NaNoWriMo for Non-Fiction Authors

All right. Hello and welcome to Tuesday Livestream. Everyone. I'm really excited to be here with you today. And you may not know this, but on November 1st, NaNoWriMo starts. And what the heck is NaNoWriMo? You might be wondering. Well, NaNoWriMo is a national novel writing month, and it is going to be all over social media. So if you are on Twitter or Facebook, probably Instagram. I don't remember a lot of Instagram stuff last year, but Twitter for sure. You are going to see lots of posts with nanowrimo on it. And nanowrimo, you'll see it in the title of this video. It's N A N O W R I M O. So NaNoWriMo is kind of a funky thing. Now we talk nonfiction. So you're probably going, whoa, did Julie go over to the fiction side? No, no. But I think NaNoWriMo is a really cool opportunity for you to write a book. And that is the whole point of nanowrimo. So welcome. Hey, everybody. Angela. Yay, you're here. We'll just call you Mojo for today. How about that? And coach. Not you, Angela. Mojo Sidolak. Coach Deb. Hey, you made it. Awesome. And Jack. Hello. Welcome. Kevin. Welcome. Whoo. It's only 11pm man, it's early. You're going to be so jazzed to be on here today. I'm probably going to have to block you. You're going to be talking so much. You're going to be so alert. Very awesome. So, yeah, we're talking about NaNoWriMo today. I'm just going to get my notes back here off the printer because there are some nonfiction options, but I'm going to tell you why I think NaNoWriMo is what you should do for. For a nonfiction author. So there is actually write nonfiction in November, which is. And there's also a nanon Phi Rhymo. So people are trying to make it for nonfiction. But you know what? NaNoWriMo is everywhere. And you can write whatever kind of a book you want to write in the month of November. The whole point is you take the whole month and you write. You set a word count goal, and you write a book in the month of November. And I like the social aspect of this and the accountability. So let's say you want to write a standard nonfiction book, which is going to be somewhere between 55,000 65,000 words. You can write shorter. You can write longer, too. But, you know, standard. We're talking like, I don't actually know the word count on Mark Magnus book, but this came out Last week. Dream big, never quit. Really inspiring book, you guys. Highly recommend you check it out. But this is probably, I'm going to say somewhere, probably 65, maybe 70,000 words. I don't know. So a standard nonfiction type book, and you break it up. So let's go with 60,000, because I like that number. And there's 30 days in November, I believe, so there. 2,000 words a day. Now, maybe you're gonna take Sundays off, so you're gonna take four days out of that. You're gonna have to do the math to figure out how many words a day you need to write. Or if you want to do it another way, you could say, I need to write 15,000 words a week or break it up however you want. Regardless, you're going to announce at the start of November that you're gonna write a book. This single day, you post your word count. And that accountability, that camaraderie, that will help push you along. Now, I've got a few other tips to help you with this, but I'm just going to check what's going on in the chat here. Betty, you made it. Wonderful. And Dave's avoiding the fires to be here. We're in Los Angeles, and Dave, in case you don't know, is my husband. If you've been watching the YouTube videos, he makes guest appearances from time to time in the videos. And we are actually. We're seeing some smoke, but we aren't that close to the fires. Certainly not that they're impacting us right now. Let's see. Carrie. Ice. I'm not sure what that. Oh, I see where the fires got it. Derek. Hey. I think today's your day. I was thinking about it. I put your name in this little mug so many times. I think today is your day, my friend. Okay, November, word count goal. Does editing and rewriting, first draft count? Certainly. I think that would be a great goal for you. Okay, let's see. All right, so there you go. So some tips. Now for those of you like, Deb's goal is great. She's got a finished first draft, so she just needs to work through it. And a lot of our clients might be at the content editing phase. So a content editor has gone through your book, and then this is kind of the second heavy lift right after you've written the book. That's your first heavy lift. When you get the developmental edit or the content edit back, that tends to be the next heavy lift, because they'll say things like, make a more engaging intro or can you add A story to this. Can you provide an example? So then you gotta do a little bit more digging and a little bit more work. So maybe your goal for the month is to, like Deb said, you know, edit 2,000 words a day or whatever it might