Tyler Wagner explains why most writers never finish books: they perfect titles and introductions first, fueling procrastination. His backwards method dumps all topics, groups them into chapters, writes each independently, then orders them and adds the intro and title last.
Chapters
Why you should write your book backwards. Now I know that sounds crazy, but I need you to stick with me because this video is going to change your life. Actually just started raining, gonna turn on the headlights. So this video is gonna change your life, and I mean that seriously because I know from being in the publishing business for 7 years why most people never finish their books. So, why you should write your book backwards. My name is Tyler Wagner. I'm the founder of AuthorUnite.com and I'm gonna tell you why you should write your book backwards right now. Here's the deal. Most people, why they don't finish their books, it's because they're perfectionists. So they are trying to come up with the best title, the best subtitle, the best introduction. They're looking for people to write forewords for their book. They're doing all this stuff that prevents them from actually finishing the book. Okay? Now, why are they doing this? They're doing this because writing is hard. Writing is not easy, and typically what we do as humans is when something is hard, we'll do anything in our power to avoid it. So we'll get busy. We'll do a bunch of things. We'll try to find people for the foreword. We'll make another pot of coffee. We'll call a friend. You know, we'll do all these things to just not actually get to the thing that's actually gonna get you the results you want. So, Here's how you actually should write your book. First thing you should do is get everything out of your head. So every, every, basically every little thing that you can think of that you want to write about, like topic, every topic you can think about that would go along with your book. So let's just say you're writing a health book, okay? So you're writing a book on health. So a possible thing you want to talk about is like morning routines, what to eat at lunchtime to like give you more energy to work throughout the day, right? So these are just a bunch of options, right? So you're writing a book on health and you come up with like 50 different topics that you could write about, right? You get them all out of your head, all on paper, okay? So then they're all out of your head, they're all on that paper. Then the second step, right, is you look at them and you start to piece together things that could be chapters. Then you start to create your chapters. Now listen, do not organize them at all. Don't put them in any order. You're just creating chapters, okay? Not 1, 2, 3, just chapters, chunks, think of it. Okay, so you realize that like you came up with a topic of coffee, coffee benefits, okay? Benefits of coffee, and you also have another thing about morning routine. So coffee benefits could go inside of the topic of morning routines, okay? So those two things grouped together, that's a chapter, okay? And you do this, maybe you find some of your topics just don't fit the book, okay? So you're like, ah, I don't know, I don't need this topic in the book. So you get rid of that. And then some topics are just on their own, could be their own. So let's say you do this, you know, you got 50 on there, you go through this exercise and then you knock it down to 15. So you got 15 chapters. Now what you're going to do is you are not, again, do not put them in order yet because that is just you trying to not write. Okay? That is you coming up with things to do to keep putting off the inevitable pain of writing, which it's actually kind of a good pain. Actually kind of feels good in some sick way. But okay, so then what you do is this, is you, you take all of your 15 chapters, write them one at a time. Again, don't try to organize them. Don't do any of that. Just write each chapter separately as like a blog post. Okay? You pick the length. People ask me all the time, how long should my book be? Who cares? However long it needs to be to provide the most value possible to your target audience. That's how long it should be. Okay? So if each chapter's 2,000 words, great. If one chapter's 10,000 words and another chapter's 2,000 words, fine. Um, whatever it needs to be. So write each one separately. So at the end you have 15, at the end you have 15 chapters, uh, written. Okay? But they're not in order. Now here's the funny thing is that you'll be able to put them in the correct order, um, after they've all been written. Because you've gone through the process. You know what the chapters say. So now the order will pretty much come naturally to you, whereas what you wanted to do at first is you wanted to put them in order before actually writing them, which is very difficult, okay? So then you can put them in order. Then you write your conclusion. Then you write your introduction. And then you actually do your title and your subtitle last, okay? So most people try to come up with their title first. Okay, but look, this is— and you're gonna realize how funny that actually is. Now, the logical mind would think, yes, come up with the title first. Okay, but when you think about what I just said, the whole backwards concept is coming up with a title after the book is written is so much easier because you've already written the entire book. You already know what it is. So coming up with a solid title after the whole thing's been written, a lot easier. Okay, so not to beat a dead horse here, but you get the point. So And just a quick tip on titles. For titling your book, I always like to go with end result titles. So for instance, like Tim Ferriss, what he did, right, it's an end result title, so The 4-Hour Workweek. So if you read the book, you know, that's the end result if you apply all his principles that you'll get, right? My first book is called Conference Crushing, and basically, you know, that's the end result. If you read this book and apply the principles in it, you'll be able to crush all your conferences and networking events. Okay, so end result titling. The subtitle is more of a descriptor of the book and also good for keywords to rank on Amazon. Probably do another video on all that. So, so that's what you do. So basically, right, you're not literally writing your book backwards, you're just doing the process backwards. Okay, so the title ends up coming last whereas I'm gonna guess all of you watching this video are gonna do that first. So, hope this helped you. I really hope to see your books out there because I know a lot of you want to become authors. It's just daunting at first, so get them out there. If you need any help or have any other questions, just go to AuthorUnion8.com. We have amazing resources there, and I will talk to you soon, soon, soon, and I will see your books up on Amazon and Barnes Noble and everywhere else. That books are available. Talk to you soon.
