Writing a non-fiction book is a time-consuming and involved process. To help you figure out if you want to go through it all, here are seven questions to answer:

1. Why do you want to write a book?

In other words, what are your personal goals for the book? What will make the whole experience ‘worth it’ for you?

The most common goals non-fiction book authors tend to have are to:

• Establish credibility. (They know a book will instantly set them apart from others in their industry/niche.)
• Position themselves as an authority in their space.
• Generate leads for a high-worth offering such as speaking or consulting.
• Make money.
• Simply experience the satisfaction of doing something many people talk about but seldom follow through on.

The above are all valid reasons to write a book. The only one I’d ask someone to have a good think about is the ‘make money’ one. Unless you have a large and established audience clamouring for your book, you generally have to invest a huge amount upfront to make a decent income directly from book sales.

(As an example, this is a rundown on the time, effort and money that went into Michael Bungay Stanier’s book The Coaching Habit selling more than 200,000 copies.)

All the other goals mentioned? Any well-written book can deliver on those.

2. What’s the book about?

I’m always surprised by the number of people who declare they ‘want to write a non-fiction book’ but don’t have the first idea what the topic of that book would be.

To answer this question, you need to sit down and list the topics in which you have enough expertise or interest to generate the material you’ll need to write a book.

(Note: You don’t necessarily need to have expertise in something to write about it. Malcolm Gladwell’s books tend to take the interest route. For example, an interest in what drives human decision-making became Blink.)

Once you have those topics, you’d then choose the one that best helps you achieve your personal goals for the book.

How specific does your topic need to be? The examples below are from some of the authors I’ve worked with previously:

• Writing better
• Thriving as an employee in the IT industry
• The psychology behind getting sh!t done

As you can see, the topics are narrow but go deep. (There’s a lot of potential material that sits below each.)

3. What value will your book present to the reader?

If you’re going to ask someone to invest their time in reading your book, it has to deliver value to them. This can take the form of:

• Learning how to do something new
• Learning how to do something better
• Being better informed
• A change in worldview
• Being able to articulate feelings about something for the first time properly
• Inspiration
• Kinship
• Entertainment

The value you want to deliver to the reader will become the driving premise of your book.

Which makes this one of the most important questions you need to answer. If you can’t answer it, you’ll produce a book that is weak, overly generalistic, self-indulgent or … all three.

4. Who, exactly, is the reader?

Anyone who’s done Marketing 101 knows if you pitch your marketing to appeal to ‘everyone’, it will appeal to no one. Similarly, you cannot write a book that is for everyone.

Your book will have an ideal reader, and it’s so important to know who that person is. Why? Because it will allow you to craft your words in a way that makes the reader feel your book was written especially for them. When you achieve this level of connection with a reader it’s pretty special because they then feel compelled to share your book with other people who are ‘just like them’.

The most successful books in the world sell well, not because they had huge marketing campaigns behind them, but because thousands of individuals said to another, ‘You must read this book.’

5. Can you access that reader?

If you’ve written the best book in the world on the topic of ‘innovations in real estate marketing’ but you have no way of putting that book in the hands of real estate agents, then you’ve wasted your time.

For your book to impact lives positively, it needs to find its way into your ideal reader’s hands. If your current network and connections don’t give you access to that reader, then you either need to build those connections first … or change the topic of your book to match a readership you can actually reach.

6. Have you got great case studies and stories?

Good books tell the reader what to do.

Great books show the reader what to do.

In chapter three of James Schramko’s book Work Less, Make More, James tells the reader they can reduce the number of things they’re doing in their business but still make the same amount of money (or more!).

How? By ensuring they’re doing only the impactful things.

It’s a powerful idea in the telling. But then he shows the reader how a client of his executed the idea and significantly reduced his working hours while increasing the money he made.

• Telling the reader what to do was aspirational and would have triggered this thought in the reader: Maybe I, too, can do this one day.
• Showing them someone who’d actually done it was inspirational and triggered a different thought: Hey, I can totally do this. Like, right now!

If you revisit any book that’s made a significant impact on your life, you will find great stories and case studies in there – demonstrations of people doing the thing the author is suggesting (rather than the author simply telling you ‘Do this, do that.’)

Once you know what your book is about and the value you want to deliver to the reader, you can start collecting great stories and case studies that support the ideas you’re going to share.

7. When are you going to write this business book?

Ah – the million-dollar question!

Many people will tell you the only way to write a book is to write daily. I disagree. I’ve binge-written all my books between 5am and 7am in compressed periods of time, (12 days for my first book, 30 days each for my other two) because I’m a business owner with two kids and a diverse range of commitments.

Another friend with a similar level of commitment booked a babysitter for four hours every Monday for three months and went to the library to write.

Figure out what kind of writing schedule and accountability it will take for you to write your book, and then … get writing!

How to get started

Once you’ve answered the above questions, there are no more excuses – it’s time to sit down and write your book. It’s usually at this point, however, that people become overwhelmed by the word ‘book’ and hit a brick wall.

My advice? Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of your book. Write a blog post that is:

• On the topic you identified in Question 2,
• Delivers the value you identified in Question 3, and
• Is for the reader you identified in Question 4.

Doing this will get you doing the hardest thing in this whole process: putting pen to paper. It will also allow you to test your idea and ensure you can put it in front of the right people.

If your topic is great, delivers value to the reader, and you can reach that reader with your blog post, it should get great traction and a great reaction. Which, in turn, should provide you with all the motivation and drive you need to expand those thoughts into a book.

The post Writing a non-fiction book – 7 questions to ask yourself first appeared on Kelly Exeter.

Since my son Jaden and I put our picture book out into the world, we’ve had a heap of people ask, ‘How did you do it/what was the process?’ I said I’d write a blog post detailing the process if there was enough interest and, well, it seems there are a lot of fellow budding picture book writers out there in the world.

