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April 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Use my approach to book-writing to create a course

I have been teaching that if you write a book following my method, (a) you’ll have a good book, quickly; and (b), you’ll be very well-positioned to start creating additional information products based on the stuff you’ve generated to write the book.

It’s time to be a bit more explicit.

First of all, if you haven’t done so, head to the link at the top of the front page of this blog and get my free book. Read it.

Done? OK, at least you scanned it. I hope it intrigued you enough to actually start doing what it says.

If you do, you’ll create what I call a BookProgram–a simple outline that is your book, in essence. The writing part is just a matter of filling in the blanks, once the BookProgram is done.

Now, whether or not you’ve written your book yet, you can use this outline to create a course. Your course can be based on the entire outline, or just a portion of it. The important step that the creation of your outline has taken you through is the one I call, “the diamond is your friend.” That’s the part that helps you think about, “What questions am I answering? And what must I explain to help my reader get from the question to the answer?”

When you’ve already done this for your book, it’s now easy to focus on, “What are the desired outcomes of this course for anyone who takes it? What will they know, what will they be able to do after taking it?” By answering these questions, you’ll be able to enunciate the benefits of the course to your prospects. You’ll be able to state clearly to them what they will gain by taking your course.

Mind you, I am not minimizing the craft of course creation. I don’t mean to imply that if you follow some general rules, you’ll be as good as any course creator out there. But just as I believe you can create a “good” book–one that keeps its promise–by following my method, I also believe you can create a “good” course by following these guidelines. A good course, by my definition, like a good book, keeps its promise.

Filed Under: book love, book writing, course writing, marketing, planning, steps to write a book Tagged With: , , ,
April 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If structure must precede content, how do you get your structure together?

A discussion I had with my wife after posting yesterday’s blog entry made me think about how I teach people to write books. I’ll try to lay it out for you in brief here, so that you can see if this fits your thoughts.

My market for my book-writing products and services has been, to date, anyone who has professional knowledge they want to share with clients. They have a body of knowledge, and a method (perhaps more than one) for applying it to the needs of their clients.

So my book-writing “secret” is simply this: If you want to write a book quickly, you must complete the structure–a simple outline–before you do any writing. And I mean ANY writing.

If you do this, your path from finished outline to finished book is just days long; maybe even hours.

But how do your produce the structure?

Steven Johnson, the author I mentioned yesterday, describes his process: He spends months collecting pieces–notes, quotes, websites, articles, etc.–without being quite sure what the book looks like, or even what it is precisely about. That emerges as he sifts through the stuff.

Important distinction: My method does not necessarily offer anything to replace this process; it’s really not intended for this type of explorer. My ideal client already has a body of knowledge, and a way that she teaches it to her clients. So she can start her structuring process by simply clustering; it will all pop up.

Steven Johnson’s approach is for getting to the point when structuring is possible.

Now, I believe he could benefit from clustering, and from understanding the diamond (if you don’t know what these are, use the “search” above to find my explanations). And maybe he does, but just didn’t mention them in that article.

I’ll have more to say over time about what must precede structuring. What are your thoughts?

Filed Under: book love, book writing, people & ideas, planning Tagged With: , , ,
April 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Check out our new Author Forum!

In the menu bar at the top of the blog, there is a new tab: “Forum.” Come check it out! Post your questions, comments, thoughts.

Warmly,

Joel

Filed Under: book love, book printing, book writing, inspiration, marketing, people & ideas, planning, publishing, steps to write a book Tagged With: , ,
April 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

First new presentation/brainstorming tool I’ve seen in years

It’s Prezi.com, and it gives me a new way to think about presentations–and about brainstorming and planning.

