How To Write A Book | Joel Trains Authors » book love

The secret to a successful book

admin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:31:52 +0000

There are more books being published now than ever before. UNESCO (via Wikipedia) says:

United States (2009) 288,355 (“new titles and editions”) ^[3]
United Kingdom (2005) 206,000 ^[2]
China (2007) 136,226 ^[4]
Russian Federation (2008) 123,336 ^[5]
Germany (2009) 93,124 (new titles) ^[6]
Spain (2008) 86,300 ^[7]
India (2004) 82,537 (21,370 in Hindi and 18,752 in English) ^[8]^[9]
Japan (2009) 78,555 ^[10]
France (2010) 67,278 ^[11] (63,690 new titles)
Iran (2010) 65,000 ^[12]^[13]

How many of these sell more than 50 copies? I haven’t found exact figures, but my guess is that the percentage is below 10.

Why? And how can you get your book into the 10%?

“Why” is the secret: Most authors write from their own need or desire to do so. They have a vague idea about who will buy their book or want to read it. But they are focused on their message.

That is a mistake. A HUGE mistake.

If you want your book to be read by more than your mom and your close friends, you must view the book as a product, and its publication as a business. Even if you plan to give it away for free.

So the first question you must answer is: Who is the audience for my book? Who will want to read it? And you must study that audience and refine your understanding of who is in it, so that you can be sure that your book is something they will want.

(Notice that I said “want,” not “need.” People buy what they want, what they desire. Their desire may or may not stem from need.)

Does this sound backwards? Shouldn’t you focus first on your message? Not if you want to reach an audience.

You must first pick your audience. Define it narrowly, as narrowly as possible–age, gender, family situation, profession, and so on. If you address the wants of a highly targeted group of people, those who share some of their attributes will also be interested. But if you attempt to address everyone, your content will not attract anyone.

Who is your audience? Dentists who have just opened a practice? Stay-home moms with 2-3 kids under 10? Harried executives in large corporations who have been at it for 10 to 12 years, and are thinking about entrepreneurship? Owners of Golden Retrievers? Once you define your audience, you can figure out what problem your book should address. You’ll know what title will capture their interest. And you’ll know where to find your readers, and how to help them find you.

What are your thoughts about audience? Please comment.

Seth Godin: The single biggest change in book publishing

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:52:05 +0000

Seth Godin is amazing, and you should follow his Domino Project. In this brief article, he summarizes a key point about publishing books that is overlooked by most authors and many publishers. Go there and read the whole thing.

The single biggest change in book publishing is this:

The industry was built around finding readers for its writers.
And new technologies and business models now mean that the most successful publishers and authors find writers for their readers instead.

Go here to read the whole short piece.

Can this new publishing model work?

admin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:31:03 +0000

Unglue.it is not even in beta yet, but it is raising a lot of eyebrows: Can you use a pledge campaign to raise money to induce a copyright owner to put their publication into the public domain? The owner gives up future royalties in exchange for a one-time payment, raised from a crowd of interested people in small amounts. (Compare Kickstarter.com) It’s an intriguing thought, and I will be very interested to see if it flies. Here’s a brief video in which Unglue.it founder Eric Hellman is interviewed by my friend David Weinberger.

Do you make these 3 disastrous book-writing mistakes?

admin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:52:40 +0000

I’ll say it again: Most people think that writing a book is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, and of questionable value. But actually, if you just follow my program, it can be doable (if not easy), quick, and a really good use of your time. I’ll save the value part for another blog post; what I want to focus on here is what makes book-writing difficult and time-consuming for most people.