So, for your reading pleasure, what follows here is how we did it. We’re not saying, ‘This is how you should do it,’ as I’m sure we broke many ‘rules of writing a picture book’ along the way. But we’re pretty happy with where we got to, so we must have done at least a few things ‘right’ ?

Here’s what we did:

Step 1 – The manuscript

Jaden came into the kitchen one morning with a book he’d just penned and illustrated on a whim. It was called ‘Clanky’s Awful Life Story’ and went like this:

In 1991 Clanky thought war was fun
In 1992 Clanky did a poo
In 1993 Clanky hugged a tree
In 1994 Clanky went to war
In 1995 Clanky’s eyes weren’t alive
In 1996 Clanky’s legs turned into sticks
In 1997 Clanky’s arms went up to heaven
In 1998 Clanky hasn’t met his fate
In 1999 Clanky was fine
In 2010 Clanky’s name is now Sven
And that’s the story of Clanky

It was funny and catchy and we all had a good laugh. And that was it.

But then the next day I heard my five-year-old daughter Mia singing some of the lines to herself while she played and I thought, ‘It’s that catchy, huh?’

It was one of those right place, right time scenarios as:

1. I’ve been wanting to do a kids’ picture book for ages, but lacked the necessary imagination
2. I was having a very stressful year and felt a low-stakes, creative project might buffer some of that stress
3. I’d just decided against us taking a very expensive family holiday to Melbourne where the flights alone were going to cost $3500. We had the money, but I felt we could take a cheaper holiday within WA and then divert the unused funds towards something that was a little more lasting. To me, working on a picture book with Jaden and showing him how an idea could be developed into something tangible and lasting was a good way to use those funds!

So it was decided right there and then: ‘Let’s turn this into a real picture book!’

The first thing we had to do was tweak Jaden’s manuscript. As someone said to me, ‘It was full of eight-year-old anarchy’ and while eight-year-old boys would certainly find it funny, eight-year-old boys don’t read picture books. But five-year-olds do.

So we, (myself, husband Ant, Mia and Jaden) got busy tossing ideas around. We wanted it to be rhyming like Jaden’s version as that version was catchy and fun. But the rhymes had to work for five-year-olds.

Oh, the other thing we knew was the standard picture book was 32 pages, but by the time you took into account the front and back covers, inside covers, dedication page, publication information page and title page, you didn’t need words for 32 pages, it was more like 25 pages. (Download a template here.) We knew we wanted each line to be a whole spread (two side-by-side pages) of the book so we were aiming for 12 lines + a way to wrap things up neatly on the final page.

When coming up with the new lines for the book, we tested them all on Mia and if something didn’t make sense to her, it got consigned to the cutting room floor.

After a bit of work, we settled on this version of the manuscript. We did end up tweaking it midway through the illustration process, but I’ll talk about that later.

Once we had a manuscript we were happy with, it was time to find an illustrator.

Step 2 – Finding an illustrator

One thing I learned throughout this process is that there’s a big difference between ‘someone who can draw well’ and an experienced illustrator. And there’s also a big difference between an experienced illustrator and a children’s book illustrator. Goran, who we eventually selected as our illustrator, is an experienced children’s book illustrator, and a large part of why the book turned out so beautifully is because of his experience.

How did we find Goran? We advertised for an illustrator on upwork.com. Here’s the exact ad we posted:

Clanky is a character conceived by my son. Attached to this job is his drawing of Clanky. We want to make a picture book featuring Clanky. We want the book to make people laugh and the illustrations will be key to this. We’re not thinking heavily detailed colour illustrations, we’re thinking more black line illustrations like the samples attached.

We are looking to hire an illustrator for our book. We will be selecting three people to illustrate two pages for us as a (paid) test job. From there we will select the illustrator for the whole book.

If you are interested in being one of the illustrators we engage for a paid trial, please apply and include samples of line drawing style illustrations you’ve done along with an indication of your rates.

(Side note: It’s interesting to look at this job post and compare our initial vision for the book, (‘We’re not thinking heavily detailed colour illustrations, we’re thinking more black line illustrations’) versus how it turned out.)

Within a few hours of posting the job on Upwork we had over 80 applicants. Eep! We quickly closed the posting once it hit that mark. Then came the job of going through the applications to create a long list. The criteria I used to create this long list was:

• Does this person communicate clearly?
• Did they do what I asked in the ad? (Include samples of line drawing style illustrations you’ve done along with an indication of your rates.)
• Do I like their illustration style? (Another thing I’ve come to realise is, every illustrator has a unique style and you’re going to get the best results if they’re able to stick to their preferred style.)

Once we had a long list of 12 or so illustrators, our goal was to get it down to three. In the end we selected four illustrators to do a paid test job because I couldn’t split them.

For the paid test job:

• Initially, we asked for line drawings only. (Because that was our original vision for the Clanky book – that it would have a Diary of a Wimpy Kid feel to it.) But then one of the illustrators sent through a colourised version of their drawing. And it looked amazing. So we then got all but one of the illustrators to colourise their drawings. (I can’t remember why we didn’t ask for the fourth to be colourised … it might have been a timing thing.)
• Initially each illustrator chose the line from the book that most appealed to them and drew that. In the end we asked them all to illustrate the same page (Clanky’s legs turned into sticks), so we could compare them more easily.

In addition to paying for the test concepts, every time we asked an illustrator to do a bit more, (change the drawing to a different one, colourise the drawing), we paid for that extra work. In all we paid around $350USD for the test concepts and it was money well spent.

Step 3 – Selecting the illustrator

So, we had our test concepts.

But which one to choose? There was something appealing about all the illustrations:

• We loved the kookiness of #1.
• #2 demonstrated an ability to convey real humour in her sample drawings (she sent through a few) – something I was attracted to because we wanted the book to make kids laugh.
• #3 was closest to our original ‘stick figure’ idea of what Clanky would look like.
• #4 was furthest away from our original vision (being quite realistic), but had a level of sophistication and style that we really liked.