be. Now, if you are going to partake, there's a couple things you can sign up. Angela has the link to sign up and hey Daniel, welcome. You can sign up to really make it official that you're part of this. And then there's other things that go on, like some well known authors will give you kind of pep talks, they have tips and other things that will happen, but really you can just say, hey, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo. I'm going to write a book this month and here's my word count goal and just rally with the troops. And the hashtag is NoNoWriMo. Hey there. But I am not an advocate of just sitting down and writing. It is going to be an absolute mess at the end of the month. Even if you're doing this without with planning, it's probably going to be a mess because in order to achieve your word count objective, you are just going to sit down and write every day. You're not going to reread what you've written. You're not going to really spend a lot of time on those words. You're just trying to get the thoughts, the ideas, the stories, the examples out of your brain onto the paper. Then you're going to spend, you know, probably the next two, three, four months refining that work and getting it ready for the public to actually read it. So before you do this, you really want to do a little bit of planning. And if you are going to participate, since it starts on Friday, then some tips for you. So the first, the first thing is really. You got it. And this is probably not going to be a surprise. This can actually be the first question. What do you think my first tip is going to be before you start writing? Sorry, I'm shaking the computer as I'm saying that. So this will be our first prize. So I'm sparing Angela the pain of having to choose somebody from the live stream. What do you think I'm going to say is the first thing you need to do before you plan to participate in NaNoWriMo? Okay, let's see. I'll read the comments while we go. You make a plan, but I want you to be more specific than that, Jack. That's a good guess. This is part of the plan. So there's kind of two Elements that I'm going to suggest are the first two things you really have to think about before you just sit down and write. Buy coffee, Jacqueline. Jacqueline took a month off of caffeine, and today she said, forget that, I'm too busy. And she caffeinated and man, she's like superpowered today. So a month off caffeine and then you buy coffee. That's gonna help you write this book. Yay, Derek. So even if I knew today was your day, Derek, I knew. So, yes, you have to figure out your hook. Your hook. And part of that hook is knowing what your goal is for this book and who your ideal reader is. So, you know, my number one thing here. And I'll just. Just so you guys know, I wasn't playing favorites here. There's my notes right there. You have to have a hook. Hopefully. I think that's backwards, but anyways, you can see I put my notes. You have to have a hook. So you have to have a clear what's in it for the reader? And. And you can then have a stream of consciousness if you want, because everything that you write from this point to the end of November will be all around what is in it for the reader. And I've talked about this hook so many times before, but it never loses its importance. So I'm going to emphasize this again. If you're writing a book about marketing strategy, that is not your hook. The hook is this is the strategy that you need to know your competition isn't telling you. That is going to help you stand out on Instagram in 2020. And it's. You can do it in seven steps or less or something like that. It's like digging a little bit deeper and really honing in. Or it's like, this is how to. I know, like, coach Deb is all over TikTok right now. So maybe her thing would be, this is how to TikTok in your 40s. Not saying Deb's in her 40s. I'm just saying some of us kind of like Snapchat. When Snapchat came out, I was like, what? What kind of Snapchat Kind of feel like that about TikTok? But it's that kind of a book. It's gonna speak to your reader, and you gotta have that before you sit down. Okay, let's see. I'm just checking, you guys. November is a rough month for Nano. Too much Q4 going on. Yeah. Let's see. Looking at my schedule, I'm doing 80k for books next year. Nice. Very Good. Shut my phone off. And social media, that's a very good tip. And Derek says I could not do a month of no coffee, no caffeine. Yeah, no, me either. And while you're here, make sure you guys smash that thumbs up button. It makes me feel good. But it's also really good for YouTube so that they know to keep showing you my stuff so we can hang out a lot more. Also, Derek, just so you know, you are a winner. So you get to choose the fabulous NoboringBooks mug. Many people say coffee, coffee tastes better in this mug. Or of course, the journal, which I have