Here are its salient features:

  • It’s Web-based.
  • You work on an infinite canvas.
  • You click and place text, which can be colored, styled, rotated, etc.
  • You can also click and place pictures, pdfs, and videos.
  • You click and create a “path” to tell a story.
  • The story can include zooms. So words and pictures can be tiny and huge, and smooth zooming traverses between them.
  • If you can picture Prezi from these bullets, you are a powerful visualizer. This presentation tells the story much more clearly:

Academy: Prezi Workflow in 15 minutes on Prezi

How to use Prezi to write your book? I’ve just discovered it, but I think it might work as a way to cluster. It is certainly a wonderful place to brainstorm and to create presentations. Love to hear your thoughts about it! (Since it’s Flash, it won’t be on your iPad anytime soon…sigh.)

Filed Under: book writing, inspiration, people & ideas, planning, write a book Tagged With: , , ,
April 16, 2010 By 2 Comments

A great free tool for information gathering and tracking

Evernote is a note-taking program that can run on your PC, your Mac, the Web, and your iPhone/iPad. You can create notes in various ways:

  • Click on “new note”; type into the note
  • Go to a Web page in your browser; click on the Evernote elephant icon, and the url and/or the page are stored in an Evernote note
  • Select something on your screen, and click on the elephant in your menu bar or system tray
  • other ways, depending on platform

What’s the big deal about Evernote? What makes it so useful to a book-writer?

  • You can create or access your notes on any of the supported platforms. Capture a note on your PC, and moments later it’s available on your smart phone. Or on a public-access computer.
  • You can capture Web pages with their urls, or just their urls.
  • You can tag your notes and group them in different notebooks.
  • You can email a note as a pdf or export it as an html page.
  • Evernote will look for text within any pictures you save as notes, and let you search the text.
  • You can capture a picture from your smart phone’s camera directly into Evernote.
  • You can capture an audio note on your smart phone by speaking into your smart phone.
  • You can scan text and images directly into Evernote.
  • You can send material to on-line scanning services and have the scans delivered directly to your Evernote account.

And did I mention that it is free? Check it out.

Filed Under: book writing, planning, steps to write a book Tagged With: , , ,
April 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

5 ways to start your book with the end in mind

Stephen Covey’s second habit of successful people (from his 7 Habits of Highly Successful People) is, “Begin with the end in mind.” Besides the fact that it echoes similar admonishments in the wisdom of many cultures, I have always been fascinated by the dual meaning of “end” in this statement. “End” can mean “terminus,” final point. It can also mean “purpose”–”To what end?”

Both are relevant to book-writing. You should think through the process to its last stage, and you should also think it through in terms of its purpose.

Here are 5 specific ways to do this:

  1. To whom are you writing? Who is your audience? What  do they care about? What language, what terminology will be familiar and clear to them? This is a biggie, and worth spending time on.
  2. Problem/solution. What “pain” are you addressing in your reader’s life? What are you offering to address that pain? Does the book’s title reflect the problem or pain it addresses, so that readers will be able to easily identify it? Are you able to offer clear steps to resolve the pain?
  3. How will the book be published? Are you going after a publishing house? Will you self-publish? Might you use print-on-demand, like Lulu.com or Createspace.com? Will you create a matching website?
  4. How will your book be promoted? How will you let people know of its existence? Ads? Press releases? SEO? Joint ventures?
  5. What role will the book play in your business? Will you sell it “back of room” at your talks? Will you sell in bulk to meeting organizers who retain you to speak? Offer it on your website? Put it on Amazon.com? Will it serve as an invitation to explore your other products and services on your website? Can it replace your business brochure? Will you give it away as a “thick business card”?

If you address these points before you begin your book project, your work will be focused and your results will be to your liking.

Filed Under: book love, book writing, planning Tagged With: , ,
April 9, 2010 By 2 Comments

Start with a cluster

the writing is on the wall
Image by flash_nerd via Flickr

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

–Ray Bradbury

I wrote yesterday (see entry directly below) about the need for a book writer (any writer, really) to work their “writing muscles” by writing daily. Now I want to add a bit of advice: Begin with a cluster.