In the end, we (myself, Ant, Jaden (8) and Mia (5)) all had our preferences, but we didn’t go with our preferences. We asked the target audience (kids in Mia’s class) which they liked most. And they were unanimous in liking #4 – which was Goran’s concept. So Goran got the job!

Note: For all that we were champing at the bit and keen to get going and choose our illustrator FAST, we let this process take as long as it took. (We had to give the illustrators a proper amount of time to get their concepts done and back to us.) In all it took around three weeks from first posting the ad to selecting Goran.

Step 4 – Working with the illustrator

Next step in the process was producing the illustrations for the book. The fun bit!

Before you can start, you need to know what size your book pages are going to be. While some sizes are more standard than others, you can make your picture book whatever size you like. The size we chose was 8.5” x 8.5” (the largest square size available via Ingram Spark – the print-on-demand provider we’d decided to use).

The second thing you need to agree on with your illustrator is pricing. Goran let us know his price was $60USD per colourised double-page spread and $30USD per colourised single-page spread.

The third thing to agree on with your illustrator is who owns the rights to the artwork and what book credits will apply. Goran agreed to assign rights to the artwork to us once it had been paid for. (All that means is we own the final artwork and can use that artwork in any way we like. For instance, on a website or in promotional material. Goran retains copyright of the artwork as the creator of the work.) With regard to book credits, Goran would be credited on the cover and in the book as the illustrator of the book.

Once all that admin stuff was out of the way, it was time to create a series of milestones in Upwork. This ensured Goran would be paid for his work in small increments along the way. Doing it this way ensured Goran was not taking the risk of completing all the work for us, only for us not to pay him. And it also incentivised him to keep the project moving and deliver on deadlines. (Not that he needed incentives because he is a pro.)

The first milestone was to create one complete double-page spread for the book. This was to get a feel for the process. And the process was:

1. Goran would sketch the spread.
2. We would provide feedback about anything that needed to change, and he’d amend the sketch where necessary.
3. Once the sketch was approved he’d properly draw and colourise the spread. (NB: If we wanted to make changes to the spread once we’d approved the sketch and he’d started working on the ‘real’ version, there would be an extra charge.)

Once that first spread was sorted, the milestones went like this:

• Complete 11 remaining spread sketches
• Complete line art and colouring of 5/11 spreads
• Complete line art and colour of 6/11 spreads
• Complete sketches, line art and colouring of front cover, back cover and final page of book

With regard to exactly how Goran illustrated each spread …

I’ve been told you should just let the illustrator do their thing and bring each line to life in they way they feel best. I feel that’s asking the illustrator to carry a huge load creatively if they first have to conceptualise what the character is going to be doing, and then illustrate it. Also, I had some specific ideas for what I felt Clanky should be doing for certain lines of the book. Where I had a vision for a particular line in the book, I’d tell Goran something like:

For: In 1984, Clanky ran straight through a glass door

I’m envisioning: Clanky on the other side of a glass door that has a Clanky shaped hole in it, and there are shards of glass flying everywhere and Clanky is cut up a bit. Speech bubble: “Ok, that hurt”

If I had no ideas for a spread, I’d say, ‘I have no ideas for this, what do you think?’ And he’d give me some ideas verbally to see what I thought before he started sketching.

Sometimes, I’d pull together some simple clipart to illustrate what was in my head and it was fun to watch that rudimentary brief go …

Essentially, anything I could do to reduce guesswork on Goran’s part and help him hit the mark with the first sketch, I did it. This also sped up the process by reducing the amount of back and forth we had to do. In the end, the only tweaking I ever did of sketches was to Clanky’s facial expressions. If Goran had a vision for a particular line that didn’t match mine, he’d tell me. And I always deferred to what he thought.

All up the illustrations for this book cost $990USD.

The front cover, back cover and final page were all single-page spreads at $30USD each.

The main part of the book had 12 spreads, but we changed the manuscript halfway through and had to re-do three spreads. The 15 double-page spreads were $60USD each.

Time-wise, getting the illustrations finalised took around two months.

Step 5 – Getting professional advice on the manuscript

Despite the fact that Goran was already working on it, I knew the manuscript wasn’t quite right. It didn’t have a beginning. And Goran felt the original ending, which took the reader somewhere and then left them hanging (‘What happens next? We’ll tell you in the next book.’) was a no no.

So I started crafting an elaborate backstory for Clanky and even adding pages when I knew full well picture books only have 32 pages. Jaden kept vetoing all my backstory stuff as ‘lame’, and in the end, I got so tangled up I realised I needed some professional help. So I put a callout in a Facebook group for a picture book editor.

I got connected with picture book author Charlotte Calder (thanks Kate!) and she was so amazing. She told me 3-7-year-olds (the target audience for this book) don’t need a backstory. A simple ‘This is Clanky, he’s led a very weird, hilariously awful life’ type beginning was all that was needed.

She also pointed out that a few of the original spreads:

• Clanky being used as shark bait
• Clanky’s arms going up to heaven
• Clanky getting zapped with a stun gun

might not go down that well with the target age group, or the parents and teachers who’d be reading the books to the kids!

In the end, it took a bit of trial and error, but I was eventually able to tweak the manuscript so that it had a beginning, middle and an end that made sense. And most importantly, that Jaden didn’t deem ‘lame’.

Step 6 – Designing the book

This is the bit where it was helpful that I’m also a graphic designer. I didn’t have to pay for this bit ?

If you do have to pay for it, expect to pay for 6-10 hours of work at $100/hr (at least). Even though the illustrator is doing most of the heavy lifting from a design point of view, there is design and art direction involved in:

• The front and back cover
• Title page
• Publisher details page
• Choosing the right font and placement for the book text
• Preparing it correctly for print

I know I’m biased, but I wouldn’t scrimp on the designer here. An experienced designer will know the right questions to ask to ensure the book is produced and output correctly for print. They will ultimately save you time, money and frustration.

