Is professional editing worth it?  The answer depends on just one thing:  Where, in your development as an author, you currently are.  

If this is the first book you’ve ever written and you’re mostly self-taught, professional editing is most likely not the only step you need to take between banging out your manuscript and landing a publisher. 

In fact, for a first-time author with no formal training, I wouldn’t recommend professional copyediting at all. 

What’s Really Needed

Copyediting (not the same as developmental editing or book-doctoring) is one of the last steps before submission. And if the basic elements of fiction (or nonfiction) are only half-realized, or missing altogether, no amount of editing for errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax; no amount of querying the absence of meaningful transitions, the presence of redundancies, or violations of consistency will matter. An unrealized book manuscript with perfect spelling, grammar, and syntax is still a manuscript that’s not yet ready for publication.  

What is needed — when that is the case — is practice:  writing one book after another to learn the nuts and bolts of craft, as well as how to coax the magic of art onto the page.

Most successful authors produce between two and ten practice books before their “first” book is awarded a pub date. To snag the brass ring of publication, an author must first be a longtime student of the form. 

But many otherwise sensible people don’t see the need. “I’m a fan of So-and-So,” they say. “I see how his fiction formula works. And I can do that, too – only a thousand times better.” 

The Path to Publication                                           

The thing is, books are far easier to read than they are to write. Even the most clichéd genre fiction requires a surprising amount of skill – skill that its author worked to acquire. Realizing this fact — that practice will get you where you want to go — is the ultimate encouragement.  It means there’s a path to this place (though each path is individual, with its length, twists, and turns unique).

Time for a Manuscript Evaluation

Let’s say you’ve done a bunch of practice books, cultivated your skills for a number of years, and you’re solidly at the next stage of your development as an author — what then?  

You might be ready to hand your manuscript over to a developmental editor for a written manuscript evaluation. An eval will tell you where you’ve succeeded and what you’re especially good at — as well as where you need to think things through a bit more and do some additional work.

With your evaluation in hand, you can nurture the less well-developed parts of your manuscript, learn new skills, restructure if needed, and rewrite — perhaps several times more.

After that, you may be ready for a developmental edit, if other issues remain; or, you may be ready for the final polish of copyediting. It all depends. 

Copyediting Can’t Realize Your Book                   

Copyediting can’t take the place of practice — just as it can’t turn an undeveloped concept into a fully realized piece of fiction (or nonfiction). Authors really do have to write-rewrite-rewrite their way into a successful version of their books. But they can get professional help as they learn how.

Publishing & Selling Books

Still want to hear about getting published, and selling tons of books?  Let’s look at each of these, in turn.

To get published, you not only need a well-written, well-edited book with a compelling concept (in a genre that’s selling well), you need a well-developed author platform.

Your author platform is the interactive “stage” you assemble with followers on Twitter, fans and friends on Facebook, subscribers to your own book blog, and connections on LinkedIn, as well as social networking sites designed for readers and authors. Your author platform is the entire world of online contacts who know you and are willing to support your books by “word of mouse.”

The bigger your platform (it should include media contacts, too – both on line and off), the more interested an agent or publisher will be in your book. That’s because thousands and thousands of connections are expected to yield thousands and thousands of sales:  bigger platform, bigger sales. 

But there is another way to seek publication. Since most major traditional publishers want authors with a major national platform — something first-timers don’t often possess — many authors with viable projects have turned to self-publishing to open the closed publication door. 

The Sales Queen of eBook Fiction                               

As a case in point, there is a new novelist in her mid-twenties who’s had jaw-dropping success this past year with her self-published eBooks. It’s a story that’s brought cheer to aspiring authors everywhere.

Amanda Hocking built her author platform by writing one YA novel after another — for a total of twelve in several marketable categories (notice not only her dedication to practice, but her market-savvy choices), and then she inspired a cadre of book bloggers to blog-up nine of her eBooks. She also cultivated a following through her own blog, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and other social networking sites.

The pay-off for all that work (completed while working a full-time job) was pretty spectacular.  So far, she’s sold over 614,000 eBooks through online bookstores, netting several million dollars and becoming the top-selling eBook author (looks like that’s also worldwide).

What Amanda Hocking’s success story illustrates so well is the inseparableness of platform and sales. When she originally self-published one of her novels on Lulu.com, she sold exactly zero copies, as she hadn’t yet cultivated her platform for book promotion.

