#336: Publish with a Purpose: Creating a Concrete Plan to Complete Your Book

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelli Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

Welcome back, Kingdom Writers, to this Publish With a Purpose episode. My name is Shelli Hitz, and today we're going to be talking about creating a concrete plan to complete your book. If you're interested in self publishing and you just want to see kind of an overview of what it really takes, I've. I've created for you a publishing map and it's actually a drawn diagram, so you can see that too. But then there's an overview video, so you get that for free at trainingauthors.com forward/publishing-map. But today we're going to talk about, like, what does it really mean to create a concrete plan to complete your book? We have a free group currently, it's called Kingdom Writers Community and you can join us for free@trainingauthors.com forward slash group. And in that group, Burl asked this question says, I have so many books in the pipeline, I need a concrete plan to complete one at a time. And yes, that is so important. As creatives, we typically have so many ideas. You have no idea how many ideas I get every day. And yet I cannot implement all of them. I just don't have the time, I don't have the energy, and I simply don't have the resources. And so we have to prioritize. It's. I mean, I have to like daily be prioritizing. And I've gotten really, really good at it. I know, what are my top priority tasks? What are the things that I really need to get done? What are the things that are just nice to have and what are the things I can delegate and, and all of that. But when you're writing a book, it's going to be so important to say, okay, which one am I focusing on in this section? Season? So number one, I want you to pick one book. And I've talked about this before, but you know, you can treat, think about treating your book projects as children. You love all your children. You know, you're not going to say, oh, I have a favorite. Most of you, I would say, wouldn't say, oh, this is my favorite child. You know, you love them all. But there will be times when you will need to prioritize one child over the other and for instance, my niece will be graduating this coming school year and my sister is going to have to be prioritizing some things to help her with that process of graduation, you know, planning for what's next with college and scholarships and all of the things, but also planning a graduation party and celebrating her and all of the things that goes into that. Does that mean she loves my other niece any less? Absolutely not. She's just prioritizing her oldest daughter right now. And so, you know, you have to pick one book and you can, you can jump around. You know that there are a lot of people that still do that but choose seasons. So instead of saying, one day I'm going to be writing this, the next day, this. What if you even just said one week, you know, this week I'm going to be working on this. And then the next week, every time you switch tasks and you context switch in your brain, you have to change. You have to get into the mindset of, okay, what was this book about? And, and it may feel more fun in the, in the meantime, but it makes it harder to really make significant progress because you're always context switching. But I also gave you some, give you some ideas on which book to write first in a previous podcast episode. So we'll include that link in the show notes. So make to check that out. So number one, pick one book. I know it's hard, I know it's hard, but pray about it, ask the Lord. And then, you know, you can always change it later, but just pick one. Then number two, set up a 90 day plan. So a lot of people talk about this because it's, you know, to, to, to see a whole project all at once can be so overwhelming. But when you break it down into 90 days and think about, okay, this next three months, this next 90 days, what is my main goal for this time? So you're gonna choose your goal. That doesn't mean that you're actually gonna have the book finished. Maybe you'll have so many chapters done or maybe you'll have, you know, the first draft done or whatever it is that you want. I have a training inside Christian Book Academy, if you remember. It's called the Clarity Call training and it's in our orientation module that you can find there. But in that lesson, I give you a ton of ideas depending where you're at on the Kingdom Writer's. So the Kingdom writers path is first draft, final draft, self publish, book launch, and then impact lives with ongoing marketing. So I give you a lot of ideas of what your 90 day goal can be in that lesson. If you're a member, go take advantage of that. But basically you're going to choose your goal. What will your main goal be for the next 90 days? Take into consideration how much time you have, how much energy do you have, any physical issues that limit you. Um, and we often tend to, to to guess that we can do more than we can do. I, I almost always estimate like that I can accomplish more. And then I get frustrated sometimes when I don't get everything done. So don't set your up self up for disappointment and frustration. Choose a realistic goal and then start brain dumping the steps it will take. So just writing out like what is it going to take for that 90 day goal? Organize those steps in the order that you'll need to take. And we actually did a previous episode. It was, this was actually years ago on a night setting up a 90 day publishing plan. So we'll include that link in the show notes as well. You can go back at the time I think I was setting up a 90 day plan for a book and I was sharing some of that. But there's even more detail and more tips on that in that episode. And then. So first you're choosing one book. Second, let's set up a 90 day plan. Third, you just need to start taking action. And I know that's sometimes the hardest part, right? But last week I talked about using a timer as a tool to avoid procrastination. And you can use that in this plan as well.

When you're trying to just start taking action. But I want you to choose one to three things to focus on maybe each day or each week. Like it depends on how much time you really have to devote to this. This is your whole career and your main job or you're retired or whatever. I mean you can probably choose one to three things a day. You know, if you don't have as much time, you may choose I'm going to do these one to three things for the entire week or for the entire month. So you just kind of have to figure out what's going to work best. And I really recommend that you use some kind of project planner. You can use trello asana ClickUp but if all of those overwhelm you don't, don't use any of those if you don't already know how to use those because it may just get you stuck. Instead just go and you can Google print printable calendar and just print out a calendar put for the month, for the next three months. With your 90 days and just write on there or just take some sticky notes. And so you know, you have your big list of stuff. Just put your one to three things and put each one on a separate sticky note. You know, you know the task one, task two, task three, you have three different sticky notes for that day or three different sticky notes for that week or month. And that way you're not looking at the entire thing, you're not looking at everything, you're just looking at those three things and you get that done. Then you move on to the next day or the next week. You choose your next three things. I will tell you, it's so simple, but planning out my days and my weeks and I look ahead. You know, every week I'm like looking ahead. I have my main calendar on Google Calendar and I'll be looking ahead on what's coming up, what are the big things. And then I have a project planner that I'm using and every day I'm planning out like what are the things I'm going to get done today. It makes such a difference. But we also have a previous episode about six creative ideas to finish your book. So if you're not stuck in the project planning part of it, but you're mostly just stuck in like actually getting the writing done, this episode might help you a little bit more. And I'll put that link in the show notes as well. But let's recap. So creating a concrete plan to complete your book. First of all, you've gotta prioritize and pick one book. Second, set up your 90 day plan. You know you're going to choose your goal brain, dump the steps and then organize those steps in the order you need to take. And then number three, you just need to simply take action. Choose one to three things to focus on somehow, you know, have a big list in one place and then just have your one to three things that you're looking at each day or each, each week, each month. But put all of the other things aside. Don't be staring at that because that will just lead to overwhelm. And I know because I've been there before.

But I hope that this was helpful to you. And if you're ready, if you're ready to dip your toe into self publishing or you just want to have a quick win or maybe you're just wanting to just get something out there in the world. Right now we have a workshop for you. It's called Procrastination to Publication where I teach you my five step system to self publish a Kindle ebook on a budget in as little as 30 days and so you can get that workshop@procrastinationtopublication.com we'd love to have you join us and I hope this episode was helpful. If so, leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you and share this with any writer friends that you have that may benefit from it as well. All right, I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you as a Christian writer have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.

Sam.