I thought about dictating this entire book, but my house is way too loud right now. Plus, I record five podcast episodes a week. My voice needs a little break.
If writing seems daunting to you, then I wholeheartedly recommend dictating your book. I work with many people who use this process, and they create amazing books fast.
Writing Location
Whether writing or speaking your book, location is critical. Your time is very precious, and I don’t want to waste any of it. You need a space where you will not be disturbed for your entire writing time block.
I live with two kids, a dog and lots of insanity. My newborn son has very little regard for my work, and cries whenever he is hungry. I can’t tell him to be quiet. He’s a baby.
When I’m deep into writing, I wear my green headphones. My family knows that I wear these headphones when I’m working on something important, and they don’t disturb me.
Some people like to write at a coffee shop. I just can’t write in public like that. I get very distracted, and my writing slows down. Right now I’m at my desk, facing the ocean through a giant window. I get to see paradise, but distractions are kept to a minimum.
Your writing location should be sacrosanct. Write in the same location every time and you will begin to train your mind. When you sit down at your writing location and put on your writing headphones, your brain knows that it’s time to get serious and focus.
Writing Time of the Day
Some people write in the morning, and some write in the evening. Everyone is different. Your time may be controlled by your work schedule or your personality. I prefer to write earlier in the day because I write faster in the morning than I do in the evening.
My writing sessions start early in the morning. I know my rhythm, and I work with my body. Trying to fight yourself is just too hard.
It might take a little while to find the rhythm that works best for you. If this is your first writing project, experiment a little to find the best time for you to write. Once you find your optimal writing time, stick to writing at the same time every day. Writing at the same time of day will ensure that your book maintains consistent quality.
Burnout
Every writer is different. Some people can only write five hundred words a day, while others can write twenty thousand without breaking a sweat. Trying to push yourself for higher word counts too fast can become counterproductive.
When you are working there will come a moment when you notice your attention fading. The quality of your sentences drops. Your body is showing the first warning signs that you are out of gas.
It’s tempting to push yourself, to keep grinding until you hit your target word count, but this is a mistake. You will exhaust your brain, risking burnout. The quality of your work will diminish. You might crank out a few more pages or chapters, but during the editing process you will have to rewrite most of this content. You are saving time now that will cost you far more time in the future.
In 20K a Day, I cover extensive speed-writing techniques and how to increase your daily word counts. Writing is a skill, and you train to develop it, just like going to the gym. If you start by adding to your target each day, you will strengthen your writing muscles. If you start out writing five hundred words on Monday, shoot for five hundred and ten on Tuesday. Stay there for a few days and try five-twenty on Friday.
Each time you increase your word count, stay at that level for a few days before you push yourself again. It might not seem like big changes, but after a month you could be at six hundred words a day. That is a twenty percent increase in your productivity. That is a massive gain!
Routine and Ritual
I’m a big believer in the power of ritual. I like to create rituals to bring my body and mind into alignment before I write. A ritual is simply the act you perform before each writing session.
Your pattern might start when you come home from work. You know you are going to write, so you begin to prepare yourself. You eat dinner and then start your ritual. First, you take a shower to remove the smell of the office from your body and to cleanse your mind. Then you put on your favorite writing sweatpants and make a cup of tea. You toast a bagel and take your writing snack to your special nook.
You put on your special blue headphones and sit down at your desk. You fire up the computer and read your favorite comic for ten minutes. Once you are caught up and you have a little entertainment inside you, you open Scrivener and begin writing. Writing comes naturally; every step in your ritual moved you closer to your writing state, that mental place where the words just flow from your body.
My personal ritual is different because I write in the mornings. I follow the same steps every single day before I begin writing. After checking my email, reading my favorite two comics, and catching up on the news, I fire up Scrivener. My pre-writing tasks take thirty minutes or less, and that gives my brain time to wake up and shake off the cobwebs.
Once I start writing it is very easy for me to stay in the zone. My body knows this pattern. Just like athletes warm up before they step into the arena, I warm up before I start writing. Ritual is very powerful. Choosing a consistent time and location to write is the foundation of your writing ritual. Develop a pattern that works for you and lock into it.
My ritual is why I don’t experiment with new pieces of software very often. I am aware that there are other writing tools out there that compete with Scrivener in different ways. Plenty of people love those tools and swear by them. I am locked into my personal ritual, and I only make changes when there will be a large spike in productivity.
Time is a precious commodity, and anything that gives me back more time is valuable.
Writer's Block
I’ve never experienced writer’s block. I know that makes me sound like a pretentious know-it-all, but please give me a moment to elucidate.
