Getting advice from someone who is not a writer is very dangerous. People who have no business offering advice are the first ones to do it.
Every single time I tell people I’m on a diet that’s working, they want to give me advice on how to change it. They want to spread the message about what worked for them. Guess what. I don’t want to hear it. Once you find a method that works for you, test and improve it, but don’t listen to someone else about what works for them.
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Background Check
I often get advice from people who think they are smarter than me. Whenever I talk to other writers in coffee shops, something interesting happens; they always want to give me advice about their writing process. "Oh, you've got to do this, and you've got to do that." They have so much knowledge to impart to me. Probably because I don’t look like a typical writer. They have an image in their mind of a successful author, and it looks nothing like me.
Before I take someone's advice, I always check their credibility. When someone gives me weight loss advice, I immediately ask them when they were fat. I have a few friends who lost over one hundred pounds; I listen to anything they have to say about weight loss. They have been through the struggle. Why would I care to listen to someone who has always been super skinny? They don’t know what my struggle is like and they haven’t overcome the challenge I’m facing.
When one of these “coffee shop writers” offers me some advice I always say, “Oh, that's so interesting! How many novels have you published? How many books have you written? You write screenplays? What was the last one you sold?” If someone offers me a piece of advice and they've never finished a book, I know that piece of advice is garbage.
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Keyboard Jockeys
There's this type of person who reads a lot of advice on forums, memorizes a bunch of it, and then regurgitates it to anyone who will listen. This person is a keyboard jockey, someone who, rather than living life, lives vicariously and repeats other people's advice. There are plenty of people out there who will read this book and then repeat the lessons to other people.
It's very tempting for me to include a deep explanation of how to outline a fiction book. I have a process that I use for outlining fiction, but it would be me repeating something I've learned from someone else, and you would be getting an inferior product.
That's why this book doesn't include a huge section on outlining fiction; it would be disingenuous and dishonest. I've only worked on a small number of fiction projects. Ninety percent of my work is in the nonfiction arena.
Teaching you anything else, repeating someone else's knowledge, is how you get inferior knowledge. It's like the game of telephone we played as children - getting information from someone else who got it from someone else and passes down this daisy chain. Eventually, the message you get is completely different.
When you meet people who want to give you writing advice, before you listen to a word they say, see if they have finished a book. Determine whether they have sold a book. Every time someone tells me that they're a great writer, I always dig a little deeper.
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Successful Writers
I am not an author or a writer; that’s not really what I do. I sell books. I’m in the business of selling enough books to pay for my family and our lifestyle. Writing is a small component of my business. For this reason, I want to know if the person imparting their wisdom has written something that other people have paid for and appreciated.
“You wrote a screenplay? Amazing! Have you published it? Have you sold it? How many copies have you sold?”
I ask these questions because I want to find out if they're the real deal. Some people I meet are very skilled. There are people that are better than me at most things. I recently met someone who writes much better Amazon book descriptions than I do. So I’m learning from him.
I also know some people who write much better than me, but nobody reads their books. If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it?
There are always ways we can improve, but we want to find someone who's actually doing better. I know people who put a book on Amazon seven, ten, and fifteen years ago and they sold three copies. Is that the advice you want? Do you want to repeat that success and sell a single copy of your book every year?
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Choose Your Destination
You should only take advice from people who are living a life that you want to replicate. If you want to live on a tropical island and dictate your books while sitting on a beautiful beach in paradise, then my advice might be worth following. If that lifestyle appeals to you, then you should read my other books and start hanging out at my website. I've worked very hard to get where I am. If you follow what I do, you'll end up with the same result.
Get advice from people you want to replicate.
Some of my friends, both writers and entrepreneurs, started the same time as me about seven or eight years ago, and they now have offices filled with employees. They go to an office five days a week. They're the boss, but they have to wear work clothes and drive to that office every day. They make a lot of money, but that's a different life. That's not the life that I want. If you want that life, perhaps you should follow their advice instead of mine.
The person you take advice from is your destination. If you take advice from someone who has a life that you don't want, then you'll end up with a life you don't want. This is something to think about because right now you're in a process where you're trying to learn things. There are plenty of other books about writing fast. There are dozens of them out there, and probably all the books are ninety percent the same. You should only follow the 20K System if my approach to writing and life appeal to you.