Quality’s Paramount

But don’t get the wrong idea. Platform (like copyediting) needs to be applied in the service of good work:  the quality of your novel, memoir, or nonfiction book is paramount. Because it is, you really do need to take seriously your just-getting-started period of practice, study, and learning (which of course never really ends), whether undertaken alone, or with the guidance of a developmental editor or book coach.

The goal is to work toward the fullest development of your talent as an author — because that’s what will land a publisher, or make it worthwhile to self-publish.  If your book is good and your platform solid, your work will sell well.

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BookMarket Chat

This post was written as a stepping-off point for the Book Market Chat (#BookMarket) scheduled for March 31 (from 4:00-5:00 PM, EST) on Twitter.com (or TweetChat.com).  Since 140 characters are not nearly enough to convey the above thoughts on editing, publishing, and selling, a blog post seemed the best way around the limitations of tweeting.



This guest blog post by Phyllis Zimbler Miller of Miller Mosaic Social Media Marketing describes her leap from learning how to promote her self-published novel — to teaching others how to use social media to promote their creative offerings.

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In December, 2007, as I approached my sixtieth birthday, my novel, Mrs. Lieutenant, had been turned down by several publishers. So I decided to self-publish with BookSurge (now known as CreateSpace, owned by Amazon), and then enter my novel in the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition. Happily, it was chosen as a semi-finalist.

Amazon gave each semi-finalist a page on their site, instructing us to gather votes for our novels from our many connections. At that point in time, I had zero online connections. So how was I going to garner a zillion votes? 

Then I noticed one semi-finalist using something I’d never heard of – a blog. That did it. I plunged into educating myself about blogs and related online marketing strategies. Soon after, I asked my daughter, Yael K. Miller (who’d graduated three years earlier with a degree in English from my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania – for me, Penn’s Wharton School of Business), to be my business partner — since  by then I’d decided to start my own marketing firm. Everything we learned, we implemented for ourselves first and then for our clients — including building WordPress websites.

Fast Forward to 2011

What I soon realized was that I’d made a major mistake by not promoting my book with social media long before it came out. And in many ways, I’ve spent the last two and a half years making up for that oversight. I’m just now beginning to see a return on my time-and- energy investment.

A few days ago, Google Alerts notified me that Mrs. Lieutenant was the first book chosen for a new book club launched by the site, Best Army Wives. I contacted the site’s owner, Irion Arce, and offered to use my social media contacts – as well as contacts from my online efforts to support our troops – to get the word out before the March 1^st book club launch date. I also offered to do four webinars, one for each week’s discussion, using the webinar software my company likes best (gotowebinar.com).

In the last few days, I’ve put into practice all that I’ve learned since my book appeared — and made use of all my appropriate contacts — to ask for assistance in promoting this new book club’s launch, featuring my novel.

(A case in point:  Laurel Marshfield very kindly offered me this guest post opportunity. How do I know Laurel?  We were both panelists for a BookBuzzr.com webinar on book marketing using Twitter.  Afterwards, we continued to email and discovered that we shared several Philadelphia writing-community connections.)

Why was I on the BookBuzzr panel?  Because more than two years ago, I created a connection with the site’s community manager, located in India.  I offered marketing advice for her book-reader software site, and she and I have continued to exchange information ever since. “You need to give, in order to get” is especially true in online marketing. But, as writers, we have one very strong advantage in pursuing this kind of marketing: We know how to write. 

What Are the Elements of a Good, Basic Online Presence? 

• Create a self-hosted WordPress website/blog for your writing projects. (If you’re the author of a novel, but don’t know what to blog about, see this free article co-authored by me and Carolyn Howard-Johnson [note: see a previous post about Howard-Johnson on this BHC blog]:  www.FictionMarketing.com )
• Share helpful information on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn 
• When your book is published, put part or all of it on BookBuzzr.com
• When you are comfortable with these social media activities, create a Facebook Page (formerly known as a Fan page, now referred to as a Page; not the same as your personal Profile page) for your book, or your blog, or your writing projects. (Facebook has just made major changes to the functions of a Page; you can read about the changes at:  www.MillerMosaicSocialMediaMarketing.com )
• Leave insightful comments on others’ blog posts (if you don’t have a website yet, use the URL of one of your social media profiles), and write guest posts.  (Sign up for free at BloggerLinkUp.com to get listings of blogs looking for specific guest posts.)