Large-scale writer’s block is when you are staring at a page and have no idea what to write about next. You are sitting in front of a typewriter with a blank page loaded up and have no idea what key to press first.
The smaller version of writer’s block is when you know what you want to say, but you can’t find the words. You can envision how you want the scene or chapter to play out, but you’re stuck on how to make it happen. You want to get your hero from the garden to the castle, but you just can’t feel the right path yet.
The cure to big picture writer’s block is outlining and research. If you have your plan in place before you start writing, the steps are easy.
You can see exactly where this section is going. In my tiny window right now, I am writing my section about writer’s block. I’m done thinking about ritual, and I won’t think about outsourcing until I open those windows. I had to look at my folders to even see the previous and next section topics. My mind locks into a tiny task and stays there until it is completed.
When you have a deeply researched and well-structured outline, you always know what to write about next.
Sometimes a single scene or chapter has you trapped with micro-writer’s block. You know where you want to go but just can’t seem to write the words to get you there. When you’re stuck here, Scrivener is awesome. You just skip the scene.
This book is organized into approximately twenty folders which will eventually be my chapters. Each folder has five to ten little files that will become headings within the chapter. If I’m stuck, I just go work on something different. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does I leave that part for a later date. Sometimes I need to do more research, and sometimes I just need to let my brain rest.
When I come back the next day, I’m able to tackle that chapter without problems.
The order of chapters can be very fluid as you create your story. I've already written half of a section in the final chapter of this book. I was writing about Clickbank, and I started to go off topic. It happens. I just moved the file to a later part of the book.
Nobody cares how fast you wrote your book. They don’t
care about the order in which you wrote it. Your audience can’t tell. They think of a book in terms of how long it took them to read it. For some people, this is a one-day book. Some people read very fast. For others, this book may take several weeks, and they think of this book as much longer. For them, it is a project and a commitment.
Your readers only care about the finished product and their experience. Give them a great experience and write the chapters in any order you feel like!
Outsourcing
Perhaps you grabbed this book because you want to build a writing empire. You want to sell books, not write them. That’s understandable. Using ghostwriters can speed up your entire process. You can generate multiple books simultaneously and grow your business much faster.
There are several challenges with hiring ghostwriters, mostly built around price, speed, and quality. You can hire a phenomenal writer, but if they take two years to write one book, that won’t help your business very much.
Some people jump into the Kindle game and pay someone in another country to write their book for under a hundred bucks.
They start cranking out books as fast as they can and are shocked when the negative reviews start rolling in. Is a thirty-three-page book really a book?
Sometimes a very short book is valuable. When you take a big subject and break it down for your customers, shorter can be better. But I don’t brook corner-cutting when it comes to content.
A few bad reviews can kill a book, a pen name, and eventually your entire Amazon account. When you hire the cheapest writers you can find, you will have books filled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. On the PSAT, I scored a perfect in the English section. I didn’t make a single mistake, and yet my books are littered with typos before I edit. There is an excellent chance that someone will find an error that slipped through the cracks and email me about it. When that happens, I fix the mistake and upload the new version to Amazon.
When you hire a discount writer, you have to do a LOT of editing to bridge the gap. My last book, Serve No Master, is just over ninety thousand words. I wrote the first draft of the book in four days, but I spent more than one hundred hours on editing and rewrites. Editing is a much slower process than writing. Writing is about letting the words flow and unlocking your creativity. Editing is about being laser-focused and fastidious. (I’ll teach you how to edit faster in the next chapter.)
You can hire good talent when you have a definite plan in place. I have a template you can use to hire writers; just reply to one of my emails and ask for it. In general, a decent writer will charge 2-8 cents per word. There is a range and depends on the project scope. You can hire a decent non-fiction writer for a ten books that are ten thousand words each. This writer will cost you around two grand.
When you hire writers for one book at a time, the price will go up. That’s just the nature of the beast.
The primary place to hire writers right now is UpWork. Most of the freelance writing websites merged into a single source.
Even when hiring another writer, I prefer to handle the initial outline myself.
You don’t want to publish a book that you haven’t read or don’t understand. Releasing content without being on top of your game is risky. One of my friends purchased some cheap content, threw it on Amazon, got flagged for plagiarism, and now he’s banned for life. He didn’t steal the words, one of his employees did. When you are the boss, the buck always stops at your doorstep. You can’t blame the outsourcer when you get caught with stolen content.
You can certainly hire other people to write your books, and I’ll continue adding more content to my website covering this topic in greater detail. Whether you write the book yourself or hire someone else, you want to handle the editing phase correctly.
