By the time I had written about my current situation my mind had already worked out how the chapter before led up to this time and how the chapter following would be formed. I was no longer restricting my imagination and inspiration to just focus on that one story at a time, because all the stories were linked! I didn’t need to write all the chapters at once – just scribble a note to myself and put it in the relevant research section for later! I had these inspirational moments on the bus, walking the beach, standing in line at the grocery store and even in the shower. I just wrote myself a quick note so I didn’t lose the idea and then filed it away in my bookbuilding binder. I call these “inspirational bundles” and use clear pockets to keep each “bundle” of notes together, eventually these will inspire my chapter titles for my book.

So how much does this all cost? You can print just one book if you like and buy your books on demand averaging $6.50 a copy plus an initial set-up cost (starting at around $150 if you self publish using LightingSource) or you could opt to buy your own stock for back of room sales and reduce the cost per copy to $6. If you retail your book at $20 that means you net $14 for each sale! That’s a much better return than traditional publishers will give you (An average royalty is around 5% which would net you $1.50 per book – you need to sell nearly 10 times more books to get the same return!)

There are lots of options depending on how many you want to print, how many pages your book is and how it will be bound. These examples are taken straight from some of my quotes from a local Print on Demand printer based on approx 200 pages and full colour cover. There are many things to consider when choosing a printer/publisher including the quality of their print and paper (do you get bleed through on the print to the reverse page?). Most important is the level of service they are offering you, some allow free uploads (i.e. no set-up costs) but remember nothing is for free and there is usually a catch like signing over the rights to your book or only receiving a small royalty for each book sold. What other services do they offer? Do they offer educational programs to help you produce a professional looking book? Do they give advice on layout and design and what distribution services do they offer (i.e. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, online book store, ISBN No. Barcode and copyright) Is your book printed locally or is it shipped out to a 3rd world country where print and paper quality can be an issue.

“The nicest thing about NOT planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression”

We’ve all heard that if we fail to plan, we plan to fail and this is never more-true than when you are creating a book that you want to sell and earn plenty of money from!

Let’s start with the end in mind here and look at our intended result: to make money.

Now we can backtrack – to do that we need to sell loads of books.  To do that we have to market our book well to the right audience (maybe we have a publisher backing us, maybe not, but marketing your book is essential to generate sales).

So now we know that marketing is essential, but who shall we market TO?  This is where your earlier planning comes in!  If you didn’t do any pre-planning when writing your book you are likely to have wasted more time than necessary.  Your book can still be knocked into shape ready to be marketed and sold but if you have a clear idea of who is going to buy your book from the outset, then you will have more direction when creating the book, greater focus, and the conviction needed to keep going and finish the work when you hit a plateau along the way where the end seems so far off.

Planning takes thought and time and it’s tempting to want to rush in and ‘get on’ with your book rather than spend this careful time in the planning stage, but the clarity that planning gives you will be worth the time spent and you will most likely accelerate your book further, faster for the time spent planning, so a proposition for your book is a must at the early stages of writing.

To write something that will sell, and not just something for your own enjoyment, you will need to address your readers’ number one concern: “what’s in it for me?”  This means you will have to put some structure around your thoughts, to answer their possible questions and this requires some thinking about.  But not only that, you will need to create content that your market will want so that they buy, and to do that you need to know who your market is.

My first book is called “The Virtual Assistant Handbook: insider secrets for starting and running your own profitable VA business” and my intended audience is existing Virtual Assistants and people who are thinking of starting up a VA business.  Because I had an idea of who would be buying the end result, I could ‘chunk down’ further to address their concerns.  I knew that many VAs who enter this profession do so from a career background as a PA, Secretary, Office Manager or Administrator so they would most likely come from a corporate background.  My book contains references to corporates and how the style of communication within them may not necessarily be the right way to speak to their new small business customers.  This is just one example of an area where planning out my end market helped to shape the content of my book.

To plan your book out and find the market that will eventually buy it, you will need to set aside some dedicated time to really think about the issues facing your readers, which direction you want the book to take and how you will get there.  Look at some books with similar content – your ‘competition’ and see who they are marketing to.  Would this audience work for you too?  If there are already books on ‘your’ desired subject, this isn’t a bad thing, it means that there must be a market for this kind of book.  You just have to make yours sufficiently different enough and address something that the others don’t or have a unique angle on the subject to motivate your readers to buy.