Everything I’m suggesting takes time away from your writing, I know.  But what good is writing, if no one reads what you’ve written? 

However you ultimately decide to promote your work, do participate in the social media community while you are planning and writing your book. It’s never too soon to build your social networking presence.

That said, want to help me spread the word about my book? Here’s the link to the March 1^st book club launch info featuring my novel, Mrs. Lieutenant:  http://www.mrslieutenant.com/march-book-club/

Brands are those vague but persuasive associations we conjure up whenever we think of any well-known product. Mac computers. TIDE laundry detergent. Nike running shoes. 

Brands are also the far more complex associations that come to mind whenever we think of well-known authors. Often, they’re a flash of images mixed with a dominant feeling, or a scene from a particular book montaged with memory fragments. 

Here’s a small demonstration:  Does the name Stephen King conjure something different for you than the name J.K. Rowling?  What about Dan Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jodi Picoult? Or Malcolm Gladwell, Joan Didion, Seth Godin?  What association appears for a second or so when you first see each name? 

People Brands Aren’t Product Brands

Whatever that instant of recognition is composed of, it’s there because that author’s brand put it there. Each association is complex and meaningful —  unlike the association you’d experience for a brand of laundry detergent.

In fact, it’s that much-ado-about-nothingness which characterizes many product brands that makes it easy to imagine authors rejecting the B word as too schlocky, too commercial, too huckster-esque. So let’s substitute the word “story” instead – the “author-identifier” story, if you will.

Brand:  Author-Identifier Story

The author-identifier story (aka brand) refers to the complex messages authors put out into the world about themselves and their books — which we then absorb and retain in a highly individual way. Suppose that you, like author Michael Cunningham, were interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” You talked about your struggles with writing, as well as your then-recent book, The Hours (later made into a movie starring Meryl Streep). You were articulate, charming, fascinating — someone any listener would want to know more about, because what you had to say was vivid and substantive.

So, you think, is that Cunningham’s brand?  Not exactly. What any given listener will remember of that “Fresh Air” interview is very little. Instead, there will be a vague feeling, a positive association, a sense of being charmed and entertained. The specifics of what was said will fade over time to almost nothing. And what is left will contribute to Cunningham’s brand, but it won’t be his brand. 

That intangible entity exists like an earth-orbiting satellite, constantly receiving and broadcasting new data – a new book, a new interview, a new movie. Over time, its signal stabilizes into something more defined, but it’s still subject to change. Just not as much as it is in the beginning.

How Do You Get One?

You may be thinking, All very interesting, but what about me, how can I do this, too?  To send out your own earth-orbiting satellite — where it will pick up and broadcast your author brand — you need to consciously make use of the intersection between your personal life story and the story your books tell. And then, you need to use that intersection to dialogue with interested readers.

An Author Who Dialogues with Her Readers

Take a look at author Jodi Picoult’s website:  http://www.jodipicoult.com. Here’s a novelist who eagerly dialogues with her readers: her satellite both broadcasts and responds.

Broadcast:  She shares family videos and author-interview videos; podcasts about her books and what it takes to be a writer; and posts revealing where the subjects of her novels and her personal life are connected.

Response: She has an active message board, allowing readers to ask questions and get answers (which makes them feel as if this author is really listening to them). There’s also a static Q&A page with info on subjects she’s often asked to comment on. Finally, there’s a confiding note in the border of her site explaining that it wasn’t her choice to wait six months to release the eBook version of her latest novel. Her publisher made the decision, and she’s angry about it, too. In other words, she’s on their side.

You can’t spend any time on Picoult’s site without knowing who she is, how she lives, what she cares about, what she’s accomplished, and where she’s going as an author. You also can’t help but feel welcomed. There’s no schlocky sales pitch, but the welcome mat is out. In short, Picoult’s site builds her brand — her author-identifier story — consciously and abundantly, though it doesn’t constitute her brand.

That complex flash of association only resides, dear reader, within the softly lit privacy of your mind. Much the way reading a novel does.

“Sometimes the big barriers in life,” writes award-winning author Carolyn Howard-Johnson, as she remembers her first attempt to get a writing job at Good Housekeeping Magazine in the early 1960s, “can’t be seen and acknowledged. Because we may not even know that those barriers are there.”

