How to start your expert book
You know, the one you've been saying you'd write someday
It’s time to write your expert book. You’ve been saying for months (years?) you’ll write one someday – but that day never seems to arrive.
You know publishing your book will help establish your expertise and make it easier for you to do things like get in front of other people’s audience to grow your audience.
Writing a book sounds like a huge undertaking and you just don’t know where to start.
I understand. I’ve been there.
Then, I figured out what the steps are and laid them all out in my first book, There’s a Book in Every Expert (That’s You!) – my third book, Ready to Publish is for people who are turning an existing coaching course or similar body of knowledge into a book, if that’s you, start with that one.
Today, I’ll talk about what you need to do before you start worrying about things like choosing a topic and title and who your audience is. But if you want to skip ahead and see a full overview of the process, either buy my book, or read a blog post I wrote on this a while ago called How Long Does It Take to Write a Book?
Why start with pre-work instead of diving right in? Because doing this work now will save you lots of time later.
Pre-work step 1: Your mindset
I often say writing doesn't have to be as hard as most of us were taught to make it, but that doesn't mean it's always easy. Before you start your book, you need to do some mindset work to increase your chances of finishing.
I'd strongly suggest that you write this work down - or record it as a video or audio. Why? Because you need to be able to come back to it.
To do this work, you need to spend some time with these questions:
What evidence do you have that you know enough to write your book?
What evidence do you have that your potential readers value your knowledge?
What evidence do you have that you can use your expertise to help others?
Having answers to these questions will help you quiet your internal critic when you have a rough writing day!
Pre-work step 2: Your commitment
Writing a book takes time. It doesn't take as long as most people imagine, but it's also not going to write itself.
All told, your active time for writing your book is about 65 hours. ‘Active time’ here is similar to what you’ve likely seen on recipes – this is the time you’ll actually be engaged in work on your book. You'll need to be confident that you can either clear the decks when you need to focus on your book or that you'll be able to work on it little and often.
These are the main steps involved in writing your book:
Planning - getting to know your reader, focusing your topic, outlining. 3+ hours
Messy draft - aka, your first draft. 40 hours
Revision - 2 rounds: big picture and polish. approx. 12 hours
Beta readers - they'll need a month, you'll need about 5 hours
Editor - they'll need a month, you'll need about 8 hours
Before you start your book, you'll need to know where you're going to find the time to write it. You'll also need to know how you're going to deal with the inevitable setbacks. You don't want to talk about the book you're writing for months and then never produce the book!
Pre-work step 3: What's involved beyond writing and editing
I wish writing your book was all there was to it, but it's not. Your book is not Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams! If you're not familiar with the film, Costner's character is told to build a baseball diamond in the middle of nowhere for some late-great players to play on: "If you build it they will come".
Since you'll need to do more than build/write your book, in addition to the steps outlined above, you'll need the following:
a marketing plan
an audience who are interested in buying, reading, and reviewing your book
at least one means of communicating with that audience - social media, newsletter, etc.
an incentive to get that audience to actually read and review it
a way to produce and share marketing materials (digital ones like social media posts and, possibly, physical ones like branded bookmarks)
a book formatter - or the willingness to learn how to do this yourself
a cover designer - or the ability to do it yourself
depending on where you live - you may need to purchase ISBN numbers
a plan for where you're going to publish - I recommend using both Amazon and IngramSpark (they distribute the book to booksellers that aren't Amazon).
What's next?
If you're thinking that looks like a lot - it would be, if you tried to do everything at once. But if you take it step by step and do one thing at a time – in the right order – it's completely doable.
I discuss all of this in detail in my free 2-part workshop, First Steps to Becoming an Author; this is module 1 in my 6-month course, There's a Book in Every Expert:
This is a live workshop. I run it at least a couple of times per quarter, so if you can’t make this one, join the waitlist and I’ll let you know when I’m running it again.