commit to filling orders. And, by all means - DO NOT sell your book before you are done writing it! What if you just get pulled off course and never finish it? You will have to refund all income from sales and that’s just a logistical nightmare. Not to mention, the pressure you put on yourself to finish writing for the sake of having a book verses the time that could be used to expand your creative juices into better or more meaningful content.

However you are selling your book, you must remember its a branding tool to market you and the thing you do before it is an income-generator….this is, of course if writing is not your career. You don’t want to be too pushy about the book. Remember to sell your personality, or the thing you do first, and the book second.  For example, if you are invited on a podcast to talk about the book…do something unexpected…don’t talk about the book! Talk about the thing you do first and slide in the piece about the book you just wrote second. If being an author is your bag then of course the book is a bit more important. I mostly speak to those looking to add a book to their overall business, but if the book is your business of course this is different. As a full time author, your book is your intellectual property and what you are marketing.

Either way, if you don’t know who your target audience is before you start then you are randomly selling books with no real goal in mind. Get a marketing plan together and identify the markers for success before you begin. After all, how will you know you’ve been successful if you have nothing to measure against.

TIP #4: Use Re-Purposeful Content

Of course when you’re building a new home you don’t just show up with a box of nails and a hammer and a pickup truck full of 2 x 4’s. You draw up a plan. Not only do you draw up plans but you pick the site, you choose the landscape elements and location, as well as the neighborhood. You might hang out there meeting new people to see if you like the area before you commit to the build. Then you define the style of the home and builder and the building elements, etc. etc.

When you’re writing the content of your book, you first have to identify what your end goal is. Are you starting a speaking career? How about recruiting members for a new institution or group? Is this purely creative? Or perhaps your goal is to teach, heal, or start a feel-good movement? When you begin to identify the end goal first then the content flows with ease.

Ultimately, if the reader really likes what you’ve written, you will have a defined platform for how you can better reach them individually or personally. Are you speaking somewhere where they can come see you speak? Or are you forming the content to blend into a teaching program where they can come for workshops? Are you marketing a product or service? When you are clear on your why then you simply take all those top elements and identify a good (15) of them and those work their way into chapters. See how easy that is? Then you just fill in the content in those chapters.

So let’s say I want to help victims of trauma heal. I want to set up the story, then how I relate, how I can help, and what people can do….My content all backfills into the defined areas as it relates. This may be defined process or methods that aid in the healing process. This may be a book of stories so the reader can relate. But, ultimately, it may lead to a movement or organization you are using a book to create awareness of.

It’s the same with a book to enhance your business platform. Who is your audience? Define this as you begin writing…talk about who this book is written for and why you believe it can help. Once you have laid this groundwork then you begin to gain the readers attention with material that enhances their life and business. And, of course, the way you lay out your content, and how you present yourself is like one big, and really long, interview to sell the experience you have to offer. The best content generator here, I find, is identifying all the repetitive pieces of your business so that they now become known as the critical elements that define your methods to success. A book gets you thinking deeper about all these functional elements so that you present rock solid clarity in your business model. When you really get this right you now have tools, systems, and methods that you can independently and repeatedly market outside of the book. Let’s say you identify, as I have in this podcast, the top (5) things you can do for the reader, the watcher of your YouTube videos, the listener to your podcast, the students in your program, etc.

In a nutshell…the best content you can write is re-purposeful in everything you do!

TIP #5: Set Yourself Up As An AUTHOR-ITY

A book is a lead-generating tool. In a business model, the book leads people into the your ecosystem. The result, you can boost sales of higher priced products and services. This is a common strategy for non-fiction authors these days. The book is more of a marketing tool than an income. But, it will also niche you into a category.

Once you are an authority of your topic, you can leverage your time as an expert, rather than trading it for dollars. A single book can be the basis for a business for a long time if it’s done right. I always encourage my authors to try to write in a timeless fashion to extend the life of the content. Sometimes though, technologies and the like change, but this is when you re-print the book and make updates. You can spin off all kinds of affiliate programs, services, speaking events, or the like from a well-written book.

You can also gear a book toward a particular market and aim to sell it in bulk. Many times these sales aren’t tracked and don’t make you a best-seller, but they can push you forward as an expert in your field if you can find your way in. If you worked closely with or for a particular large organization you might give that organization the right to brand market a collaboration book. The company likes your material and they print a special edition with their logo on it for a particular event where they buy a copy for all attendees. A company could even place advertising in the book by buying space.

Because it’s such a hot topic today…let’s switch things up and talk about the constitution. This work has been a rather timeless writing.  Imagine if you were able to create and write guidelines in your book to help transform an organization into a new system that became the Bible for the new structure. You could brand the system, allow the company to brand the book, and turn a profit from bulk books sales as well as give yourself the opportunity to consult on the topic for an additional income. Thinking of your book with a business mindset will maximize your revenue and opportunity.

Let’s re-hash these (5) helpful tips…

5 Helpful Tips:

TIP #1: Change Your Voice Commands - Body, Mind, And Spirit
TIP #2: Write With Future Thinking in Mind
TIP #3: Align All Marketing
TIP #4: Use Re-Purposeful Content
TIP #5: Set Yourself Up As An AUTHOR-ITY

In Conclusion

We talked about how there are many phases of awareness in the publishing of a book. What I’ve asked you to do here may or may not resonate with you as the top (5) tips, but they are all good tips nonetheless. These tips will get you thinking about the purposeful nature of your content. It will have you writing with end goals in mind. This is a big investment…writing and publishing a book…you will expend time and money and in the end you want it to work for you by giving you a chance to succeed outside of the book. I just always go back to a model that allows this investment in time to prove forward a worthwhile opportunity for enhancement and build clarity and purpose for you. It just makes so much more sense. The only way this isn’t going to make since is if your soul purpose is to be creative and a return on investment just isn’t why you are writing. But, I don’t know many authors that have that kind of mindset. Everyone wants their work to be seen or they just wouldn’t be making this effort to begin with.

If your book is designed to express your creativity, to push forth a business plan, or maybe a little of both…you’ll find the ability to manifest the content, that fills the pages, stems on you holding and aligning with a crystal clear image of the final output and goal.

Closing

I’d be happy to share more with you. I always offer a complimentary phone or zoom conversation if you’d like to learn more about writing and publishing your book. It’s really important we chat well before you begin writing. So many times I get called when the manuscript is already complete. But, I can help get you focused in the right direction before you invest too much time going in the wrong direction. It’s my goal to get you aligned with not just why you are writing a book, but also to get you focused on how to best utilize a book to earn the greatest reward from all the hard work and effort you put forth.

OK guys, check out my other podcasts episodes, my blog, my videos, and be sure to download a copy of the Let’s Get Your Book Published eBook and other cheat sheets from my website. Good luck pulling it all together and happy to assist you when you’re ready!

As always, wishing you peace, love, and light.