The Secret to Choosing a Best-Selling Book Topic

This is episode one of Author Audience.

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.

Welcome to Author Audience where I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message and let you know that it's your time to shine.

Today I'm rolling out the red carpet and inviting you to join me as.

I share the first of a series called Procrastination to publication. My name is Shelley Hitz and I'm the owner of Author Audience Academy where my members are successfully publishing new books almost every day. They truly do amaze me and some have become number one Amazon best selling authors in their categories within days of publishing their books simply by following my proven system. Now I believe you have a God given message to share with the world. Yes, you. You may be listening in your car right now.

You may be at home, you may.

Be working out, but I have a.

Question for you today.

Are you ready to shine? It's time for this week's Center Stage Spotlight training. This is where I share training and strategies to help you grow your business or ministry to through writing and publishing books, marketing online and creating products and services to sell on the back end. Today's podcast is episode one and it's titled the Secret to Choosing a Best Selling Book Topic. But we won't just be talking about book topics, we'll be covering a lot more.

So enjoy today's training. Procrastination is like a credit card. It's a lot of fun until you get the bill. Christopher Parker I know so many of us can relate to that quote because we all procrastinate at some point in our lives. There are things that we put off that we know are really important because there are so many things that we have to get done every day. Many times this is called the tyranny of the urgent that we just are trying to get by day by day to keep up with the to do list. And yet the things that are really important sometimes get pushed to the side. And those things could be our family, our relationships, our health, you know, exercise, eating right and it can be fulfilling a lifelong dream, a purpose for you like writing and publishing a book. It could be something like spending time growing your business, working on your business instead of just working in your business and all the day to day things. Now I want to encourage you as we get started to take a hard look at the truth in your life. Yeah, I want you to do it with grace and not judgment. So many times we have the issue that my mom calls stinkin thinkin', where we get these negative thoughts that just pour in, like, why don't you ever make any progress on that book? Why is that book not finished yet? You should have had that done years ago. And we can start going round and round and it just causes us to spiral downward. So instead of doing that, I encourage you to look at the truth with grace and be able to then take positive action in the right direction, which is making progress on your book. So I'm Shelly Hitz and I'm looking forward to helping you in this process. To get started, let me tell you my own story. My first book took me one year to write and publish. This was back in 2008. I was a speaker. At that time I was still working full time as a physical therapist. And on the side I was writing articles for my website for teen girls. Well, over the course of a year, I wrote enough content that in 2008 I was able to compile that, edit it, add additional information, Bible Studies, leaders, guides, etc. And publish it as a book. However, my last book took me only one week to write and publish. Now, why is there such a huge difference between one year and one week? Well, first of all, I have developed a system over the last seven years that works for me. Now, my system may or may not work for you, but I offer many different alternatives to your personality, to your style, and to the time and the money that you have available. However, I have developed a system that is repeatable and I can now publish a short ebook within a week. And I want to show you how to do this. I'm going to take you step by step through my system. Now, for me personally, I can get it done in seven days. However, because you are just starting the process or just developing your system, it may take you longer. I want to say give yourself at least 30 days, maybe even seven weeks. So one week on each step. But whatever you choose, I encourage you to make a system that works for you. And then repeat it. Rinse and repeat. You know, the more you do it, the more efficient you'll become at it. So I'm excited to hear about you publishing your Kindle ebook on Amazon. It is so easy to do, yet that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone will do it. You still have to take the time. You have to make it intentional. You have to make an intentional decision to do it. And so I encourage you to commit to both yourself and to me that you are going to do this. Stop by my Facebook page and let me know if you are writing your book. It's facebook.com authoraudience now we're going to get into my system. I've broken it down into seven steps and I've tried to make it as simple as possible. So let's get into step number one. Step number one is to choose your topic. Now, you want to be able to narrow down your topic to something, preferably that you have experience in. When you're writing about something you know about, it's going to flow and it's going to come a lot easier than if you're writing something that is brand new to you and you're researching for the first time. Now, that doesn't mean you can't write on something that you're researching, because I've done that as well. Just know that you probably won't be able to write it as fast because you're going to have to get a lot of the background information. And so you want to narrow down your topic to something that you're passionate about, something that you know about, and something that people are interested in. And so you can go to Amazon.com and search on the Kindle books and see what type of nonfiction Kindle books are selling well if they have a sales ranking overall of greater than 10,000. So that means anywhere from zero to 10,000, that book is selling really well. And so you can go and just look at what topics you may really want to talk about. Underwater basket weaving. But that may not be a topic that many people are interested in buying. And as long as you know that, as long as your expectation isn't that you're gonna sell thousands of copies, then go ahead and write that book. I've written books that are just on passion. And because I know that I'm supposed to write those, and I just, I have a burning desire in my heart to write on that topic. However, there's other books that I really researched to see what the demand is. And if you have a business, if you're a speaker, a blog, a business owner, and you want to get more exposure for your business, then you definitely want to choose topics that people are interested in. Because the more interest, the more potential exposure that can.