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Multiple Paths up the Same Mountain
There are only so many different techniques for writing faster. When you find a system that works for you, stick with it. There are dozens of martial arts schools in every city. They all take you to the same destination; they teach you how to fight. The difference is how they get there. You choose the school that you enjoy and the teacher that you connect with. Would you take advice from every person in a Karate uniform who strolls into your life?
People will give you advice about what time of day to write, what software to use, what tools to use, what order to write, and everything else. People are always recommending that I change my workflow.
After writing Breaking Orbit, I learned that there's a way to export and convert a book directly from Scrivener into an e-book format. I always use a separate piece of formatting software. I played around with exporting ebooks from Scrivener, and I learned the process, but I'm not sure that I'll stick with it. There are a couple of changes that I like to make when generating my final edit, and I'm not super happy with how the formatting comes out when I export directly from Scrivener.
It's not perfect for me. I'm sure it works great for ninety percent of people. I gave it a try because I’m always trying to improve, but I have a workflow right now that just works perfectly for me. I've used it with more than thirty books published on Amazon, and I am very hesitant to make changes to a system that works.
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Unsolicited Advice is Garbage
I don't like to change things, but people want to give me advice all the time. I'm pretty much always on a diet because I'm perpetually overweight. I've lost almost fifty pounds in the last year, but I still need to lose at least another thirty, forty, or fifty more. I hate telling people I’m on a diet because I know that they want to proselytize me.
I had a neighbor who was a fruitarian. It’s such a rare diet that my spellcheck doesn’t believe it is even a real word. He found out that I lost fifty pounds and immediately told me that I’d done it all wrong. He looks sickly all the time. I don’t want to look sick; I don’t want to look worn out. Why do people hear about success and want to give you their two cents? It’s not even worth half of that.
Think about how illogical this thought proc
ess is: “Oh, you're on a diet, and it's working? Here's what you should do instead.” If it isn’t broken, I don’t need to fix it.
There's nothing worse than unsolicited advice. I NEVER give people writing advice unless they ask for it. It’s so pretentious. When someone gives me unsolicited advice, I start to hate them immediately. It’s a natural human reaction.
That might sound like a strong word, but they've basically ignored my success and said that they have no respect for a process that’s already working. They turn their diet or their writing process or something else that they are obsessed with into a pseudo-religion, and they are determined to spread their gospel. Everyone wants to shove their secret method down your throat, and it's annoying.
It's very uncouth and rude, but unfortunately it's also very common. If you're an amazing fitness coach, you know that if you give someone unsolicited advice, they will never act on it. All you will do is turn them against you.
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Protecting Your Success
As someone who's worked in the advice and coaching field for a long time, I know this lesson very well. I don't give people advice without them asking. I don't tell anyone about how to write faster or how to become a great writer unless they ask me.
I know it seems like we are going down a little rabbit hole here, but I’m trying to protect you from what will happen when you tell people that you are learning to write faster. They will see an opportunity to offer you advice, and I don’t want someone else to mess up what we are doing together. I’ve invested a lot of time in this book and money for advertising. I want to get this book into your hands, and the last thing I want is for someone in the local coffee shop to ruin all my hard work. I don’t want them giving you bad advice, ruining your success, and causing you to drop a totally unfair one-star review on me.
People will tell you to write in the morning or write in the afternoon. That you should only drink coffee or that you should only drink tea. They have all of these different rules for how they write, and most of the people who give you this advice are not professional writers. They're wannabes. They're people who've never published a book. They're people who've never sold a book. They're people who haven't achieved massive success.
People that have achieved massive success no longer give unsolicited advice. They get asked for it all the time, so they don't need to give it unsolicited.
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Remember the Forest
I have been building the Serve No Master podcast for a while now. A lot of other people in the podcasting field like to give me advice. There are plenty of ways to improve my show, but here’s the thing: most people running podcasts aren’t making any money. Some of the top shows out there took more than five years to turn a profit. One of my favorite shows has a huge following, and the hosts still have to maintain full-time employment outside the show. Why would I want to replicate that?
I’m in the business of making money; so are you. You want to write fast so that you can get more books out there. Remember your core goal. You want to write faster to achieve that goal sooner. Do not lose sight of that because focusing on writing fast by itself is looking at the trees and forgetting the forest.
