Am I Ready to Write a Book?
In the course of coaching about a hundred people every year, this is a question I hear often. And I always appreciate the people who ask. Some people hold the view that you have to be the #1 expert in your field to write a book - nothing less than knowing it all will do. Others assume that expertise is not that important, as long as you are true to your own experience.
Each extreme has problems. No, you don’t have to be the absolute expert with all the answers. In fact, the book writing and creating process will force you to think more deeply about what you know, question it, and come up with new and different ways of thinking. It will help you clarify your own ideas about established ways of thinking, and this can sometime lead to real breakthroughs. If you think you know all the answers, you are less likely to question the norm and your book may suffer as a result.
But on the other hand, you do have to have enough education or experience to write beyond your own, necessarily limited perspective. And we have to be clear on what we know well enough to advise others and what we have yet to learn. Then we have to have the discipline to write a book on the narrow subject area or go out and learn what we need to in order to write a broader book.
Writing a nonfiction book is a significant undertaking. Here are the top six prerequisites that will make the journey a lot more rewarding and fun for the aspiring author:
1. Significant expertise in a topic area. This expertise can be gained through formal education or lots of experience in an area with lots of different people and situations. They don’t allow an individual to become a licensed therapist without both formal education and many hours of counseling various types of people. My advice is pay your dues - attend seminars, workshops classes and make sure you have a clear understanding of the basics, the traditions in your field. Then, if you have a new way, a more helpful way of looking at the world, try these out yourself by giving your own classes, workshops and with your own clients.
2. A viewpoint on that topic. Why write a book unless you have a new perspective to share? It doesn’t have to be a new earth-shattering theory or revelation, but give us some reason to read your book instead of what is already out there.
3. Stories of real people beyond just you and your family. If your ideas are true and they work, then we want to hear stories of people who had problems and had them solved by working with you or utilizing your suggestions. If you are “for real” then you won’t have any trouble giving us examples. Just because something worked for you doesn’t begin to mean that it will work for a large cross section of people. Test your ideas before writing a book. Make sure they stand up to the test of real life. By doing that, you will start to accumulate real stories of people who said, “What a difference you made in my life!”
4. The ability to clearly communicate these ideas in writing. We don’t learn to write books in school (at least most of us don’t) so you should not be embarrassed that everyone else can do this and you can’t. But do your best to assess your ability and get the help you need at the level you need it. If writing just isn’t your thing at all, you may want to work with a ghostwriter. If you know what you want to say but have trouble getting it organized, you may want to work with a substantive editor. If you’ve got most of that down but aren’t sure of your grammare, you may want to work with a copyeditor. At a minimum, it is important to have your work reviewed by people who know what makes a good book. And you want to subject your thoughts to peer and audience reviews. It is better to know before you publish that you’ve been able to clearly communicate what you wanted to, and that it reaches its intended audience.
5. A willingness to persist and do the hard work of thinking, rewriting, rewriting and rewriting. Writing a book is hard. Really hard. You begin thinking you have a clear direction and somewhere in the middle you begin to doubt both that you have the stamina to do it and that you have any idea what you are talking about. The process is supposed to feel that way. If you didn’t feel that way, I would know you weren’t digging deep enough and questioning everything you know. Great books require a lot of soul-searching. We owe that to the audience.
6. An audience who is willing to pay to get your help in solving their problems. People buy nonfiction books, for the most part, because they are in pain. They want your help. They buy your book because you’ve convinced them - by your cover, the expertise in your bio, their reaction to what they know about you - that you can help them. Is there an audience for what you know and are going to write about? Do you have the experience, the knowledge and the ability to communicate openly to help them?
I work with many people who are writing second books, hoping to get it right this time. They knew they were missing one or more of these prerequisites the first time, but were determined to do it anyway. Slow down, think it through and make this the book you want to be remembered for.
You Could Have a Best Seller in Your Computer
Your original ideas are your intellectual property. The value of that intellectual property is dependent on your ability to take your ideas and turn them into products from which others can benefit. Many aspiring authors have already written or given talks about their subjects. These can be used as the basis for their books.