 After a 1950s childhood in Utah, during which her mother advised her to “become a teacher, because you can be home the same hours as your children,” Howard-Johnson went to college, majored in English Literature, and dreamed of writing a novel like Gone with the Wind.  But it wasn’t until she applied for work as a writer that the invisible barriers facing women became — not visible, exactly, but nearly tangible.

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When I applied for a job as a writer for the Hearst Corporation in New York at age twenty, and was told to take the typing test, I politely pointed out that I wasn’t applying for a job in the typing pool.

“No typing test, no interview” was the immediate retort.  So I took the test and was offered a job as a typist. Surprised, I somehow found the courage to insist upon the interview I’d been promised. Not that it made any difference. What I didn’t realize was that typing skills were only required of women — not men — seeking employment at a Hearst magazine.

Much later, I realized that this kind of institutionalized prejudice feeds on the ignorance of its victims. Sheep-like, they accept the status quo because they don’t understand what they’re really facing, and because no other options seem available.

Something similar was at work when I married and had children. I left my writing career (by then, I was a staff writer at The Salt Lake Tribune) with hardly a backward glance, since I was doing what was then expected of women — by nothing less than the entire culture.

As we all know, things are different, now. So much so, that if you’re younger than your mid-fifties, you probably can’t remember a time when women didn’t know they had choices. “You can’t be a nurse,” I remember my mother saying, while laying out my limitations, “because your ankles aren’t sturdy enough.” And of course I couldn’t be a doctor; that “wasn’t a woman’s profession.” But, she advised, “Learn to type. Every woman should be able to make a living if her husband dies.”

My young husband’s career took precedence, because that was how it was done. We had two children, carefully planned – also how it was done. But by the 1970s, we both wanted to spend time with our kids while being in command of our own lives, so we built a business. After that, we lived through floods and moves, enjoyed traveling. And, during all forty of those years, I didn’t write — even though the culture gradually changed in ways that impacted me and others like me. Women acquired the right to have choices. More importantly, we became aware that having choices was itself a kind of choice, an open door.

Finally, at sixty, I realized that the place in my life which my children used to fill was many times larger than the space they actually left behind. I knew I needed to write; the time had come. But after four hundred pages, I saw that something major was wrong. Writing a novel wasn’t as easy as writing news stories. There were certain skills I didn’t have. So I took classes at UCLA and attended writers’ conferences. I listened to teachers, revised, and listened again.

In time, my novel, This Is the Place, “fell into place” on the page. Much of it was my own story — the warp of it was real, while the woof was imagined as fiction. After my first book was published, I went on to write a series of nonfiction books for writers, and to teach at UCLA myself, but I know that the novel I was able to produce at sixty-something contains more well-lived insight than it would have had I succeeded in writing it at twenty.

So, in some sense, I managed to turn those invisible barriers — the cultural prejudice I faced as a young woman — to my advantage when I, at last, became a mature novelist.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the recipient of eight awards for her novel, This Is the Place, available on Amazon.com:  http://tinyurl.com/26u22ru   Her main website address is: http://www.HowToDoItFrugally.com  Her blog address is: http://www.SharingWithWriters.Blogspot.com  On Twitter, you can find her at:  http://www.Twitter.com/FrugalBookPromo

One of life’s persistent problems — apart from finding the time to write that book you were meant to write — is doing things you don’t especially want to do.

It can be as mundane as getting up at 6:00 on Sunday morning, because you promised two friends you’d go running. Or it can be as important as writing your novel.

In the latter case, you may be thinking, UGH. I’m looking at 5,852 hours chained to my computer, trying to throw impossibly difficult scenes onto the screen — scenes between characters whose motivations I’m still unsure of.

But, could you envision somersaulting over those thoughts, so they become . . .

YIPPEE! I’ve got all morning to sharpen the three scenes I wrote last week, and then I can introduce that character I wanted to give a walk-on part to . . .

See what a difference a somersault makes?

It’s the fastest way to turn fear and loathing into excitement and absorption. For every area of your life, being able to flip from anticipating pure drudgery to anticipating pure fun is a very handy skill to have.

“Okay,” you say, “but how can I reliably do that?”

All you have to do is somersault into what you find exciting and enticing, or pleasurable and fun. Ask yourself, “Is there anything about this drudgery-filled task that I can flip? So I see it as something that I can’t wait to do?” 