Step 7 – Printing the book

There are many ways you can get a picture book printed.

1. Local printer (usually expensive, especially at small quantities)
2. Printer in China (risky, takes a long time, and only worthwhile if you are printing thousands of copies)
3. Print-on-demand provider like Amazon’s CreateSpace or Lightning Source’s Ingram Spark (where the cost per book is the same whether you print one book or 1000)

I’ve used both CreateSpace and Ingram before. I chose to go with Ingram in this instance because they have a printing presence in Australia while CreateSpace doesn’t (their books come from the US). If you print something with CreateSpace, it can often be cheaper than Ingram, but then the shipping costs from the US to Australia wipes out all the savings you might make.

Ingram offers a handy calculator on their site to help you figure out what your book will cost to print and ship to you. Here’s an image showing the settings I used for the Clanky book. You will note:

• I chose Premium Color over Standard Color 70 and Standard Color. Because this is a picture book I felt it was important to have the highest standard of colour. For the record, if printing 100 books, the difference pricing between the three colour options is $609.76 vs $482.49 vs $449.16. Is the difference between Premium Color over the other two worth it? Only you can decide. If you ask Ingram, they will send you samples so you can compare.
• I chose a Matte cover over a Gloss cover. This is a personal preference thing. I just like Matte better. Many picture books do have gloss covers, however, as gloss is more hard wearing.
• I chose not to have a duplex cover. If you have a duplex cover that means you can print on the inside covers as well as the front and back covers. I didn’t feel this would make our book any better to look at or read. So, despite it only increasing the price per book by ~40c, I didn’t do it. I might change that in the future though.
• I chose saddle stitch over perfect bound. (NB: It didn’t actually give me that option when I went to create the sample settings linked above. I don’t know why.) Our book is saddle stitched (stapled) because this lets the spread sit flat. That was important for us because key parts of our illustrations cross the middle of the two-page spreads. If key parts of your illustrations don’t cross this area, then perfect bound (the way most paperbacks and magazines are bound) is fine.
• The page count of the book is 32 pages. Really, it should be 28 pages because the cover pages (Front cover, inside front cover, inside back cover, back cover) are not included in that number. But Ingram need to have two blank pages at the end of the book in order to print their barcode in the book. This meant I had to add four pages at the end of the book. Two were these, and two were blank.

Preparing your book so it’s print-ready and able to upload into Ingram requires professional graphic design knowledge and skills. This is where and when the money you pay for a pro designer becomes money well spent.

FYI, when your designer is creating the back cover of your book, they will need to know your ISBN. You get your ISBN from Bowker. Once your designer knows your ISBN, they can use the Ingram cover template generator to generate a template that shows the barcode, the cover dimensions and the live areas for the cover. (If your designer doesn’t know what ‘live areas’ of a cover template means, get a new designer.) CreateSpace also offers a cover template generator but their template doesn’t include a barcode. You will need to purchase a barcode file from Bowker if using CreateSpace.

Once your file has been uploaded to Ingram (or CreateSpace), checked by them and approved, you can order a single copy to be sent to you to check the quality and that everything looks as it should. If you’re not happy, you can get your designer to make adjustments. If all is good, you’re ready to press ‘Publish’.

Step 8 – Publishing your book

Ingram Spark and CreateSpace are both book distributors. Once you tell them your title is available for distribution, they will push it out to the stores they are aligned with. For Australian authors, Ingram is the only way to make a paperback book available via the Australian Amazon store. They also make your book available to retailers including all the overseas Amazon stores, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository and Booktopia. (You can see a more comprehensive list here.)

It’s important to note that just because Ingram makes your book available to these retailers, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll stock them. But Amazon will certainly pick them up and display them online.

You can also purchase your book directly from Ingram at author pricing, and then sell the books on your website or at book events (or wherever). This is the best return you’ll get on your book sales.

We can purchase the Clanky book for ~$6/copy via Ingram. When we sell it for $12 on our website ($12 + $3 shipping in Australia), we make $6/book.

If a retailer buys our book from Ingram to stock in their shop, this is what we make:

Which leads me to …

The economic reality of picture books

As with all books, you don’t do a picture book to make money!

So far we’ve spent:

• $480 AUD ($350USD) on getting test illustrations done
• $1350AUD ($990USD) getting the full set of illustrations for the book
• $539 AUD printing 100 sample copies to send to friends, family, influencers and kids in Jaden’s and Mia’s classes (via a local trade printer who we get wholesale prices through because we have a graphic design business)
• $200AUD mailing copies to friends, family and influencers
• A total investment of $2569AUD

To make back that investment, we need to sell 428 books at a profit of $6. (I think. I’m sure Ant will correct my maths here if it’s wrong!)

It’s quite difficult to sell that many books. To date we’ve sold around 50. Admittedly, we’ve only done the softest of launches thus far. The proper launch will come. But if we spend any money on that ‘proper launch’ then the number of books we need to sell to make back our investment goes up. So that’s something to consider.

For us, the main aim of this project was to have some fun. I had money set aside to have that fun and really enjoyed working through the process with Jaden. It was awesome to show him what was involved in taking an idea through to the creation of something really tangible. And he got to be a published author shortly before his ninth birthday. Nice. Also, it was a project everyone in our family could get involved with and we all enjoyed having input along the way.

The post How to write and publish a picture book first appeared on Kelly Exeter.

As you would imagine, there’s a bit involved in writing and publishing a book. There are also many misconceptions about how things work. The aim of this post is to allow you to go in with ‘eyes wide open’ and ensure your expectations of the process are realistic. This will allow you to extract maximum enjoyment from what is a very exciting and fulfilling venture.