over here. Our journal. So just shoot us an email@teamooklaunchers.com with your mailing address and your choice and we will get you your prize. So thanks so much for watching and always tuning in and participating. Okay. And yeah, Angela just put the email address in there. Coach Deb said, more like TikTok in your 50s. Yeah. Okay. And she's saying she hasn't hit her 40s yet. I'm not going to be the one to talk about this. That's all I'm saying. Okay. The next thing is the outline. And because NaNoWriMo is on Friday, you may not have time to get a really clear outline, but if you have your hook well defined, you can just write down a bunch of things that you want to put in there and it can be restructured later. I mean, why I like nanowrimo is it gives you that accountability and the pressure to get this book out of you. And then once you've got the words on paper, so long as it all follows your hook, it can be restructured. The problem? Some of the manuscripts that come into our office that are hard to save are hard to save because they didn't have a hook, they didn't have a clear what's in it for the reader. And even the reader wasn't clearly defined. And when that happens, it's hard to save the manuscript. And you create a lot of work for yourself, for your team, whoever you hire to edit and so on. And this is how you, you know, we get clients who get their book edited and their book is grammatically correct, but it's not actually good. And this is often because there was no hook. And an editor just went in and said, well, I'm just going to make this, you know, sound better and be grammatically correct. They didn't actually do the hard work of going, okay, what is this person trying to say? And what's the benefit? So. So that's what I would say. If you can take some time to create a bit of an outline so you do have a plan. And then when you're participating in NaNoWriMo, I have a couple tips for you for just writing every day. So I'm just checking, I'm just checking the comments here. You guys are having fun over there. It's always fun when Coach Deb is in the house and Kevin McGuire has an extra hour. He's an hour earlier than normal because he's over in Europe, so it's early for him. So he's got even more energy today. All right, so tips. Plan your schedule. That's number one. And I recommend setting aside that's at the same time every day if you can. So for some of you, this may mean that now for the month of November, you're going to get up at 5am and write from 5am to 6am I don't know. I don't know what your life is like, but that might be what you have to do to just commit to getting this book done. Getting these words out of you every single day, that might be what you have to do. But the more you do it at the same time every single day, the more you train your brain, okay, this is writing time. And it will, after you've done this, I would say probably four or five times in a row, your brain will just know, okay, I'm going to sit down and write for this time of day. Others may prefer, like my husband Dave. He's a night guy, so he would probably set a sign 10 o' clock to 11 o' clock every single night or 10 to midnight because he likes to work at that hour. I'm in bed, I'm asleep. So he has quite a quiet time to do that. So whatever it is, try to schedule it in. And I would say, you know, to achieve this, you're probably going to have to be committed to writing at least six days a week to get your word count out. So try and do it at the same time that you can do every single day, six days a week. And maybe take Sundays off. I don't want to read anything I wrote at 5am Yeah, I get up and work out first thing in the morning. So I'm usually up 5:20 to 5:40am to go to the gym. Not sure if I could actually type a book out at that time, but after I've been to the gym, yes. Okay. And Coach Deb has put it on record here that she's gonna get up at 4am Have a coffee and work on her book. So you guys heard it here. You guys can hold her accountable. Okay then. I mean, besides committing to this, the other tip I have I already said, and that is to make sure that you don't reread anything you've written to make it much easier on yourself, start when you're about to finish your writing session for the day, either start the next sentence that you're going to pick up on where you left off or write down a few bullet points of what you're going to cover next time you sit down so then you don't have to reread to remind yourself where you were at. And by the way, that's also the beautiful thing of NaNoWriMo. I have been working on a book on and off for quite some time. I basically stopped working on it for over a year just because we were getting book launchers going and I really need to focus on building the team and getting our systems in place and all of those things. So I stopped working on it and it's been hard to pick