First, let’s take an inventory of the intellectual capital you’ve already created. Check to be sure whether you already have:
• Articles you’ve written (published or not)
• Proposals you’ve written for prospects
• Presentations you’ve made to clients or to other audiences
• A unique way of doing business you can explain well to clients, friends, or business associates
• Such a passion for what you do that you often find yourself talking about it
• Interviews you’ve given to the media
Take a look at the word-processed files on your computer. Which of these contain your ideas and could form the basis for articles or your book?
Examine your hard copy files. Have you done reports for clients or kept other notes that share your ideas?
Have you or could you record and transcribe speaking engagements or workshops?
How can you take what you’ve already done and write transitions to connect the pieces?
Get some help from an objective third party about what you’ve already done that could be a diamond in the rough and you could be well on your way to creating one of this years’ nonfiction best sellers.
When You Are Ready for Professional Help for Your Manuscript to Make it Best Seller Perfect
Whether you’ve created a book, eBook, or other informational product, and no matter how good a writer you are, you need an editor. It simply isn’t possible to read your own work and see the problems. We all read what we think we wrote, not what is actually on the page.
Some authors find it difficult to let their “perfect” manuscripts go through the editing process—it can be ego-bruising if you let it. Try looking at it through a new lens: The editing staff can take you from a good writer to a great writer by uncovering inconsistencies, grammatical errors, and poorly constructed sentences that don’t communicate your meaning well. Learn to love your editors—they deserve your appreciation for a job that is noticed only when it isn’t done well.
An editor will help you take out needless words, avoid redundancies (saying the same thing more than once with different words), avoid unclear communication, help you use active instead of passive voice, and be sure you have all the power you can. Language serves to communicate your message with all the power you would in person.
An editor should be able to work electronically with your manuscript and suggest changes using the Track Changes feature for documents or, if you work with PDFs, the Adobe® Acrobat® 7.0 Standard program so that you always have the final decision about accepting their edits or not.
Different levels of editing are needed to take a manuscript from ragged to polished, and you may need one or both of these.
A substantive edit is a thorough read of the manuscript that looks for problems with the overall structure, consistency of the tone and style, ambiguity in the meaning of sentences, and the sentence structures. An editor also looks for grammatical errors, sentences that are just too long and inconsistencies (such as saying you are going to discuss three items and then just discussing two). The editor walks a fine line, and the intent is to improve the manuscript without changing the style of the author. An editor generally reads the entire manuscript first and then reads it again, beginning to write in changes in red pen (or type in changes using one of the software programs mentioned above). One of the editor’s main jobs is to “query” or ask questions of the author to clarify terminology, meaning, or other parts of the manuscript.
A technical edit is done by another subject matter expert for a nonfiction book. In this type of read, the editor looks for factual errors in the manuscript. The technical editor will read it as an expert and may also do some research to double-check the facts in the manuscript.
The editing process is a very important to an author. Twenty years ago, the author could count on the publishers to make sure there was a thorough edit. Today, the author may have to provide that. Don’t forget to schedule a thorough edit before you send any sample chapters to an agent or publisher with a book proposal.
Editors work either by the hour or on a project basis. How many pages they can edit an hour varies by the level of edit, the expertise of the editor, and the condition of the manuscript. You might expect to pay from $50 to $100 an hour or more for a qualified editor, especially if he or she has expertise in your subject matter. A fully edited book can cost from $1,000 to $3,000. Since this is a fairly large expense, it is important to be clear on what is being provided by the editor and what is being charged. The editor should give you his or her agreement with you in writing.
Although you want to be sure you get good value for your money, don’t scrimp on editing. It is one of the essentials of creating a great book.
Writers, facing tight budgets want to cut part or all of the editing process. If you do, you will pay for it later. Readers who see inconsistencies and typos and poorly written text lose trust in the expertise of the author.
Every best selling author had a great editor. Check the acknowledgments section of any best-selling book and see if the author didn’t heap lavish praise on his or her editor (now his or her best friend).