If you’re stuck at any of the stages below, I’ve also mentioned the type of professional you’d seek out to help.

Stage 1: Ideation and market positioning

When deciding to write a book, it’s not enough to have a ‘big idea’ you want to share with the world. You must also consider:

• Who is the market?
• Will it resonate with the intended market? (Are they ‘ready’ to hear it?)
• Can I access that market? (There’s no point having a big idea that will help real estate agents if you can’t get your book in front of those people.)
• Will writing a book for this market allow me to achieve my personal and business goals?
• Do I even know what those goals are?

At the end of this stage, you need clarity around:

1. The book’s title
2. A working sub-title
3. The book’s premise (The presumption upon which your book is based. Eg. ‘Most overthinkers are so busy trying to stop their overthinking, they don’t realise there might be a better way to go about things.’)
4. The book’s promise (How you’re going to make the reader’s life better, in the context of the book’s premise. Eg. ‘I will show you how to work effectively with your overthinking brain instead of constantly fighting against it.’)
5. Who the target market is (As you should be actively engaging with them and priming them for the fact that the book is coming from the moment you start writing the book.)
6. What outcome the book needs to deliver for you (Does it need to bring you new clients? Give you credibility in your field? Increase your profile? Bring speaking gigs? Sell 1 million copies?)

Who can help at the ideation stage?

It’s admittedly hard to find help at this point because there is no industry-accepted term for an ‘edit’ at this stage of the game. Realistically, you want to speak with someone who has both publishing and editorial experience, and understands the nuances of self-publishing a non-fiction book (i.e. Your goal may not necessarily be to sell as many copies as possible (the goal of most traditional publishers). It might be to attract the attention of a very small, but very lucrative niche audience.)

The service I offer for this stage is called a ‘Developmental Edit‘. But! Be careful if engaging someone else for a ‘developmental edit’ because many editors use the term to describe a structural edit, which is something else entirely!

Essentially, to determine whether someone can help you at this point, ask them if they’re going to be able to leave you with firm clarity around the six points mentioned above.

Helpful resources for the ideation stage

If you’d like to work through this stage by yourself …

• You could write a complete book proposal as if you were pitching the book to a publisher.
• You could answer my 5 questions to ask yourself before writing your non-fiction book
• The Scribe Guide to Writing a Perfect Book Title

Stage 2: Marketing

Some important things you need to know about book marketing:

• It doesn’t matter how amazing your book is, if you can’t get it into the hands of your target readers, your ideas won’t spread
• If you wait until your book is written and produced to start marketing it, you’re making things very hard for yourself
• There’s no book marketing formula that will guarantee the success of your book.
  • Every book is unique in who it’s trying to appeal to.
  • Every author has different sized email lists, fan bases, connections and budgets. (i.e. Every author has a different set of advantages and disadvantages.)
• It takes as much as, or more, energy to market your book as it does to write it (book marketing needs to be ongoing)

Who can help you market your book?

Ooh boy. There are a LOT of people out there who promise the world and don’t even deliver a suburb in this regard. As mentioned, there is no real unshakeable book marketing formula that works for everyone so anyone who suggests they have one … best you run far away in the other direction from them.

The best person to help you at this stage is you. (Sorry, I know this is not what you want to hear!)

First step, read both these books:

• Your First 1000 Copies: The Step-by-Step Guide to Marketing Your Book
• Book Launch Blueprint: The Step-by-Step Guide to a Bestselling Launch

Second, start building an email list.

Third, create a Facebook group of people who are interested in what you’re writing about.

Fourth, tell people you’re writing a book. Tell them what the title is. Check their reactions to it. You’ll know you’ve nailed your title if the person you’re speaking to is your target market and there’s an instant glint of recognition in their eyes. You’ll know you’ve really nailed it if they say, ‘Tell me when your book is out, I need to read it!’ If people look at you blankly when you tell them your book’s title, or if you have to explain it to them … change your title because your book’s title is its most important marketing tool.

Finally, get your head around the fact that marketing your book is something you’re going to need to find a LOT of time and energy for when your book is finally written and published. SO many self-published authors get to the end of the book writing and publishing process completely burnt out and just don’t have the energy to market and promote themselves. I know I’ve been guilty of this. And it’s a huge shame because if you don’t have the energy, your book won’t get in enough hands to achieve the critical mass it needs to spread on its own (via word of mouth).

Stage 3: Writing

So, how do you write a book?

The way most people think it works is:

1. You create an outline
2. You knock out the first draft to that outline
3. Once that first draft is done, an editor steps in to polish it up and yay, finished book!

The truth is, the above is rare and the writing process is usually much more frustrating and iterative than that.

• You might start writing to your outline and find you don’t have as much to say about certain parts of that outline as you thought
• You might complete your first draft, send it to an editor, and find out the 30,000 words you’ve written are actually just the introduction (and those 30,000 words need to be condensed to 3000) and now it’s time to write the rest of the book (this actually happened to me)
• You might complete your first draft and realise the punchline of the book is completely different to what you originally thought it was, and now you have to re-write the book to deliver on that new, better punchline (this also happened to me)

This is why I tell the authors I work with to call their ‘first draft’ a ‘content draft’ instead. I want them to accept the idea that most first drafts are nowhere near being editable. And while this sounds harsh, it’s actually really freeing. It releases them from the need to be super-coherent and they get to do massive brain dumps instead.

Sometimes they brain dump to the rough outline we’ve worked up for their book.

Sometimes we don’t even create an outline. Sometimes we go to the premise and promise of the book, brainstorm all the questions a book with that premise and promise should answer … and then start brain dumping the answers to those questions.

In my experience, the whole ‘brain dumping thing’ is what produces the strongest book the author is capable of. Mainly because once I know what kind of content the author can produce, and, most importantly, what kind of stories they have to illustrate the points they’re making, I can structure the book to optimally deliver their thoughts and ideas to the reader in a satisfying (i.e. highly readable and actionable) way.