Take the first example. Suppose you look at getting up at 6:00 on a gorgeous Sunday morning as your chance to embrace all that blue sky and warm sunlight. Suppose you look at it as a sensuous experience. A chance to hear the birds sing, gaze at the vibrant reds and yellows of fall leaves, breathe crisp, fresh air. Doesn’t that feel like something worth getting out of bed for?

Perhaps that’s too easy. Let’s take something harder — your novel, for instance.

When faced with work that threatens to stretch on for an interminable amount of time — especially work that you’re not sure how to do — you may, like most of us, feel tempted to do anything else to avoid it.

Oh, wouldn’t tomorrow be a much, much better day to write? Always the wrong choice.

The right choice is to flip this writing task and see it differently. Is there any small, easily embraced aspect that excites you? Because you only need a spark of gleeful anticipation to get started. And once you’re absorbed in one sentence, two sentences, three, momentum takes over. You’re home free.   

Let’s recap: You can flip your fear and loathing when facing what seems like sheer drudgery, IF you can find something about it that’s fun.

True, it may take a bit of imagination and creativity to do that. But isn’t that what being a writer is all about?

Here are some ways to flip into excitement — some “somersaults” to get you started:

• Find a word you like. Start there.
• Envision the end result. Your chapter – complex, compelling, and completed.
• Think about why you wanted to write your book in the first place. Type your reason onto a page. Tape the page above your computer monitor. Read it over three times. And feel your passion for your project return.
• Last resort: bribery. Two pages of writing gets you two hours of something you love doing that’s effort-free. Reading, for instance.

Don’t just use the somersault with writing. It’s good for anything that seems difficult, or daunting, or a tad uninviting to do.

Simply envision one small aspect of what you’d rather avoid as enticing. It’ll make everything in your life a whole lot easier. Not to mention, fun. 

The Large-Canvas Reward

Writing a book offers a large canvas:  two hundred and fifty-odd pages in which to articulate, refine, and cultivate those thoughts and ideas, feelings and experiences that preoccupy you, and have, often for years. But a book manuscript offers a large canvas not only in the medium of space, but in the medium of time, as well: most books require a year or two to write, and frequently longer.

Those years spent “carrying” a book (similar to carrying a pregnancy), result in a hidden organic benefit. Authors find themselves growing into a more fully-realized sense of their personal reality, while at the same time inhabiting an expanded sense of the world outside themselves.

This is a mysterious and wondrous process, though its beginning is something every author is familiar with. Once one or two ideas are successfully articulated on the page, they begin to multiply, giving birth to new thoughts not otherwise available. Over time, in the space of a book-length manuscript, whole new worlds of thought and understanding open up.

The Greater-Awareness Reward

The mystery of book writing occurs in the ability we all share to tap into a greater awareness. Though it is accessible only when we undergo the preliminary “discipline” (actually, a joyful experience) of paying close attention to the wisdom of our deeper minds. It is the book writing-induced access to vaster understanding which creates an enlargement of our personal reality. And this occurs naturally and organically — without our conscious recognition — during the lengthy and painstaking process of writing a book.

The Creating-a-Living-Being Reward

There is also the reward that results from nurturing the living being of your book. (Caring for anything is an enlivening experience, as those with children, animals, plants, and whatever else requires constant care, know.) Your book will emanate a life of its own, a life independent of you, its author, in direct proportion to the amount of love and involvement in your book’s creation that you are able to give it (that you, in a very real sense, achieve with your book).

The parallel between parenting and authoring has been observed by, among others, author and creativity teacher, Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way), who once referred to her books as “book children.” This seems particularly apt. Books, like human children, travel out into the world, affecting others in all sorts of ways, seen and unseen. It is a phenomenon that has occurred for thousands of years.

In Robert B. Downs’ Books That Changed the World, authors from Plato to Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine to Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoreau to Harriet Beecher Stowe, and from Charles Darwin, to Freud, to Rachel Carson, have produced works that profoundly changed the worldview of millions of people — both in their time, and over the course of time.

Newer authors, meanwhile, come from the ranks of those who have been so personally touched by books that they feel moved to participate, to do what books do:  they want to create worlds of sense, sensibility, and deeper meaning.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, Barbara Tuchman, observed, “Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, ‘lighthouses’ (as a poet said) ‘erected in the sea of time.’ They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”

The Vital-Reasons Reward

Long before they reach print, during the long and painstaking process of their creation, book manuscripts offer their authors all the gifts Tuchman lists. Writing a book changes and transforms our sense of who we are (it cultivates our own “civilization”), by opening windows on our inner and outer worlds. And it place-marks passages in our lives, experiences that, without being evoked and preserved in words, would be less available to us, if not completely lost.