Jumping in without a complete plan. If you want to build a house, you don’t begin driving a truck to the Home Depot and filling it with 2×4′s, dry-wall panels, and other materials. Obviously you don’t know how much to buy, of what materials. Instead, you hire an architect, and work out detailed plans. Only when these are complete, down to each door, window, strip of molding, and electrical outlet, do you find a builder who will shop for materials and turn them into a house for you. Produce your title, your subtitle, and your table of contents down to the sub-chapter level. Now you can begin to write.
Researching as you go. Thanks to Wikipedia, Google, and other resources, research can quickly become a fascinating journey without an end. DO NOT research while writing. When you come across a “blank spot,” something you need to find out, just mark it with “%%%” or some other sign your word processor can easily find. Then, when your book is complete, go back and look up only what you need to replace the “%%%.” If you follow this guideline, you will save many, many hours.
Writing for the broadest possible audience. If you try to write for everybody, you wind up writing for nobody. Instead, picture your ideal reader, the person for whom your book will be a welcome and blessed gift, exactly what they needed and wanted. Write a detailed description of this person–gender, age, family situation, work, physical qualities. Give them a name. Cut out a magazine picture that looks like them and post it where you can see it. This is your audience. Speak to this person as you write.

Have you discovered any mis-steps that slow your book-writing or get you off track? Share them in the comments!

What’s the question?

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:49:12 +0000

Your audience–the people you want to reach with your book–has a question. Yes, I know they have more than one. But for many of them, there is one big question they share. It occupies them. It represents a pain, a hole in their lives, that is demanding comfort, that must have an answer.

Do you know what your audience’s question is?

If you do, great. The title of your book should address that question. And the answer found in your book should be powerful. Actionable.

If you don’t know what the audience’s burning question is–find out. Ask. Call. Interview. Read market research reports. In fact, if you don’t know, don’t publish a book until you do–that is, if you want anyone to read your book.

Paper vs. ebook

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:04:04 +0000

It’s not really a dichotomy; you can, and probably should, have both. Thanks to print-on-demand machinery, you can get your book out there for very little money (consider Lulu.com if you can handle terrible customer support; otherwise my favorite is Booklocker.com). And you can simultaneously publish your work as an ebook, getting it formatted for the different readers, as well as offering it for computer reading.

A paper book can be a “big business card,” as Dona Kozik puts it; it’s a physical presence in your prospect’s hands, and then in their home or office, that constantly reminds them of you. It’s authoritative, and establishes you as an author–hence, an authority.

An ebook has very low production costs and is almost free to distribute. If you sell it, it’s almost pure profit; if you employ it as a bonus or giveaway, your marginal cost per copy is essentially zero.

One poorly exploited aspect of ebooks: Media richness. Your ebook can contain color, audio, video, and links–all of which are expensive, impossible, or cumbersome to put in a paper book. Yet they are easy and inexpensive to have in an ebook.

But why invest the additional work? Here are some reasons:

Reach readers with different learning styles
Rich more media-jaded younger readers
Enable a reader to reach you with a single click
Build a broader-bandwidth relationship with your reader

Why not?

Good media can be expensive or difficult to produce
The results may not be worth the investment
Your audience doesn’t respond well to media

Writing a book is something you need to do, to establish yourself as an expert. But having a media-rich ebook is something that may or may not enhance your business. Don’t decide by default; think about it and do what makes sense.

Flavorwire: Advice from 10 prolific writers

admin — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:30:52 +0000

JoelTrainsAuthors is mostly about non-fiction. But this advice (which came via Copyblogger, whom I thank) is useful to all writers.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Build a web

He wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days, but he wasn’t in too big a hurry to mind the web of “sound patterns” essential to the delicate art of constructing sentences, which he elucidates in the first chapter of his 1919 essay collection, The Art of Writing:

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself. In every properly constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness.

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MindManager 9 for the Mac: A worthwhile update

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:20:19 +0000

I’ve used MindManager on both the Mac and the PC from its earliest versions. (The story of how it was developed by Mike and Bettina Jetter while Mike was undergoing leukemia treatments is amazing; read the book.) It is the most popular mindmapping software on the market today.

Mindmapping in Wikipedia: “A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea.”

This is not a complete generic review of MindManager; I am not interested in its extensive task- and project-management capabilities, for example, or in its ability to generate a slideshow. My interest in mindmapping stems from my use of clustering. (Here’s a short video on how to cluster.) Clustering is a way–perhaps the best way–to get stuff out of your head and onto paper, in front of you. It’s how to find out what you know–and what you don’t know–about a subject.