Who can help during the writing stage?

• Joining a writing group for accountability is always helpful. The people in that group can also act as beta readers and sounding boards.
• You might hire a book coach to mentor you through the process. (They will also do some beta reads and act as a sounding board.)
• If you’re someone who writes well, but slowly, you might engage an editor to act as a co-writer to speed things up.
• If writing is not your preferred form of communication, but you have all this great content in your head just crying to come out, a ghostwriter will both extract that content from your head, and assemble it into a marketable entity (a book).
• Once your content draft or first draft is finished, it might be worth getting a manuscript assessment done to find out just what shape the manuscript is in.

Helpful resources for the writing stage

• How to Write a Book: The 5-Draft Method – Jeff Goins
• How to Not Waste Your Words: The Secret to Writing a Crappy but Usable First Draft – Jeff Goins
• How to Write a Book the Pip Way – Pip Lincolne

Stage 4: Editing

There are four editing stages every book should go through to ensure its quality is at the level the discerning reader is looking for:

1. Developmental edit
2. Structural edit
3. Copy/line edit
4. Proofread

1. Developmental edit

As mentioned above, this is the term I give to the ‘idea’ edit. It should be done at the start of the book writing process and at the end of it you should have:

• A clear understanding of who the market/audience/reader is
• A strong working title and sub-title
• Clarity around the premise of the book
• A clear understanding of the ‘promise’ you are making to the reader
• The confidence you can deliver on that promise
• The confidence the proposed book can deliver on your personal goals

2. Structural edit

This edit can be done at the ‘content draft’ stage, first draft stage, or both.

It’s the edit that asks:

Does this book flow nicely, build the author’s argument in a logical way, and deliver on the promise the title is making?

It’s important not to skip this edit and go straight to a line edit because a line edit can only sharpen up what’s already there. A line edit doesn’t point out where something needs to be expanded on, or moved somewhere else, or deleted entirely because it’s surplus to requirements. A structural edit does.

There are two kinds of structural edit:

• What I call a ‘high-pass’ structural edit will provide high-level notes only. The editor won’t go into the manuscript and move things around for you, or make any changes of their own.
• What I call a ‘granular’ structural edit will see the editor moving things, deleting things, smoothing out transitions and doing whatever fixes they feel necessary to ensure flow, idea delivery and reader satisfaction.

3. Line editing

Even if some line editing has been done during the structural edit, it’s still crucial for a line editor to go through the entire manuscript once it’s ‘done’.

As mentioned, where a structural editor looks at things on a macro/flow level, a line editor goes super-micro. They literally go through and sharpen up each line: correcting grammar, cutting long lines into two, fixing up awkward syntax etc.

4. Proofreading

While I understand a book is expensive to produce, and while I understand how tempting it is to get your mum, dad and five great friends to read your book and assume that between them all, they’ll pick up any proofing errors … a professional proofreader is worth their weight in gold. The things they pick up are more than just typos, they also pick up formatting errors your book designer may have made when typesetting the book and often do fact checks too. The things a professional proofreader picks up are often the difference between your book being ‘publisher quality’ and not.

When do you get your book proofread? Once it’s been laid out/designed. If you do it before that, your proofreader won’t get the chance to pick up on any formatting errors that might occur during the design phase.

Who can help during the editing stage?

Search online for the specific editors outlined above. Or, even better, speak to other writers about who they use as personal recommendations are golden when it comes to editors. If an editor is very good, they’re also usually very booked up. So be prepared to wait

Helpful resources for the editing stage

If you want to get better at self-editing (and you should), it’s worth your while reading:

• The Story Grid – What Good Editors Know, by Shawn Coyne
• Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron

And listening to:

• The Story Grid podcast

Stage 5: Design and printing

So your manuscript is finalised and your book is ready to be produced. Hurrah!

In order to make your book available for sale worldwide, you’ll need to format it in at least two ways:

1. Paperback
2. Kindle/e-book

Perfect world, you would also produce an audiobook as audiobooks are becoming increasingly popular.

But let’s just talk about paperback and Kindle for now.

Despite there being many DIY tools out there to help you design your book yourself, discerning readers will spot a DIY effort a mile away, and all the effort you put into writing the book will be wasted. Short story – make sure there is room in your budget for professional design.

Design consideration 1 – Cover (Paperback and Kindle)

The adage is true – people really do judge books by their covers. A professional designer won’t just ensure your cover looks fantastic, they’ll ensure it’s genre-appropriate too. (If you’ve produced a business ‘thought leadership’ book but the cover makes it look like it’s a cookbook, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the cover is, your book won’t sell. Not to the intended market anyway.)

Design consideration 2 – Interior (Paperback)

An invisible part of the reading experience is your book’s interior design. When a book is easy to read (font selection, font size, line spacing, presentation of bullets and tables, sub-headings etc) you don’t notice all the things the designer has done to make it so. When a book is hard to read (the font is small and the lines aren’t spaced well, for example) – you do notice. And you think unkind thoughts about the book even if it’s well-written.

Your book’s design also impacts how seriously the reader takes you. If your book is well-written but your book’s design looks like a 1980’s school report, you’ll lose credibility in the reader’s eyes.

Short story, get a professional to design your book’s interior. That professional should also know how to navigate the KDP and Ingram Spark interfaces (as this is who will likely be printing your book) and fix any problems they throw up on file submission.

Design consideration 3 – E-book

There are tools out there that say ‘upload your Word document here and we’ll convert it to Kindle for you’. KDP and Ingram also offer tools to convert your paperback design to Kindle. Please don’t use these tools. They produce an inferior Kindle book that will impact the reading experience for your reader. Get a professional Kindle Formatter to do it. If you want the details for one, send me an email and I’ll hook you up.

