#196: How to Organize Your Journals into Book Content

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Do you have a bunch of journals that you've kept over the years that would make great content for your books, but you just don't know where to get started organizing all of it? Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the owner of Author audience academy and trainingauthors.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. And in this training, I wanted to share with you a few tips for organizing your journals for book content. So it was in October 2018 that I taught two different full day workshops at Gathering of Artisans. And one of them was on self publishing. Because that's really something that I've taught for years. I'm an expert in that area. And so I had a full day workshop on self publishing. Well, one of my friends caught me at dinner one night and she was like, shelly, I want you to come over and talk with someone. I think that you could really give her some insight for her books. And so when I'm at conferences and when I'm speaking somewhere, I'm always willing to go above and beyond and even do little mini coaching sessions with people. And so that's really what this ended up being. I ended up talking with this person and she's in the process of writing a series of books and has a lot of content in her journals to use in her books. But she was just stuck. You could just see like the overwhelm on her face that the paralysis of analysis, just that look of being paralyzed by what needed to be done just to organize her journals. And yet she knew that she was to write these books. She knew God had put that on her heart and that she had really great content to share. And so we just started talking and immediately I could tell the place where she's stuck is getting this content organized. And that can be a place where a lot of us get stuck, whether it's research that you're organizing or journals or something else. And I just gave her a simple three step process. And during the process of us talking and just talking through this three step process, all of a sudden I saw her face literally go from being overwhelmed to being lit up with hope that she could actually do this. Like, it was so amazing. And she was like, thank you so much. And I haven't heard back from her, but I Pray that she put it to action and that she was able to move forward in what God has called her to do. And so I thought this would be a great podcast to share with you of just that three step process. So the first step is simply scheduling a block of time to do this organization. So part of the process that I really recommend is called batching. Batching your time is basically doing things in chunks of time so that you're not just doing a little bit of organization here, there, there, or a little bit of editing here, there, a little bit of writing. Like you're doing it in chunks of time. You get in the flow, you get in the process, and then you could really get a lot done. So what I recommend is setting aside a significant chunk of time, whether it's an afternoon, one day, a Saturday, maybe it's a weekend, and you even just go away and you know, get away for the weekend with your journals to get project done. Because I guarantee once you do this, once you get these journals and this content organized, things are going to go much quicker, much smoother and much faster. So the first step is just to block off a chunk of time to do it. The second one is then to think about how you want to divide your journals. So you've written these, you kind of know what kind of content is in the journals. And you could divide them, for instance, into seasons. So maybe there was a season where you were in like say a college season, then it was a single season, then married and children. Or maybe there are other seasons. Maybe, you know, you have different seasons that were related to maybe the type of work that you do or some tragedies that happened in your life. But you could, you know, break it down into different seasons or different times in your life. That way you can also break it down into topics. So let's say there's a topic that you want to write on that's gratitude, or you want to write on the topic of faith or something like that. Then you can go back and as you go through your journals, you can skim through them and start identifying the different places in your journal that you've talked about that particular topic. And so this can be really powerful because you can literally have so many different books just from journal content. Like, I have a lot of content in my book Forgiveness formula on the topic of forgiveness, that came from my journals. Same thing, my book, the Gratitude Journal, it started as my journal, I had no intention of publishing that and it ended up becoming one of my best selling books. So it can be A really powerful thing to break it down into topics, or you can break it down into what you think will be the different types of books that you're going to write. So maybe you're going to do devotionals and you have like different themes for each devotional book that you're going to write. So you can kind of go through and find content that would match that theme for that book. So there's many different ways to organize and categorize, but you just need to figure out a system that will work for the kind of content that you have. And then the third step is then to take some sort of like sticky note or maybe like little tabs, like I've bought those little sticky tabs that are colored and get different colors or be able to write something on it. Colors are great because you can see it at a glance. You just glance down to your journal, you'll see it sticking out to the side. And everything pink is related to gratitude, everything purple is related to faith, or so on. And so you can then just start flipping through your journals. And I really recommend staying on task, you know, not getting caught up in rereading everything because that could take forever. But really try to skim as you skim. I know when I go back through and I skim my journals, it comes back and I'm like, oh yeah, now I remember what I was writing at that time. And then I can put the tab of that color in there and that way you are starting to color coordinate the different seasons or topics or books from the journals that, that you have. And for one of my books that I wrote, that is a resource for Christian women that struggle with pornography. I went back through my journals to get the timelines and to get the details of when did I go to counseling or how long did it even last? I couldn't remember, it's been so long. But when I went back to my journals, I could get some of that information and those details. And I flagged different journals with different things so that I could have that information and be able to share accurately my own testimony and what God really did in my life. And so there's many different ways to do this. But again, the three step process is just as simple as scheduling off a block of time and make it as big of a chunk of time as you can. Gathering all your journals and deciding what kind of different organization process you're going to use. Are you going to break it up into topics, into seasons, into books? Something like that. And then once you have that system down what you'll do is you'll skim back through your journals with color coordinated post it notes or tabs and you'll have a different color for each topic, or a different color for each season, or a different color for each book. And then you'll just flag that in your journal. You'll do it quickly. You're skimming. This is quick. You're not going back and rereading everything word for word. You're skimming. So you're just flipping the pages. Skimming. Okay, this is, you know, I can use that for this. Some of the content you won't ever use. Some of our journals are meant just for us, between us and God, you know, just to process things. But as you're skimming, as you're flipping, you'll put those color coordinated post it notes or tabs on there and then you'll have a system that you can use going forward as you write your books. Now, this is just one way to do it. I would love to hear your tips and the things that have really worked for you. Please share in the comments. If you're here on the blog or on YouTube or on Facebook, share in the comments what has worked well for you. If you're on the podcast, come over and join us on facebook@facebook.com authoraudience or on my YouTube channel, author audience and leave a comment. Let me know what's worked for you. Because that's the way we help one another is by sharing what has worked well for us. I hope you found this podcast and this training helpful. If you have, please share it with a friend. And again, I encourage you to get your journals out, get unstuck, move forward, get them organized and then start writing that book. If you're ready to write the book, I have a great free training for you. It's a seven day writing challenge called Writing Week. You can find it@writingweek.com and I really believe that challenge will help you just really get started and get the content out, get the writing out and help you to find what works best for you in your writing. Again, this is Shelly Hitz and I will see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Author Audience. I would like to invite you to attend one of my free trainings on three proven book writing formulas every nonfiction author needs to know. This is a fun and fast way to write a nonfiction book, but also a book that you're proud of. Plus, I will give you two free gifts just for attending. No credit card required. First, you'll get my 10 nonfiction book title templates and you'll also get my ebook titled Brilliant brainstorming. It's a 28 page ebook and both of these bonuses are yours at no charge. Just for joining us for the training, you can sign up for my free training by going to shellyhits.com formulas. That's Shellyhitz S-H E L L E Y H I-T Z.com formulas. This training and the two bonuses are free, and I would love to help you write your next nonfiction book.

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