Maybe you have some ideas of what you would like to write about and you think you are not good enough at writing or you don't have enough motivation to write. Well, let me tell you some tips that will inspire you to write and self-publish books.
Today's question has three answers and you're going to want to stick around for the third answer. It is going to tell you how you can get around this whole issue of whether you can write well or not.
So let's get into it. The question that was sent in is, not good enough at writing? This is a common issue that many people have when they're getting started.
Because you want to publish a book and you would like to get something out of the market for many reasons. Maybe you have some ideas of what you would like to write about or maybe you would like to just see if you can get some sort of a passive income going.
And that's another major motivation that gets a lot of people into self-publishing. But you're not a very good writer or at least you think you're not a very good writer? Well, how good of a writer do you need to be?
But the problem is because you have this feeling, this limiting belief of what it's doing to you. It's slowing you down from making the progress you need to. Maybe you've written your book but now you're not sure you want to put it on the market.
Or maybe you haven't even started and you're thinking "this is too big of a task, I'm not going to be able to accomplish this" since you're not a very good writer. You see how you can get stuck here without ever publishing anything because of this simple belief.
Well, this is what we're going to answer today. Check out my free Self-Publishing Checklist to make sure that you are not skipping any of the important steps necessary to win at the self-publishing game.
So let's get into it. Let me tell a little bit about my own story. When I first got started, I was thinking also that writing a book would be very difficult.
Where do you start? Do you have an outline? What do you do? There are all sorts of questions that need to be done, that's just on the writing part and then later you'd have of course the publishing part of the contents.
The formatting, the cover, the description, the ads, the audiobooks, and all of these sorts of things. It gets very heavy but if we find that the writing part is difficult, that can stop us right from the beginning before we even get to the formatting and the next step.
So, for a lot of people, this is exactly the feeling I had with myself when I was first getting started. But then I came across a strategy which was to not focus so much on the quality but just pump out a thousand words a day.
I wrote out a basic outline and then would just write a thousand words a day. Until I had completed my very first book on some ideas I wanted to get out into the world.
Using Voice Stream
What do I do then? Well, I took the book and I ran it through a couple of editors that I'd found on Fiverr that were highly rated editors. I used the program Grammarly which is free and I use Libre Writer's grammar check.
And finally, I listen to the entire book in an app called Voice Stream. It is a fantastic one for just taking a text file like your book. Throwing it in there and just listening to the whole thing be read.
This is an excellent way to find mistakes that maybe these other things haven't found. The result though of all of this was I published the book and there weren't that many mistakes inside the book in terms of grammar and the flow of the book.
Because the fact is when you're using a little bit of time and running it through these different tools, it finds a lot of the common mistakes that you may have made. I tested out a bunch of other programs that did not work out so well for me.
I ended up not using them because they were pointing out a bunch of mistakes that were not particularly relevant. Then what happened was I repeated and improved this for each book improving the quality.
And later I began to understand that I enjoyed the publishing part and making money off of the books. But I didn't have the time necessary to publish on the right keywords and to get those books out. So I found many publishing agencies and there's a whole series of them.
Check out this related article: How To Self Publish Short Stories?
Epic Write was one that I had used in the past. You have Writer's Summit and a whole series of other publishing companies where people will write the book. You make sure it's not copyright and I use a couple of programs just to check to make sure that the text is original.
Then we're able to format and run it through the same processes and upload the book to Amazon. Many of the best-sellers have been books that I did not personally write. Though my book on Sleep is by far the most popular book that I have written.
It's a very useful book that people still today can get quite a bit of value out of. Every day I'm selling copies of it. But these other books, many of them have outsold my books.
Things from cookbooks to How-To's, to all sorts of nonfiction books that are targeting very profitable keywords. But maybe not something that I have the time to do. I enjoy just putting more books onto the market.
That's how I have over 190 books on the market as of today. That feeling is fantastic seeing those books. Because the beauty is you don't know which books are going to sell.
It's different books every day that are going to be selling. It's not like every book is selling tons of copies every day. If somebody has told you that, they're lying to you.
Hire A Ghostwriting Agency
When you have a lot of books on the market, you're seeing these sales happening across the different platforms and the different markets. So that's something also to keep in mind. But the thing is that I had that barrier feeling.
Maybe I'm not very good at writing but through practice, we were able to overcome that particular one. There may be new barriers like shortage of time and some other things but in terms of this particular barrier, it hasn't been so much of an issue.
So, not good enough at writing? Well, you get better with practice like I was commenting plus reading books will help you improve. You can read Stephen King's book on "Writing" and there's a lot of other fantastic books out there that will help make you a better writer.
These are tricks that will improve your writing but you just need to start practicing. The second is you can hire an editor so it can make you the best writer you can be. Fiverr is a perfect place, just choose somebody who has thousands of positive reviews.
And you will probably be just fine when you send your work to them. So that they're able to go through it and find a lot of other types of mistakes that you're making. And over time, you will become a better writer.
Check out this related article: Self Publishing Children's Books Canada?
So that's something else that you're going to want to do. Now, let's get into the secret answer of today which is the third answer. If you're terrible at writing, well as I have mentioned, you can hire a ghostwriting agency if you want to get a book on the market without writing it yourself.
And there's nothing wrong with that. I would not suggest putting it under your name since I think it's very important that when you write something and it's in your name that you wrote the book. But in terms of hiring it out to somebody else, you can come up with a name.
There's nothing unethical, many of the best writers in the world have used pen names when doing it. Ghostwriting is a completely acceptable way. I just wouldn't suggest that you put it under your name.
So choose a different name that sort of matches that genre that you're writing for. And keep each genre separate to a different author. So even if you were writing books in a different genre, it might be wise actually to use a different pen name for yourself for those different genres.
Otherwise, it undermines your authority in each of those areas. So that's another thing you're going to want to keep in mind. So, do you struggle with writing a book?
If you do, write "Yes" below and if you don't, write "No" below in the comments. I would be very interested to hear and that will help me make better blogs and videos in the future. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.