The book we are writing becomes our closest companion during all the years we spend working on it, and teaches us what we do not even know we need to know. Our book manuscript metamorphoses magically, from week to week, while holding our best thoughts within the vaulted bank of itself, where it collects and compounds interest. These are vital reasons, all.

Even more vitally, our book gives us our own humanity. Once in print, it offers our individual expression of humanity to countless seen and unseen others.

The hardest part of writing a book is getting started, keeping at it, and crossing the completion line. What makes those pivotal phases so difficult is the appearance, again and again, of five obstacles that seem insurmountable:

1. Inertia
2. Fear
3. No Time
4. Wavering Motivation
5. Unclear Commitment

Of course, none of these are really insurmountable. Here are some simple strategies for making each one instantly irrelevant.

Obstacle One: Inertia

Inertia tends to arise in the chasm between an idea and its execution. Ideas seem to pop into awareness almost effortlessly, while finished book manuscripts do not. To cross the yawning chasm between an idea for a book and its completed exploration in words, you need what amounts to a map, or a list of simple, specific steps that will take you where you want to go. Your list might look something like this:

1. Buy bound journal for all book-related notes, first drafts, doodles
2. Make notes in new journal about the point or the message of my book
3. Write down all title ideas
4. List and elaborate on content areas
5. Note ideas for research subjects and sources
6. Write down chapter subjects, as well as title ideas
7. Arrange content within chapters
8. Research existing books in my book’s specific subject area
9. Set up a dedicated work area
10. Gather books similar to the one I’d like to write (both for inspiration and as models of organization, tone, and more)

Once the project is underway, it’s a good idea to continue listing steps, though these will be much more specific and detailed (i.e., find correct citation for quote from poet, MO; locate block of text on the ambiguities of time; find files from summer of last year).

The point is, it is absolutely impossible to “write a book.” It is only possible to take one specific step at a time toward a completed book manuscript. This may seem ridiculously obvious, but almost everyone forgets it. And then feels needlessly overwhelmed by the prospect of tackling that impossible task — “writing a book.”

Whatever phase of your project you are currently working on, there is a next step. The most effective and motivating way to proceed is to write each step down, in five- or ten-step lists. This is because you need to know, exactly and precisely, what each step is, in order to mentally gear-up for completing it. Think of your ongoing list as a kind of “anti-overwhelm” tool.

Obstacle Two: Fear

It is almost axiomatic that, if a project doesn’t cause a modicum of fear (can I really bring this off?), that it probably isn’t sufficiently challenging or interesting to sustain the level of involvement you need to feel in order to see it through to the end. But how do you deal with the urge to avoid your book project, because the mere thought of getting to work on it stimulates overwhelming feelings of fear, self-doubt, and . . . sudden exhaustion?

The answer is all too obvious, though most of us find it hard to see. Get into it. Get involved in the actual work. Fear immediately disappears when your attention is engaged by the work at hand. It is similar to what happens to a baby’s attention: there she is, wailing away full blast with her entire small being, when the neighbor’s miniature dachshund appears. The tears shut off like a faucet, because the dog captures her attention so completely that she forgets to cry.

Engage your attention in completing the next step on your list, and fear, doubt, and terminal tiredness will dissolve (at least for the short-term; when they return, simply engage your attention in the next step all over again).

As extra-added reinforcement, keep in mind your overall reason for wanting to write a book. Is it to convey a message, engage in a quest, nurture your talent, or to express the inspiration you feel when reading another author’s work? If you add inspiration (your reason for writing) to engagement, fear won’t have a chance.

Obstacle Three: No Time

Almost everyone has too much to do, and no time to do it. But that’s no reason not to write your book. It is reason, instead, to outwit your particular version of having no time. (Keep in mind, however, that we all somehow find the time to do those things we truly want to do.)

Most often, it’s not so much having no time that’s the problem. It’s the feeling that the job is much too big for the much-too-small amounts of time that are intermittently available.

Make the following strategy into a game you play on a daily basis: accumulate an hour’s worth of five- or ten-minute periods spent doing something towards your book (refer to your list of steps for small, specific tasks, and if they’re all too time-consuming, cut them in half, or even into quarters).

