Overcome Book Writing Challenges with These Simple Steps

Look, it's not a secret that writing a great book around your business is a great strategy to maximize your income and your impact. Books lead to media, speaking, influence, shorter sales cycle, and they help you hire rock stars into your business. But writing a great book can be so flipping hard. And honestly, I don't have a magical solution to make it easy because, well, let's be real, anything worth doing is usually going to take a little pain. But if you want to know why it can feel hard and what to do about it, well, good news. This video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers which started as a self publishing services company, but we've expanded into hosting communities to support you, like our Author Business Accelerator community. We have courses and soon software. Of course we still have services. So if writing your book for your business is a real challenge, your first solution should be to schedule a call with us to chat about how we can help. And you can do that right here@book launchers.com apply but why is it hard? Well, writing a book for your business can be challenging for several reasons, the least of which is the time commitment. Writing a business book is a significant undertaking that often takes much longer than you expect. I can't tell you how many authors I talked to that have been working on their book for years. Even if you know what you want to write, it's not always easy to sit down and hammer it out. I've talked about it before, but when I was writing Self Promote and Succeed, even when I had time, I didn't have the mental capacity for the book because I was dealing with so many issues. If you're curious about that, well, I shared all the dirt on that in our seven year anniversary video which you can find on the channel. But there was all kinds of problems, from immigration issues to a death in my family, to financial challenges with the business and more. It was a bear of a year and I couldn't seem to finish the book even when I had all the time to finish. So I get it. There's also financial considerations. So many people with a fabulous story hit me with the question, but will I make any money back? And the answer is not always on book sales alone. We do have many authors that make the cost of our full service support back in the first year the book is out. That's almost never from book sales alone. A few authors have seen the money back in the months around their launch just from book sales, but I'm saying a few and we've worked with hundreds. In fact, last time I checked we were working with our 750th author. Not all ended up launching and some came to us post launch, but you get the picture. My point is that if you're writing a book and you want income from that book, you need to be building a business around it or writing for your business. Like I did with Self Publish and Succeed and self Promote and Succeed books can be incredibly lucrative, but you need to have a clear goal and a good plan of what you're going to use it for. I started a new community called the Author Business Accelerator. I'll put the link below so you can join if you want. We built this community around the sole principle idea that authors should be building an income and building their impact around their book. And to do this they need to build their brand, grow their platform, leverage the IP that is their book over and over to monetize it with courses, consulting, talks, services and more. When you do that, you'll find the money flows and so does the good you're doing with your story expertise and the tools you share. A book is not usually a way to make quick money. So what I will say to any author hesitating because of financial considerations is that you will always wish you had your book done yesterday. So today is always the best day to start. But it's not something that generally starts seeing an ROI for three to six months after it's been launched. So you have to take a long term look at this. When you make the financial decision to move forward with a book, the next one is market saturation. When you look into books that are already out, it's to easy easy to feel discouraged because there's most certainly other books talking about what you're talking about and that can make the project feel hopeless at times or just not as exciting. But here's what I'll say to that. Make sure you're writing a great book. Don't write something that AI can write, because if you do well, don't expect to stand out and make sure you know your reader really well, because when you do that, you'll find that you still have a book that will be appealing and will help you grow your brand and your business. Skill requirements is another thing. And writing a full length book requires different skills than other forms of business writing. Even if you think you're a good writer, structuring a book, telling stories, that's a different skill than writing a blog post or a technical paper, or being able to write a letter to the Editor. It takes understanding of story structure, how people like to consume long content, and it's a skill gap. And while it can be filled by reading books, watching videos, taking classes, or working with writing coaches, it still can make the experience feel hard. So how do you make the process easier? Well, first, know your big picture goal. Before starting, understand why you want to write a book. Having clear goals beyond just making money will be the thing that keeps you going. For me, it's always knowing how many people my book can help and the things that we can do with my book once it's out that will help the business. One of the things we use my books for is testing, testing new promotions, services and