There are a lot of things that you need to consider when it comes to writing a book. Check out these 3 best pieces of writing advice to win at the self-publishing game.
In today's article, I'm going to be hitting upon three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. It is a secret as to the one thing you are definitely going to want to do if you are writing a book yourself.
Today's topic is the 3 best pieces of writing advice. Now, as an author or somebody who's aspiring to be an author, there are several phases in the whole process when we're getting going on the self-publishing route.
And of course, the very first part you might imagine is writing the book itself. But you would be mistaken because some things need to even be done before the writing of the book. We're going to be hitting upon that today.
If you skip these things, you will go through a lot of pain and suffering as I have done in the past. Check out my free Self-Publishing Checklist to make sure that you're not skipping any of the secret steps to getting your book onto the market and selling.
When I first got started, I had no advice on what exactly I should be doing. In other words, I was just trying to figure it out the old-fashioned way by myself. I made almost every mistake that you could possibly makeover some time.
It took me to get my book onto the market but the reality is that to avoid these mistakes, I would have to know what is a mistake and what isn't a mistake. I was not getting much advice at that time. Later on, though once I had a coach, I had taken courses on writing and self-publishing.
I started to see a jump in my progress. In addition, I had the motivation to keep on working. Because I knew that what I was doing was along the lines of what is the best practices when it comes to writing and self-publishing your book onto the market.
There were 3 main key lessons that I took away from this. We'll be hitting a little more in detail regarding these. The first is that you need the correct theory.
That is to say that when you're doing anything, there is the best way of doing it. There's obviously a lot of different ways that you can write your book to get it onto the market. But there's going to be some ways that are a lot better than other ways.
It's best to take other people's experience and the theory that's drawn out of that. Regardless of which type of book you're writing and using that as your basis to start it all off. The theory is incredibly important and incredibly boring unless it's relevant at the moment.
But it needs to be covered anyway, so you'll notice I cover a little bit of the theory aspect within my articles and videos. That's why subscribing to my channel will help you out. Hit the bell so that you will know when I'm coming out with the latest videos.
In addition, daily action is the next one. If you aren't moving forward daily, well then you're falling behind. Then we're sort of wasting time because it's just another hobby. We're not going to devote the time and energy that we're going to need to make progress.
The Basic Sales Rank
Then the final one is "accountability", who are you holding yourself accountable to? Is it just yourself, how well has that worked for you? Most people find that when you're trying to do anything content of any sort, whether it's books or videos or whatever if you have no accountability it's going to quickly become boring and redundant.
You're going to find difficulty in staying focused. So 3 best pieces of writing advice. Number one, you need to choose the right niche from the start.
This is the part I commented on at the very beginning of the article. It is that when you're writing a book, your first step is not writing, it's researching. We're going to research the market itself, how many books are out there already on the subject for which you're interested in writing?
Are they selling a lot of copies? Because that's the second point which is the shortage of books are there. A shortage of books on the one side and are there people who are investing money?
We want to see, you can look at the BSR, a basic sales rank of many of the books that we have that are currently on Amazon. It's available information and we can see how many of the books are showing up at the top. Let's say top 20 or top 50 books on Amazon in a given niche that you're thinking of writing on are in the top 100,000 BSR.
We're looking at books that are selling one to two copies a day that is on Amazon. Seeing that we find books in our niche, so if you're thinking of maybe I'm going to write a book in an issue where there are no books on there. Then how do we know people are going to want to buy it?
We're going to want to write a book that people are going to want to read. But how would we know if those people don't exist? Are we planning on building an entirely new market ourselves? This is probably a terrible idea.
Because the fact is some so many people jump into the market and attempt to create a market. Even if you did manage to create a market, the people who understand marketing are going to then monopolize and jump in to compete with you.
This is a better strategy, to think of it like surfing. What we're doing is we're looking for the perfect wave. Then simply when we see that wave is already there, the energy is already there, there's an audience already buying.
There are not many other surfers on that wave, that's the wave we're going to target. We'll jump on top of it. Now, interestingly enough sometimes, if we choose a given keyword and we see there's too much competition we just simply go downwards to what we call long-tail keywords.
That is if you have a niche, you can use 2 niches together to achieve the goal that you have. In terms of trying to find that special niche where people are interested in buying your book. There aren't so many books but at the same time, we see that there are a lot of sales on that given type of book.
Daily Writing Goal
The second point we're hitting today is, set a daily writing goal. You can do this both in terms of the time you're devoting to writing each day. I would suggest 30 minutes a day or also the number of words you're doing a day.
So that we have an idea with regards to maybe for me it was a thousand words a day. Another issue here when we're dealing with budgeting resources would be money. How much money do you have available to dedicate towards self-publishing, dedicate towards yourself?
We're going to need editing, we're going to need covers, we're going to need formatting. I discover the best route is not to try to figure it out yourself. But rather, take a course, I offer a Course on book formatting which is very reasonably priced and it will get you up to speed with what you need to know.
Check out this related article: You Deserve To Be Read!
To start formatting your book right away and then you don't have to pay somebody else to do it. You can do it yourself and we can change everything to make it exactly perfect. So that it will meet your needs.
Moving on to our third point and our secret point of the day is that you need to get accountable to someone. The joy of writing like any other thing wears off. You need to stay on track, hire a coach.
I offer Coaching or hire somebody else to hold you accountable most. It is best not to use friends and family since they're just too close. They'll try to be too nice to you, whereas others will be nice but at least trying to say why didn't you accomplish what you said you were going to do?
Then you'd be doing it daily. Just giving basic updates and then once a week we then hold a session to review where we've come. What are the next steps ahead?
By breaking it down like this, you're working towards something. You have that accountability which I'm arguing is the absolute most important aspect of actually achieving your goal of getting your book onto the market. In terms of both the writing of the book but also the further steps as well especially in the writing part.
It deals with any hobby you might have. If you've got an "accountability person" to hold you on track, to achieve what it is you're trying to do. You have a much greater chance of success.
So what are the 3 best pieces of writing advice you have been given? I really want to know, let me know down in the comments. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.