Printing your book

A key part of your book production process is printing. Where and how you print your book will depend on how you intend to sell copies of the book, how many you want to have on hand at any one time and how many copies you want to print.

For most authors, using the print-on-demand services of Ingram Spark (Australian authors) or KDP (US authors) is the most cost-effective way to go about things. When using those services, the price per book is the same whether you print 1 copy, or 10,000 copies. When printing small quantities of your book (500 and under), using a print-on-demand service is going to be cheaper than sourcing the printing of your book locally.

• Ingram Spark book pricing is here.
• KDP book pricing is here.

If printing more than 500 copies, I usually recommend Australian authors print locally as the quality is slightly better than Ingram/KDP for the same price. For larger quantities, or for printing books that are full colour throughout, it’s cheapest to print with a China-based printer, but I don’t have any personal experience with that.

Stage 6: Distribution

Ok! So your book has been written, designed, printed/converted to e-book, and because you’ve done such a good job marketing it, people want to buy it. Where can they buy it from and who delivers the book to them? And what if bookstores and libraries want to buy your book?

How and where you decide to sell your book from depends on a range of variables, (where you’re based, how much you want to make from each book, how willing you are to store books at your home or office and mail them to buyers yourself etc.) I’m not able to cover all those variables here so I’m just going to cover off the ways you would distribute your book and if we work together at some stage, I can offer advice that is more specific to your situation.

1. E-book

Your e-book designer/formatter should provide you with a .epub file and that’s the file you would upload to Amazon KDP in order to make your book available worldwide on Amazon in Kindle format.

If you want to make your book available worldwide on Apple iBooks and Kobo, you’d upload your .epub file via Smashwords.

Whenever any of these online retailers sell the e-version of your book to a reader, they pay you a royalty. The royalty amount varies depending on the book price, and which online retailer sells it.

2. Paperback

There are a few ways people can buy your paperback from you:

1. From your own website

To sell books from your own website, you’d purchase copies of the book at author pricing from KDP (US and UK authors) or IngramSpark (Australian authors). The average business book (6” x 9” in size, full colour cover, black and white on the side, up to 250 pages) usually costs around $5-6USD, $7.50-8.50AUD delivered.

You’d then mark up the book price to whatever you want to sell it for ($17.99-$24.99 is the usual range), add postage and sell it for that amount from your website. Remember though, the con of this option is that it involves you putting books in envelopes/mailers, addressing said envelopes/mailers and going to the post office to get them in the mail. The big pro is, it’s the option where you make the most per paperback book.

2. Direct via online retailers

US and UK authors would upload their paperback file to Amazon KDP. Readers can then buy the paperback direct from Amazon. Amazon takes care of the printing and delivery of the book, and pay you a royalty per book sold.

Australian authors would upload their paperback file to Ingram Spark. Ingram Spark then makes the book available to Amazon (and other online retailers like Book Depository and Booktopia) as well as Australian bookstores and libraries. The reason Australian authors would use IngramSpark is because KDP won’t send proof copies of paperback books to Australia anymore. Nor does KDP make paperback books available to amazon.com.au.

(Yes, I know, this is all very confusing. But the short story is US and UK authors can upload both the e-book and paperback book to Amazon KDP and have their books distributed to their major markets. Australian authors whose primary market might be Australian readers, and need their paperback to be available on amazon.com.au … only IngramSpark can make that happen.)

3. Brick and mortar bookstores

If you’re a self-published author, and you want your book stocked in brick and mortar bookstores, you need to either engage a distributor (which means your book will be one of many books that distributor is offering to a bookstore to stock) or go into bookstores yourself and ask them to stock your book. How? This article is old, but still accurate.

The other way that can work is to get friends to go into bookstores and request your book. The bookstore will then order your book from IngramSpark at a wholesale price, mark it up to retail price, and sell it to your friends. If enough people request your book, the bookstore might order an extra copy or two to have on their shelf.

Whenever a bookstore orders a copy of your book from IngramSpark (or a library), you get paid a royalty via Ingram Spark.

4. Airport bookstore distribution

Don’t we all want to see our books in airport bookstores?! Unfortunately, this usually involves having a bestselling book, being with a traditional publisher, paying a large fee … or all three.

What does it all cost?

You may not need all of the items below, but I’ve listed as many of the costs as possible to help you budget for self-publishing a book at a professional level. All prices below are in AUD.

The post The 6 stages of non-fiction book publishing first appeared on Kelly Exeter.

You get into bed, exhausted.

Given you’ve been falling asleep on your feet all day, it’s only reasonable to expect you’ll be out like a light in two seconds flat.

Except, the moment your head hits the pillow and your eyes close gratefully in anticipation of sweet slumber, your brain decides it’s time to party. And invites everything you’re worried about over for a shindig.

Why does this always happen?

It’s because the most effective way to avoid dealing with our worries is distraction – something that’s easy to find during the day by simply keeping ourselves busy. We’re all very good at putting worrisome thoughts in a box in the corner of our brains, and using busyness as the lid for that box.

The only problem with this technique is that at night, just as we lay our heads down to rest, that lid jumps off the box in our brains, and our worries are able to come out and play.

Is there a better way to deal with those anxious thoughts? One that will allow us to actually get some sleep? Yes, I reckon there is. I call it ‘Scheduling time to worry’.

Here are three ways to do just that.

1. Go for a walk (or run)

There are a few good reasons exercise is great for stress and anxiety. One is because exercise releases hormones that act in a similar fashion to anxiety medication – regulating mood and relaxing the mind.

Another is that when you are exercising, your mind has license to run wild and free. By setting aside time for exercise each day, you are effectively setting aside time for worrying. By the time you’ve finished exercising, there’s no need to stuff all those worries in a box in your brain because they’ve had a chance to be ‘heard’ and are effectively neutralised for the day. Now, they can just sit there quietly in your mind and refrain from interrupting your sleep because they know they’ll get their chance to party again when you exercise the next day.