I’ve discussed clustering (here and here), so I won’t repeat the instructions. I just want to remind you what clustering does for you:

  • The stuff you know, think, and feel seems to be floating at different levels in a viscous fluid. The closer to the surface something is, the more accessible it is. When you cluster, all that you know about the topic at the center of your cluster comes to the top, where you can find it easily.
  • Clusters sometimes grow like fractal flowers, branching off in unexpected ways, surprising you.
  • If you write first thing in the morning, you have easier access to all the great stuff your subconscious worked on all night. Sometimes dream sequences are recalled; often forgotten or unnoticed associations are brought forth.

Warning: I’m not saying to write your book this way. That’s all in the process described in detail in the free book you can get here. This clustering-and-writing is about a daily workout to make you a better writer. The process of writing a good book is simple and structured. But the stronger your “writing muscles,” the better your good book will be. You can make it great.

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March 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

4 things you can do today to get your book going

  1. Stop writing. If you’ve been filling pages, online or off, just stop. Don’t throw it out; it may fit in your book. But that’s not on the critical path to getting your book done.
  2. Identify your audience and their pain. If you don’t know to whom you are writing, you are unlikely to have a successful or even passable book. You have something to say to someone. It should address a specific point of pain, an ache your reader is desperate to get rid of. Who is that audience? Who is, in fact, your ideal reader? Write out a clear description. Test it! Find someone like that, and interview him or her.
  3. Name your book. The title and subtitle of your book articulate a promise to the reader. The promise is that they will be relieved of the pain alluded to in your title and subtitle. That’s what will get them to pick the thing up.
  4. Create your “diamond” structure (read about it here). Know the question and answer for the book, for each chapter, and for each subchapter. When that’s nailed down, you are ready to write.

For more details, read my free book.

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March 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

In writing your book, what’s your organizing principle?

qestion mark and exclamation mark
Image via Wikipedia

One of the most powerful kinds of help you can give your reader is an organizing principle–a way to put together the pieces of what you are trying to teach. More often than not, that will be a metaphor of some kind.

What’s a metaphor? One definition is, “An answer to the question, ‘what is this like?’”

For example, in my approach to writing a book, I say, “The diamond is your friend.” The diamond is a shape that visually describes what for me is the “shape” of every good book: A question-mark at the top of the diamond indicates the question that the book promises to answer; an exclamation point at the bottom symbolizes the promised answer.

The wide part of the diamond are the points that must be established to help your reader make his or her way from the question to the answer. They are the chapters of the book–and each of them is a diamond.

In the wide part of each chapter are its intermediate points–the subchapters of that chapter.

So in a sense, the diamond, and two layers of diamonds nested within it, is the organizing principle of every book.

But your subject matter also needs an organizing principle. What is it? Perhaps it is

  • Chronology; first this happened, then that
  • Complexity; the topic divides naturally into 4 parts, then each part has sub-parts
  • Some kind of “natural” order; the US, then states, then counties and cities

Do you see a pattern? By appealing to a framework that is generally understood, you give your reader a way to find their way around your material, which may be new to them.

What’s your book’s organizing principle?

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December 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Write to different listening styles

I just listened to a recording of Alex Mandossian speaking about talking to people with different listening styles. Based on David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning, Alex suggests (in the context of his Teleseminar Secrets course) that you address, in your teleseminars, these 4 types of learner–people who ask:

  1. Why?
  2. What?
  3. How?
  4. What if?

In other words, first explain why do or learn whatever you’re speaking about; then, details about what it is; follow with words about how it works; and finally, consider contingencies, alternatives, “plan b,” etc.

In my BookProgram approach to writing books, I discuss the power of completing your structure before starting on your content. I’ve found that structuring is an obstacle to many authors, so I’ve been looking for ways to help authors create their structure. Alex’s interpretation of Kolb’s styles sounds like one approach that can be useful for authors, too. I’ll be trying it on my next book.

Let me know what you think about this approach: joel@joelorrcoaching.com

Filed Under: book writing, planning
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