Spend, for instance, a free ten minutes between appointments making notes about what to include in chapter ten, instead of simply frittering that time away. (It’s a good idea to have a bound journal dedicated to your book project. Keep all your notes there for reference, and for the inspiration of seeing the material you’ve gathered accumulate and grow into something substantial. A journal is also portable in more circumstances than a computer is.)

Once you’ve completed one hour in small increments, find a small but gratifying way to reward yourself. This step is very important. You want to feel good about steadily doing small, incremental amounts of work on your book. Those increments add up, and can take you through the whole process. It’s also important to give yourself rewards because the ultimate payoff for writing a book doesn’t happen for such a long time — an unavoidable aspect of any long-term project. Small rewards are a way to circumvent that lengthy delay of gratification.

Postscript: When you are able to set aside more than brief amounts of time, be sure to create a timeframe for your work. Look at the clock and count out an hour or two, while telling yourself, “Okay, I’ll work on my book from 7:00 to 9:00.” The reason not to say, “I’ll just spend the day on my book,” is that it’s much too amorphous and overwhelming. These two conditions lead to avoidance and burnout. You need to have a set start-time, and a set finish-time.

Once you’ve done an hour — or whatever timeframe you’ve decided to use — take a break and reward yourself. Then give yourself another time-limited work period, followed by a break. Psychologically, this sets you up for work, but doesn’t overwhelm you with the thought of spending an endless, daylong amount of time doing nothing but. Most likely, you’d spend your day doing everything except work on your book (First, I’ll clean out the garage, the attic, and the basement — then I’ll get started on my book).

One last thing: Be sure to list what you intend to accomplish during that scheduled hour or two-hour period. It’s another way to prepare your mind to get your book work done. After you complete each task, check it off. This is oddly satisfying. It also produces a “snapshot” or visual record of all the things you’ve accomplished during that particular work period (a picture really is worth a thousand words).

Obstacle Four: Wavering Motivation

Sometimes you feel that working on your book is the most exciting thing you can imagine doing. And sometimes you feel that working on almost anything else would be cause for celebration. What to do?

Recognize wavering motivation for what it is: Either it’s a lesser form of fear (self-doubt), or a sneaky form of burnout (too much time spent doing the same, well-known writing tasks, with not enough variation to keep you interested).

Examine your feelings to find out which one is creating the waver. If it’s a feeling of fear, turn to engagement in the work, coupled with external inspiration, to get beyond it. If it’s a feeling of boredom, or burnout, figure out which new aspect of your book work would perk you up. What feels as if it would be fun to do?

Another technique for keeping motivation strong is to practice the tripartite work mantra: Same Time, Same Place, Every Day. In other words, schedule your days so that you can spend a half-hour or more each day (and the earlier in the day the better), working on your book in the same physical location.

There is a buildup of productive energy, not only in the place where you work, but in the habit-forming quality of work itself. If you show up every day at the same time, there is a natural tendency to move easily into work, because a memory groove already exists for it. You can use this phenomenon to keep the momentum of your project going, with much less effort.

Obstacle Five: Unclear Commitment

Your commitment to your book is what makes it “stick” for you. It is your overriding purpose, what you ultimately hope to accomplish by seeing your book through to completion.

Sometimes people start work on a book with an overly vague idea of why they are working on it. They then suffer particularly acute amnesia about those vague reasons during inevitable periods of low energy and, hence, low engagement and interest in their book work.

To protect your project and your commitment to it, create a carefully constructed statement about why you want to write this book. What points do you hope to make, and why do you want to make them? Be as specific and detailed as possible. Then place your reasons visibly in your work space, as well as in the front of your book journal.

If you eventually find that you’ve outgrown your original reasons for writing your book — because your subject has evolved as you’ve worked through the first several chapters — then rewrite your statement of purpose. But continue to maintain clarity about your reasons for writing. At its simplest, this is usually a matter of what wakens a feeling of energy and excitement in you (what it is you love), and which your book gives form to, or embodies.

Writing a book may not be “easy,” but it can prove to be rewarding in ways almost nothing else is. To be sure you get started, keep going, and cross the completion line, remember there are a few simple ways to make Inertia, Fear, Lack of Time, Wavering Motivation, and Unclear Commitment instantly irrelevant.

::: First, you set a “start” time for your writing period. This is the top of your imagined box. (10:00 AM, say)