2. Journaling

One of the most effective things I’ve done to manage worries and anxiety is setting aside time in the morning to journal 750 words. I start with the words ‘Today I am worried about …’ and continue writing from there. The most important thing I do here is, once I start writing, I don’t stop till I hit 750 words. I find if I stop writing I can get caught up in my head and it makes me more anxious. If I keep writing, no matter what, even if I’m writing ‘I don’t know what to write here, I don’t know what to write here’, I go off on surprising tangents and often come to a surprising solution for a given problem … or manage to make peace with a situation I previously couldn’t process.

You don’t have to write 750 words – you can just set yourself to write for 15 minutes. Or 300 words. The most important thing is that once you start writing, you don’t stop until you’re done.

It’s also worth noting: for a while I switched to doing my 750 words at night just before I went to bed. I thought this was a good way of dumping all the negative thoughts out of my head before trying to sleep. What I found was that I spent all night dreaming about the things I wrote and this wasn’t very restful. Consequently, I’ve since shifted back to doing my 750 words in the morning.

Another variation on the above is to write a particular worry down in a book, close the book, and tell the worry you’ll come back to it later. A friend has said she’s found that when she comes back to that book, the worry she wrote down never seems as big as it did before … or has ceased to be a worry at all.

I suspect the reason this works is because we spend a lot of time trying to invalidate our worries, or having other people invalidate our worries. Which isn’t all that useful. Worries are worries. Writing them down is a form of validation, and quite often that simple act of validation is enough for the worry to loosen its grip on your mind.

3. Talk it out

Have you ever gone for a walk with a friend, or chatted with one on the phone, and at the end felt lighter and freer? Do you joke that you just spent 30 minutes solving the problems of the world? That’s because you did.

Talking things out with someone – especially someone who’s willing to listen and not try to solve everything for you, or tell you about the time they had a similar problem – that’s such a gift. It’s another way of airing your worries and freeing them from your head, and in doing so, taking away a lot of their power.

What if you don’t have a friend to chat with? Most phones these days come with an app that allows you to record yourself. So, as silly as you might feel, talk into your phone and tell it all the things that are on your mind. You don’t have to listen back to the recording. And you can even delete the recording straight away if you like. I’m always amazed how the act of verbally articulating my worries helps put them into perspective and takes away the power they have over me.

The final word

Humans are very good at avoidance – it’s our natural and preferred method for dealing with most kinds of discomfort. But, that avoidance almost always leads to a different kind of discomfort (in the case of worrying, lack of sleep – something that can exacerbate anxiety and stress).

Being pro-active when dealing with our worries gives us previously unrecognised power over them. And allows us to get through our days without the constant buzz of anxiety we didn’t realise we’d become very used to.

Do you have an effective way of dealing with worries that doesn’t fall in the category of ‘avoidance’?!

The post Why we should all set aside time to worry first appeared on Kelly Exeter.

Hands up if your morning is some variation of the below:

Wake up, hit the snooze button, hit the snooze button, grudgingly get out of bed, drag self into shower, see the time, freak out, hurry, hurry, hurry … no time for breakfast, ARGH I missed my bus and now I’m going to be late for work.

I’ve made little secret of the fact that I am super-passionate about having a morning routine that allows you to leave the house in a chilled out fashion. I really believe the way we start our day is super-crucial to the way the rest of our day pans out – mood-wise and productivity-wise.

But what if you’re not a morning person? Are there some simple things you can do to start each day in a more dignified fashion? Of course there are! Here are six:

It all starts the night before

1. Lay it out baby

Ever found yourself panicking at 7.30am because there’s not a single pair of hole-free stockings in the entire house and your first meeting is at 8am? Try this the night before: lay out all the clothes you need for the next day. This will quickly identify anything crucial that is missing from your ensemble and also means you won’t have to ask yourself that mind-numbing morning question “what am I going to wear today”.

2. Do the token tidy

Nothing frazzles a morning faster than being faced with a pile of unwashed dishes in the kitchen. And I realise the last thing you might want to do each evening before bed is tidy up but all it takes is five minutes. Get those plates in the dishwasher and restore your living area to a semblance of tidiness. This means no little jobs will be nagging at your brain while you’re trying to enjoy your breakfast.

3. Hook up with a good book

Many people delay going to bed simply because they can’t be bothered getting off the couch. Best tip for getting to bed ‘on time’? Get your hands on a great read. This should be enough to tear you away from the comfy couch and comes with an added bonus. Reading before bed winds the mind down and clears away the stresses of the day making it easier to fall asleep AND stay asleep.

In the morning

4. Get up half an hour earlier

Hey – what? That’s not a tip, that’s torture! Don’t knock it till you try it though. Since you’re falling asleep earlier these days, getting up half an hour earlier is not going to rock your world. Do you usually find yourself gulping down some form of lukewarm liquid from a travel cup as you bolt out the front door every morning? Getting up 30 minutes earlier means you’ll have time to drink a hot cup of coffee while reading the paper or browsing Facebook. What a nice way to start the day!

5. Stay on task

Woo – you’ve got all this extra time on your hands in the morning. Why not take the opportunity to pop a load of washing on! Err … no. Your mission is to have breakfast, get dressed and leave the house. The end. Add anything else into the mix and you’re back on your way to situation ‘frazzled’.

6. Make your bed

No really – make your bed. This has two benefits. The first is that right off the bat, you’ve already accomplished something for the day so you’ll leave the house with a spring in your step. Secondly, when it comes time to crawl into bed that night, you will send a fervent ‘thank you’ to your morning self for leaving such a lovely gift­ for the end of your day!

The post Magic mornings: 6 simple tips for starting your day right first appeared on Kelly Exeter.