it back up because I don't remember if I told that story already or I covered that tip or I did stuff. So with you working on this, in one month you're going to have a pretty good sense of what you have and haven't talked about yet. So you don't need to reread it. Just type, sit down and type. And don't judge yourself while you're typing this thinking it's terrible. It probably is terrible. Nobody types great words, brilliant prose on the first try. You know, that's what rewriting and editors are for. The goal here is just getting this out of your head. You guys have more tips? Any other ideas? Any questions? Are you going to participate in NaNoWriMo? It starts on Friday. I am curious to hear who's going to be participating. I know Kevin's not too busy. I'm not going to be doing it. I'm almost done my book by. I plan to have it over to my team by the end of next week. So. See checking over here. Rockstar cross training. Yes, Rockstar cross training. Oh, I get up at 7 and I thought I was an early riser. Yeah, no, I am at the gym. I am working out by 6:30. Yesterday I was at 6:00am I was working out and by 6:30 I had already done. Let's see how many I had done 41 push ups and 41 deadlifts. There was a very specific workout that I did and then I followed that up with some rowing and skipping. Yeah. Morning. Okay. Yeah. Jacqueline says she's looking forward to seeing that manuscript. I'm looking forward to getting it off my plate. Okay. All right, Angela, let's do a. Let's do a draw. So let's. Jacqueline, pick a number between 1 and 50, and then Angela will tell you what to do with it. And this will be for our final live stream. And then we'll also do this draw right here for the folks that have been commenting. So for those of you who are maybe new today, I saw a couple names that I hadn't heard before. Hadn't seen you around the YouTube channel yet. So if every Tuesday, every Friday, a new video comes out, every other Tuesday, we do this live stream and hang out together. If you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet, sweet, no boring books swag. And then we do the draw live. Right here. By the way, you guys, November 12th, so the next live stream, super, super special day, we are having a party. I have some awesome new Swag limited edition just for this event because we crossed 1 million views last month on our YouTube channel. So I want to celebrate with you. So we have some limited edition swag just for November 12th. So make sure you are here live because you have to be here live to win that special edition swag. And that will be happening right here, same time, same place, on November 12th. So 2pm Pacific Standard Time, 5pm Eastern Standard Time, and I don't know, Kevin, will we have switched time zones by then? I don't think so. I think we'll still be 11pm Kevin McGuire time. I don't know when our time changes. I can't remember when it's coming up. We might have switched by then. And. Yeah, so that's a big celebration. I'll be posting it on the community tab and of course, in the book Launchers launch letter, which, if you aren't subscribed, you should head on over to book launchers.com and get on the launch letter so you don't miss out on these things. All right, let's see. Jacqueline, did you pick 20? Because the 20th is my birthday. I like that number. All right, Angela, let's go backwards from our broad. Oh, time change. My mom tunes in to tell us the time change is on November 3rd. So, Kevin, it will be midnight again. Sorry. All right. Hey, Mom. All right, so let's go back 20. So count back 20 comments, Angela, and let's find today's winner. Let us know who it Is. And let's see. I'm just reading. Catching. I'm just catching up. Let's see. Catching up. Need my brain. I have to do mornings because I need. When I need my brain to shut down. Night is when I need my brain to shut down. Me too. All right, Jacqueline, let's see. Katie. Oh, hey. Nice to see you here. Yeah. NaNoWriMo, actually a website. I think Angela posted it up above. You can sign up to make it official. It's a not for profit, so you can also donate to the cause, but you can also just participate by putting the hashtag NoNoWriMo and telling everybody and just holding yourself accountable to it. Okay. I never time myself while writing, but I guess it might take me three to four hours to write 2,000 words a day. I don't know, Maybe. I don't know how slow certain people type, but if you think about it, a typical email, which you can fire off pretty fast, is about 250 words. If you're a really slow typer, talk it out. You don't have to type this up, you guys. You could talk it out and then get it transcribed. We like Temi, Temmit.com as a service for transcribing large volumes. It is 10 cents a minute versus Rev.com, which is what I use to transcribe the videos. That's a dollar a minute. It's transcribed by humans, so it's more