Remember the goal beyond writing fast. That's your real motivation. I write fast because I want to write loads of books and I want to make loads of money. Be sure that you know exactly what your motivation is.
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Luck is Never a Factor
Your writing process will be different than mine and will be different from every other reader of this book. Everyone writes in a different way. I want you to find the way that works best for you through experimentation. Any time you encounter someone who, after discovering you have a pattern that works well, tries to give you advice, find out what their experience is. Find out what their qualifications are and then reject their advice because they're wasting your time. The only effective method to becoming a massive speed writer is self-experimentation; no other method works.
I hate depending on luck. When you start to listen to my podcast, read my blog, or one of my books, you will notice that as a consistent theme. My disdain for luck slips into nearly every book I ghostwrite as well.
If I only taught you a single method, I would have to depend on luck. No thanks. If I said that you have to write every morning between six and eight AM in a coffee shop and that you're only allowed to drink a small latte, it would work well for some people. That's a pattern that works for some people out there.
Like a broken clock, I would be right sometimes. It would be luck, though. I would randomly help people just by guessing a pattern that works for them. If that were the only advice I offered here, and I sold one hundred thousand copies, the advice would work for probably ten people.
They would write glowing reviews about how I’m a genius, and I could pretend that I’m a great success. One of the reasons that I wrote this book is that most of the speed writing books I read and studied in my past only taught singular methods. If it worked for you, great. If not, the problem was you. I don’t want to pretend I’m a great success because my method works for some people.
This book is tougher than the competition out there. There are competing books that offer a simpler path that only works for some people. The 20K a Day method is tough. I’m sorry to say it. It requires a bit of work to achieve great success. But the good news is that this system works for one hundred percent of the people that apply it.
If I put out another one-method book, I could pretend that I am a great success. Enough people would love it that I could sail through life on their compliments. But their success would depend on luck, my arch nemesis.
Only the people who happened to match my terrible advice would achieve success, and they would write me amazing five-star reviews. That select group of people who match that advice would think I’m a genius. But that genius would just be from luck.
I'm not interested in chance. I hate people that depend on luck. I believe luck is a factor you can control through effort, and that's why we're building your luck. By the end of this book, you are going to know a dozen different ways to manipulate luck to your favor.
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Master One System
Don't worry about advice from other people. Don't worry about other systems of writing fast. Don't get drawn into the pattern of reading fifty different books about writing fast and then choosing which one you think has the best advice. If you follow the 20K System for the next twenty-one days and you don't see any improvement in your writing speed, please send me an email.
I'll gladly help you discover the perfect pattern for you. I will interact with you in a way that helps you because you've purchased one of my books. Even if you grab this book using Kindle Unlimited, you are still one of my customers. You paid me for wisdom, and I’m not here to leave you in the lurch.
You are a member of my tribe now. That means something to me. We have a relationship, and I appreciate that. This is not a one-way street. This is not a one-time message. Different techniques might work for different people. Perhaps you have a unique situation.
I don't want you ever to feel like you are on your own. I know that if you try to follow ten different systems at the same time, you'll never succeed. You will be overwhelmed with confusing and contradictory advice. Too much information can be even worse than too little.
If you start Karate, Tae Kwon Do, and kickboxing classes at the same time, you will struggle to succeed. You will learn different methods, and the messages will get confusing. In Tae Kwon Do you kick with your foot, but in kickboxing you kick with your shin. Use the wrong technique in the wrong class, and you could end up hurting someone or breaking the bones in your foot.
I don’t want you to break your writing foot!
If you study just one martial art, you learn how to fight. If you try to learn them all the same time, you'll just be confused. They all have different systems; they all teach you different ways to punch, different ways to kick, and different w
ays to approach fighting. Each of their systems works, but when you mingle them all together before you're ready, you'll achieve no success.
Stick to one system until you achieve some success and then add on new techniques. That’s how you will become a master writer.
If you want to add techniques from another system, wait until after you have mastered the 20K System.
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Action Steps
Trust but Verify. Never take advice from someone who doesn’t have the life and experience you want.
Don’t try to learn multiple writing systems at the same time. Many systems work, but not when you mingle steps from different paths.
Be prepared for unsolicited advice from people around you and have a plan for how to deal with it.
Lock down your real goal for reading this book. Do you want to write fast just to impress other people? Do you want to write fast to make more money? Write down your goal somewhere you can see it every day.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 15