The more potential exposure you can get. Because Google loves Amazon, and if you rank well in Amazon and people are buying your books, there's a good chance you may rank on Google as well and people may find you that way. So then you want to narrow down your topic and then you want to brainstorm book titles and you can either write the book title based on keywords. So when you do some research on Google, you can look in their keyword tool and you can look and see if many people are searching for your keyword. And you may want to write the title of your book based upon that keyword. For instance, how to write publish a book. I could write my title based upon that, or I could choose something that has more branding to it. My husband is my resident branding expert and he helps me come up with this title, Procrastination to Publication. It has a little bit of a ring to it. They both start with a letter P and it's more of a branding title. However, my subtitle then has my keywords in it. And so what you can do is you can build your book title or subtitle around keywords that will rank well in Google, or you can simply choose a title that really expresses the book, your branding and so forth. It's really up to you. Once you have a topic, the next step is to create an outline. And as you're creating an outline, I know some people just love to fly by the seat of their pants. In the writing world, that's sometimes called a panster. However, I highly recommend if you want to write in the quickest, most effective way that you outline your book first. Every time that I do this, when I create an outline, I am able.

To write that book very quickly.

And so some tools to consider. Some of my favorite first is a mind map. I love mind mapping and you can use online tools, a free tool like freemind or xmind and it's a software that you can use.

And I've actually created the outline for this book in a mind map and you can download it for free@shellyhits.com.

Procrastinationtopublication I love using a mind map because you can move things around. So if you decide that you want chapter one to actually be chapter two, you can easily just drag and drop it and it moves it around. You can do this in Word, you can do this in Scrivener, you can do this in other places. But I just really like starting out in a mind map. You can then copy your mind map into a Word document and then you have the basic of starting your book. So mind mapping is so powerful. You can do it on paper, with paper and pen and just write it out. However, then it's harder to move things around. You have to scratch things off, you have to move things around. So if you really want to use paper and pen, what I recommend doing is mind mapping with sticky notes. And therefore, you can move the sticky notes around, just like you can move the different things around in a mind map. You can move your sticky notes around. You can just do a brain dump. You just put everything in there and then move it around, organize it. And either way that you choose, whether you use the online or digital way with mind mapping, or you use sticky notes or pen and paper, I really encourage you to take the time to put everything on paper. So I mentioned doing a brain dump. Basically, you just put everything that you can think of on that topic in a mind map, in an outline, on sticky notes. And then you can cut things out, you can rearrange, but you get everything out and you're not thinking, oh, did I forget something? What else did I need? And it works really well. I also have done this with a whiteboard. I have a whiteboard in my office and sometimes I'll just get out my markers, my dry erase markers, and I will go to town on my whiteboard doing a brain dump. So whatever you do, it's just important to get started there. Then once you have all of that information, you have the brain dump started and the outline started. I encourage you to outline your chapters first. So you want to ask yourself, what do your readers need to know on this topic? You know, we're talking about nonfiction ebooks. So on your topic, what is it that your readers need to know and give them that information. So in your introduction, you could include the benefits of what they will learn from your book. You know, benefits are different than features. A software may have a great feature, but the benefit is actually that it helps you to save time. So think about what are the benefits that your reader will get from your book. You could include this as a list and then in your chapter one, if possible, include your own story. For instance, I shared that my first book took me one year to write and publish, whereas my last book took me one week. And how I've learned a system and now I can do it so much faster. So if possible, include your story. You can include the before, the turning point, and after. Like I said, for me, the before was it took me one year to write and publish my book. The turning point was I developed a system that works for me. And after, I was able to then write and publish a book in one week. And then you want to outline the main content, chapters, look at the flow. What makes the most sense? Is there something that needs to come before something else. For instance, when you're writing and publishing a book, you need to outline it before you start to write it, or you need to write it before you publish it, those sorts of things. So there may be just a logical order that you go and then the conclusion can simply be a review of everything you've covered in the book. It's good to just include all the key points and our steps because we have short term memory and so giving that repetition really helps. And it helps to give closure to your book, especially when it's nonfiction. Once you have those chapters set up, now it's time to start filling in the meat of your book. Basically, you'll just put three to five main points under each chapter. Some chapters may have more depending on how long that they will be. Now, like I said, I'm recommending that you write a short ebook. Put in three to five main points for each chapter and you have got a solid outline to start with.

Lights Camera Action Are you ready for this week's Take Action tip? What I recommend that you do is go through the process of choosing your book topic and then start the process of outlining your book as described in this training. It's powerful. I actually take people through this process in one of my live webinars and we finish this within an hour. So you can do this. And if you'd like to join me on my next live webinar, you can join me@authoraudience.com.

Webinar also, make sure to get all the show notes and the resources from Today's episode@authoraudience.com 1 that's the number one. Authoraudience.com 1 Before we end, I want to give you a backstage pass in this week's Godly Gain segment, which is all about keeping Christ at the center of all we do. In the end, it's not about us, it's truly about Him. As we're choosing a book topic and.

As we begin to outline our book.

I recommend praying and asking God for wisdom. James 1:5 says, if you need wisdom, ask our generous God and He will.

Give it to you.

He will not rebuke you for asking. Don't you love that? Ask our generous God and He will.

Give it to you.

So if you need wisdom, if you need help on choosing a book topic, I recommend praying and asking God for wisdom and he will show you. He will lead you and guide you and show you in the right way to go. It's my hope and my goal that these episodes are bringing you one step closer to being able to shine and reach more people with your message. If you've been getting value from this podcast and feel the urge to leave a review, I have a special gift for you. Simply post a review and send me a screenshot and I will give you my $47 course procrastination to publication for free. It includes this entire training as well as video training on how to use sticky notes to outline your book. I'll send you that training for free when you email me your screenshot of your review on itunes. For this podcast, Just email me@contactellehits.com and I'll send you this gift. Thanks again for joining us this week for Author Audience and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.