Julie Broad argues that authors lose enormous time by writing without a clear plan; with modest upfront planning (outlining, chapter-headline naming) writers can avoid extensive rewrites and save hundreds of hours. She illustrates this with an anonymous Book Launchers client who spent a year on a 60,000-word manuscript that required scrapping half the text due to poor structure, and ends with a call-to-action pointing to her book Self Publish and Succeed (2nd ed.).
Chapters
Want to know how I saved 1,418 hours when I was writing my book? Too bad I didn't actually save that amount of hours. I made that number up, because how would I ever know the amount of time I saved? But I could have saved that much. Especially if I'd done one thing a little better, planned it properly. Most authors waste months wandering around their manuscript because they don't start with a clear hook, a reader outcome, or a solid outline. One of our clients at Book Launchers, I'll keep him anonymous. But he spent a full year writing his book, brought it to us for editing, and we had to tear it apart. It lacked structure. There were good pieces, but they were in the wrong order. It was built like a house built without a blueprint. Every idea was there. It was just in the wrong place, and the foundation was not there. It lacked structure and no clear hook for the reader. He had 60,000 words, and we had to scrap half of them. That's a year of work gone because he started building before he had a plan. Sometimes planning feels like it gets in the way of creativity. But if you spend just 5, 10 hours outlining, you can save hundreds of hours writing and rewriting. If you spend 30 minutes naming your chapters like each of them are headlines or talk titles, you'll hook readers and the media before your book even launches. And yeah, planning is kind of boring, but so is rewriting your entire book because you didn't do it right the first time. So. So before you start writing, grab a coffee, open a doc, and build your blueprint. Your future self and your editors will thank you. Want the full process? It's in Self publish and succeed the second edition. You can get it right now at self publishandsucceed.com.