12
Tools of the Trade - Editing
Grammarly is the most glorious tool in my entire collection. It might not be able to replace a human editor, but this tool will correct at least eighty percent of the mistakes a human editor would catch. I wrote one of the longest blog posts of my life reviewing this tool and breaking down the hundreds of reasons that I love it.
Grammarly connects to a central server and scans your writing for loads of errors, mistakes and just plain wordiness. I straight up love this tool, and EVERYTHING I write gets run through this before anyone else sees it. It scans my blog posts for me in real time and ensures that I don’t look like a dumb-dumb because of some typos. No matter how much we want to deny it, typos make us think the writer is dumb.
Grammarly works perfectly with Scrivener. I pull one section at a time to edit. I can keep my editing process laser-focused and avoid feeling overwhelmed by the thought of hours and hours of editing. Editing in this way creates loads of stopping points. It’s very easy to stop between sections when you get tired.
I cannot speak the praises of Grammarly enough. The tool is always improving and growing. Each time I use it, I can see that the software is getting smarter. Eventually, Grammarly may achieve sentience and start sending robots back in time to kill our heroes, but until that day comes this tool is pure gold for the independent writer.
Hemingway
If you write fiction, Hemingway is not optional. You must grab this tool. We have a tendency to write wordy sections that just take far too long to get to the point. Unfortunately, most of your audience reads at a third-grade level. If your writing is too long and complicated, your audience will get turned off. They might even think you are pretentious.
Hemingway looks at your sentences and tells you to cut it out. This wonderful little tool analyzes each sentence and assigns a color. You know exactly where to chop things down. Personally, I use Grammarly a lot more than Hemingway, but at ten bucks right now this guy is a total steal.
I am testing Hemingway on more of my projects, and for fiction it is simply crucial.
Word
Though it might surprise you, my books do eventually end up in Word. I hate writing in Word, but this is where I do a lot of my final blocking and formatting. My books go through Word before they end up in CreateSpace.
Once my book has been through my entire editing process, Word is the final step. I run the built-in Spelling and Grammar check across the entire document. Word will catch mistakes that Grammarly misses, as the algorithm works in a different way. Eventually, Grammarly will become so smart that I don’t need Word, but right now a final scan is worth it.
Word sends in some false positives, but it’s worth the effort. The more mistakes you can catch via automation, the better.
13
Editing
The Kiss of Death
There is one type of review that can murder a book. When someone leaves a review pointing out the bad grammar and spelling in a book, that book will die. It’s the sniper bullet that kills new books from a thousand yards. Some reviewers think they are being helpful by pointing out that the author couldn’t afford an editor but really should have used one anyway.
This review is honest, but it’s also brutal. You must do everything in your power to avoid one of these. Cutting corners in your book creation or outsourcing process will leave you with a book riddled with errors. This book right now is loaded with errors. I’m in the initial writing phase. But there is no way on earth I would release it onto Amazon in this state.
Spend as much on editing as you can afford. Some editors are brutally expensive, and you have no choice but to do it yourself. Do your best and get friends and family to help you as well. Do whatever it takes to avoid getting the “death review.”
I read a new book every day. I am a voracious reader, but when I see one of these reviews I still won’t read the book. Even as someone who knows how hard handling the editing process on your own can be, I still move on. Do not screw around with the editing process or you might end up with the mark of death on your Amazon listing.
Edit Yourself
I handle the first round of editing my books myself. Whether you are going to hire an editor or h
andle everything yourself, your book should go through this phase.
If you hire a writer, you still need to edit the book. No writer will deliver a perfectly edited book. There is a reason that editors exist.
If you look around online, many editors hate on Grammarly. They write about how the tool can’t replace a real, human editor. That’s entirely accurate. A human editor will do a better job, but not everyone can afford that.
Wait at least a week between finishing your book and beginning the editing process. The second you write the final word in the final chapter, you may be tempted to roll back to the start of your book and immediately begin editing. Don’t do that; your brain is still in writing mode.
Waiting a week before you start any editing allows your brain time to relax, and you will start to forget your book. When you start editing, you will be able to look at each chapter with fresh eyes rather than only remembering when you wrote it a few hours earlier. Memory can become a major distraction when you edit too soon.
I start my personal process with Grammarly and run the entire book through that software before I do anything else. Grammarly helps me with the spelling and grammar, but it also helps me with my language. Like Hemingway, it points out overly wordy sentences and chastises me every single time I dare to use passive voice. For Grammarly, passive voice is the greatest of sins.
With a work of fiction, you then need to run your book through Hemingway. Even for non-fiction, it’s worth it. The tool will help to bring your sentences alive.
Breaking Orbit: How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following (Serve No Master Book 4) Page 5