Mindmapping is typically used for presentation, or for gradual and deliberate planning. Clustering is much more streamlined. It is a mining tool, to let you get at the riches you have stored in your mind. Gabriele Rico devotes an entire book to it:Writing the Natural Way.

How do you cluster? Here’s a description from the blog of writer Dustin Wax.

Here’s the basic idea:

1. Write a word in the middle of a sheet of paper.

2. Circle it.

3. Write down the first word or phrase that comes to mind and circle it.

4. Draw a line connecting the second circle to the first.

5. Repeat. As you write and circle new words and phrases, draw lines back to the last word, the central word, or other words that seem connected. Don’t worry about how they’re connected — the goal is to let your right-brain do its thing, which is to see patterns; later, the left-brain will take over and put the nature of those relationships into words.

6. When you’ve filled the page, or just feel like you’ve done enough (a sign of what Rico calls a “felt-shift”), go back through what you’ve written down. Cross out words and phrases that seem irrelevant, and begin to impose some order by numbering individual bubbles or clusters. Here is where your right-brain is working in tandem with your left-brain, producing what is essentially an outline. At this point, you can either transfer your numbered clusters to a proper outline or simply begin writing in the order you’ve numbered the clusters.

I am a geek. I love using computers for anything–and often have difficulty admitting when I’d probably be better served by pen and paper. But years ago, when I first started to cluster, and I tried to do it on early versions of MindManager, it just didn’t work. I couldn’t get access to the stuff in my head that just came pouring out when I used pen and paper.

I think I know why. At the time, mindmapping on the computer was very much a left-brain activity. Even though the results were graphical, the process of producing a mind map involved lots of keyboarding and menuing. So I couldn’t cluster productively with a computer.

But over time, computers became more powerful; graphics became higher in resolution, and far smoother; and MindManager grew up.

Today, I cluster on my Mac, using MindManager 9. The process of creating a new “topic” or “subtopic” is so simple that I don’t have to stop to think about it. I can quickly create a cluster without planning or cogitation; it just flows out from my fingers, little engaging my left brain. So my right brain can “dump” its contents onto the screen.

By using MM9, I don’t have to worry about running out of room. MM9 unobtrusively reconfigures the layout of the cluster or mind map according to preferences I can set.

So my most favorite aspect of MM9 for the Mac is that it is unobtrusive enough for me to cluster with. For me–and I believe, for any author–that is a biggie.

But there is a lot more to this highly polished product. It integrates well with both Microsoft Office and Apple software, interoperating with word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents. It links to URLs on the Web, as well as to other mind maps. It comes with a large list of templates, giving you a starting place for any mindmapping project you might have in mind. Here’s a full list of MM9′s features.

Although it is not quite as rich as some dedicated outliners, MM9′s outlining facility is respectable. You can switch back and forth between map and outline view very easily.

As an update, MM9 for Mac is a big step ahead of MM8. Its user interface has been simplified; its esthetics have been refined; its presentation, printing, importing, and exporting capabilities have been improved; and it works under Lion. (For a full list of upgraded features, click here.) All the improvements make it an incredibly useful tool for the aspiring author.

Autocrit: Almost-free editing site

admin — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:36:35 +0000

A Google ad suggested I go look at Autocrit, an on-line editing wizard. I was blown away by its power! In seconds, it identified a bunch of subtle problems with the block of text I dropped into the free version.

Running into the limitations of the free version, I signed up for the $47/year account so that I could put in multiple blocks of text–blog posts, articles, pieces of fiction, whatever. (Knowing that I have a 60-day money-back period gave me confidence too.)

Autocrit is transparent; it explains what is wrong with the writing, covering things like:

Overused words
Slow pacing
Appropriate dialog tags
Clichés & redundancies

You can try it for free.

I liked it so much I signed on as an affiliate. The links in this post are affiliate links; I’ll get 25% if you decide to buy a subscription.

A blog worth reading: A Newbie’s Guide To Self-Publishing

admin — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 02:17:36 +0000

I was going to quote and link to one particular article on Joe Konrath’s blog, but the more I read, the more I realized you should read it all. So click on that link and head over there. Joe shares powerful lessons for people wondering whether self-publishing is viable vs. finding a publisher.