By : Brian Tracy
1. Start with a message, idea, story that you really want to share with other people.
2. You must be an expert on your subject. You must know 10 words for every word you write. If you write on success, you must already be successful. If you write on money, you must already be rich. If you write on relationships, you must already be happily married.
3. Define your target market, exactly who are you writing this book for?
4. Make sure that your market is large enough, containing 100,000 to 1,000,000 potential book buyers.
5. Buy, read, and find out everything you can about other authors, books or articles dealing with the same subject. Make sure your material is different and better in at least three ways.
6. Gather all the information that you will need to write your book. Do your research and homework before you start to write?
7. Organize your material into seven, ten, twelve or twenty-one chapters, each following in a logical order, from beginning to end.
8. Write out every key point in each chapter on a legal sized writing pad.
9. Organize your points from #1 through to the closing part of the chapter. Do this for every chapter until you have a separate “down dump” of all the key ideas.
10. Begin with Chapter 1 and dictate the book in the order of material you have chosen.
11. Once you have dictated the entire book, have a typist type it out and give it back to you by email or disc for your computer. 12. Set up a work schedule with blocks of time of two, three or four hours. Discipline yourself to sit at the keyboard and edit during
this time.
13. Edit the entire book from front to back the first time. Correct the grammar and typing errors. Create the necessary paragraphs. This is the longest, hardest job of editing in the whole book.
14. Write an Introduction, a Preface and Acknowledgements if necessary.
15. In your second edit, break up the text with a heading every 2, 3, 4 paragraphs. Make it “bite-sized” and easy to read.
16. In your third edit, place a quote at the beginning of each chapter. Create three, five or seven action steps at the end of each chapter if it is a self-help or educational book.
17. In your fourth edit, which will take much less time, polish the sentences, delete unnecessary material, make final corrections.
18. In your fifth and final edit, completely reread the entire book from cover to cover. This takes the least amount of time of all.
19. The entire process above requires 50-100 hours of work, once you have gathered all your material.
20. Always play gentle classical music in the background. Best of all, get headphones and listen to classical music while you work. Music makes you more alert, creative and fluent.
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