accurate. Temi is an AI transcription service. So it's not 100% accurate. But for the purposes of just talking it out and getting the words done, if you talk, most of us can talk a lot of minutes, a lot of words a minute, let alone a lot of words in an hour. So you could probably talk out your book really fast. So if you're slow at typing, think it's going to take forever. Try that to achieve your word goals. Where's Angela? Oh, it says message retracted. Oh, of course. Coach Deb would be the 20th comment back. Let's pick someone else. Not that she can't have swag, but I'm going to see her on Thanksgiving and I actually was going to give her some of the limited edition swag, so she's already won. So let's pick someone else, please. All right, Jack, I may bring it down to a thousand a day. Yeah. And you know What? Like, a 30,000 word book is still a decent sized book. Let me see if I can get you an example here. Jacqueline, while you're here, how many words was Mark Megna's book You would probably know. I was guessing. I was guessing it was somewhere around 68,000 to, but I didn't know for sure. Let's see, whose book do I have handy here? That was closer. Well, Ron's book was. Ron's book was shorter. It was even shorter than 30,000. But it's a smaller, smaller book. But, you know, that's. It's still a book. And let's see, what was Casey's book? This is going to be a shorter book. Let's see. Ron's was 15,000, so. Yeah, so 15,000 words. So even 500 words a day in the month of November could get you a small book. And then Casey's book was about 35,000. That's what I would have guessed, too. Okay. Yeah. Jacqueline Marks was a longer one. That's why I figured it was closer to 70,000, but I wasn't sure. Let's see. ACX says the average audiobook narrator is 9,300 words per hour. I mean, they're reading words versus thinking it through, but that's awesome information, Kevin. Thank you. So there you guys go. You can talk out this book book a lot faster than he might be able to write it. So if that's your thing, I highly recommend you do that to achieve your word count for the month. All right, Mojo. Hey, congrats. So shoot us an email@teamoklaunchers.com and let us know which of the book launchers swag you would like. Of course, it's the mug or the journal is your choice for now. But on the 12th, we're going to have some cool limited edition swag to celebrate our 1 million views, which are all thanks to all of you for your comments, your likes, your shares, and just being part of this fun YouTube community. I'm so, so grateful to have all of you around. Okay, so this is for our Tuesday Friday commenters. I'm gonna do two draws here and the same deal. All you have to do is email teamokluxures.com with your mailing address and your choice, and then we'll get it off to you. Okay, so here we go. All right. And we have Michael Lamontang. I don't think I saw Michael on here today. So, Michael, hopefully you're tuning into the live stream replay. Shoot us an email and you'll get your prize. And one more. Derek says he teaches, so he could probably speak out his book in a couple of days. And I can always not use another journal. So you've got a journal just sitting there collecting Dust. All right. Okay, here we go. And I'm having trouble picking one here. Okay, here we go. Oh, I saw. I cheated you guys. I looked at it. Okay. Gotta put it out of my eye range. Okay. Here, I got it. Okay, whose is it? William, Roberto, you are winner number two. So thank you so much for your comments on the videos. It makes my day. All right, so unless you guys have anything else you want to chat about, I am going to close it off today and hope to see a lot of you guys using the NoNoWriMo hashtag on November 1st. And I hope to hear about your completed manuscripts on November 30th. Go get them. All right, just checking the live. The final comments here. I used to work at Michael's and have close to 30 journals. Well, you could always take the mug. You know, you don't have to drink coffee in it. You could drink tea. There's many options. I had neocitrin today. I have a little bit of a sore throat, which you guys don't have in the US you don't have neocitrin, so I have to import it from Canada. But that's a topic for another day. I too am part of the dust collecting journal crowd. You have the mug too. All right, see, you guys are awesome. I have really pretty leather journals. Pens. Send her a box of pens. Okay. All right. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for making my day and being here today. And we will see you on November 12th for a super duper special party celebrating 1 million views with some awesome, awesome limited edition swag for you. So I can't wait to see you guys all here on November 12th. And thanks so much for being here today, you guys, and for participating and having so much fun in the chat. It was awesome. Bye.