other processes so we can use it, see if it works, and then apply what works for our clients. But I also think it's important to know what your bigger picture goal is before you start writing because it will help ensure that you're positioning the book to do what you hope it will do. The next thing to do is to choose the right topic, select a subject that you're passionate about, that you have expertise and stories in, and that addresses an underserved market. Sometimes authors start writing a book because they feel like they have to write that book, but they're not actually into it. Well, when you do that, it makes it way harder than it should be to write a book. So my suggestion is to find something that you're passionate about and where that intersects with your business. Take Jonathan Stanley's book as an example. I think because he wrote a book he was so passionate about, he's enjoyed so many successes, including a ton of book awards. His book Purposeful Performance shares decades of experience as a business owner and CEO and shares a powerful framework that simplifies strategic planning into just eight four plus four slides. He is very passionate about helping businesses combine engagement, customer experience and social impact to create a legacy that goes beyond the bottom line. He could have written all kinds of business books, but he found a subject he was passionate about. And while he won't tell you the book writing process was easy, you will hear him talk about it with smiles. I'll actually link to a video from Jonathan at the end of this because he shared his experience with you or with us to help you. The next thing is to assemble a support team. Writing is a team effort. Book launchers can help in a lot of ways. We have a community that is free and you can join for our writing sessions, training and more. I'll put that link below. We also have writing coaches who will coach you one on one and a course called Self Publish and Succeed. There's also writing groups and you can get an editor who works alongside you or just beta readers who can read what you're writing while you're writing. Whatever you do, writing alone can be very difficult. And book publishing, well that is definitely a team sport. You won't succeed alone, so start assembling your team early and make it more fun. All right, so something else to do to make it easier. Consider alternative approaches like use a ghostwriter to interview you to help craft the book based on your ideas and expertise and stories. We have ghostwriters by the way. Fabulous ones. So if you want an entire team, including a ghostwriter and a marketing team that surround you as you go through this book, launchers.com apply another approach is to talk it out. Who says you have to sit at the keyboard, get a good outline and then start talking and record it. A few of our clients have talked and walked. They do their best thinking on the move so they would talk the book out. So send us the transcripts and our writer would edit them and get it polished for the editors to take over. Others will get the transcript and work on it themselves. All I'm saying is you don't have to sit at the keyboard to get this done. My personal favorite because I hate starting with a blank page is to repurpose existing content from blog posts, podcasts, presentations or other materials you've already created. For this, don't start with the content and figure out what the book will be. Figure out what the book will be first and then fit the content into that. But you'll find your book is pretty fat word wise before you know it. If you follow one of these approaches. Another strategy to make this easier Plan for profitability. Cha Ching Think beyond book sales though. Your book is a business and it can be a highly profitable one if you look at it as the valuable intellectual property that it is. Turn it into courses and workshops, then seek international right sales. We have a partnership with Drop Cap. We pitch our clients to them, they to represent, but you can also get on their international marketplace. If you use our link you can go to book launchers.com dropcap there's a fee to sign up, but if there's international interest in your book, they just might represent you and you could be seeking international rights like our clients Nick Hutchison and Carol Sanford. They got some international deals which is really cool. Regardless, plan for your book. Not to be the end but the start and get excited about all the money you can make while having a big impact. And another strategy is just start today. I always find that procrastinating makes everything worse, and if I just started taking action today, I would make progress in time and the things I thought were hard would get easier every day. So you can start today by reading Self Publish and Succeed. And as you're reading, work through the material to develop your hook and your outline. Or join our free community on school and start participating and following those lessons. Or start jotting down ideas or recording voice notes and just clearing time in your schedule to make forward momentum happen. Sitting there and staring at a giant item of Write Book, Write my book makes it seem impossible. But if your task list is Read a chapter of Self Publish and Succeed or join the writing sessions with book launchers, write an outline, Write section one of the first chapter. Suddenly the book seems possible and you'll make progress before you know it. Now here's how to work with a ghostwriter on your book and it's useful even if you're not going to hire a writer. And this video is all about how big your book should be. Both are fantastic. So click on over and say hello when you get there. I always comment back, go ahead and test me.