By taking time to work on the big picture, you can get on with creating the ‘little picture’ – your creative work.  The time spent planning and researching your end market will be recouped many times over when your book is a best seller!

2009 © Nadine Hill

I maintain that the first book I wrote is the one I wish I could have read when I set up my business as a Virtual Assistant, but there wasn’t such a book around at the time so 4 years later – I wrote it and it became an immediate Amazon Best-Seller!  There are well known sayings that go “Where there is pain – there is profit” and “Where there is misinformation – there is a market”, this basically means that if you have struggled to work something out without your own ‘guide-book’ then maybe others are doing so too and could use your hard won expertise!

The best way to get started on this path is to find the pain….

You will have heard the saying “write what you know”.  This is sound advice because to be a successful author you need solid subject mastery in order to be credible.  Readers won’t buy your book unless you are the ‘expert’ in the field you write about so once you have an idea for a subject area from your own life, you can start to formulate a plan of how the book will flow, what topics within your subject need to be addressed first for the later chapters to make sense.

Once you know the rough journey of your book (what topic will lead to the next and the next), you have to find a ‘reader friendly’ way to present that information, so it is not too ‘textbook-y’ or uninspiring.  A good way to do that is to consider the readers pain if they don’t follow your advice.

For example, if you are well organised and efficient, the better you’ll be able to deal with someone who’s not.  Say that a disorganised person in your life is your boss, and you want to get them to plan so you and the rest of the team have a better idea about the activities you are going to be doing, you’ll have to find the reason that the boss doesn’t plan, and appeal to that.

It’s probably due to disorganization and if so, the boss is suffering as much as you are. You must therefore find some pain so you can treat it. The next time you’re together, find out what your boss would really like to do if he or she had extra time. It might be the pain they feel when they disappoint their son by showing up late (or not at all) to his football games. Once you find some pain, help them see how changing some aspects of how they work will give them the extra time they need. Try to get them to make small changes—changes that you know will have an immediate effect. Continue doing this with the focus on how the changes will help them, and the situation will change for the better.  This is a gentle process but it shows how you can find the readers’ ‘hot spot’ and find a way to address it.  If you actually do this process with someone (like your boss!) then you can write about what exactly you did to help them, and thus getting content for your book!

Complete this short quiz.

• Do you work in an office or shop with colleagues, or do you work alone?
• Do you have a never – ending list of tasks to do?

It doesn’t matter what you put for the first question but I bet you answered “Yes” for the second!  The point is that whether we have actual colleagues or ‘virtual’ ones, we can still work with them to complete our objectives.  Read on to see how.

Other people can help us fill the gaps where we lack information or ideas, and help us get to the bottom of our ‘To Do’ list.  This is our personal ‘fountain of knowledge’ and to use it properly, adopt these pointers.

If your workplace has other people within it, consider calling a meeting to brainstorm solutions to your work problems and everyone else’s.  You may have tasks on your ‘To Do’ list simply because you are not sure how to go about starting it, so the job keeps getting put back.  Use other people’s ideas and input to find a way to move forward.

If you work alone, you cannot call a meeting but you can chat to suppliers, customers, the parents on the school run, family and friends.  Someone may know a good way of doing something that you had not considered.

Have a ‘skills swop’.  If you are great at organising events for example, and someone needs help with this, offer it.  Then, when you are stuck with a job, ask for assistance.  If you have given your time freely in the past, others will reciprocate.  By doing this you get access to lots of skill sets, and may find that the job was more enjoyable to complete and the end result was better too!

We each have a fountain of knowledge within our immediate circle.  The trick is to know how to tap into it.  Another related saying is “Dig your well before you are thirsty”, which links to the point about giving your time to help others, because when you are then struggling to complete your work, they will be more willing to help you.

Your writing can often benefit from another perspective which injects some fresh thinking into your ideas.  So when you are stuck, get talking to others.  You never know what ideas they will spark.

2009 © Nadine Hill