Hold Yourself Accountable To Writing Your Book
Its not good enough to write only when inspiration strikes. There will be days where writing is the last thing you want to be doing.
But you have to treat your writing as if it were a job, or a duty. This means holding yourself accountable, taking action, and showing up every day.
Heres how to hold yourself accountable to writing:
Choose A Book Writing Software
The next step in how to write a book has to do with writing tools.
In 1882, Mark Twain sent to a publisher the first manuscript to be written on a piece of technology that would transform the writing industry: the typewriter.
Nowadays, we have computers with word processing and the internet where you can find an endless assortment of useful book writing software and apps that are meant to help you be an efficient and effective writer. If youre writing a novel, check out this guide to .
You may be tempted to overload on apps because you think itll help elevate your writing. But honestly, less is more. The truth is that the right tools and even self-publishing companies make writing and publishing easier and more enjoyable.
Instead of overwhelming you with all the possible apps in existence, below is a list of three tools I recommend adding to your writing toolkit today .
- You can organize all aspects of your project in folders
- You can host files for your projects like images, photos, etc.
- You can use Google Docs as a word processor.
- You can enable offline access and work on your files even when you dont have an internet connection, such as when youre traveling.
- You can collaborate easily with others, avoiding version control issues.
- You can access it from just about any device .
Plus, Google will give you 15GB of free storage just for signing up.
If youre new to Google Drive, heres a list of resources that can turn you into a pro.
Develop Your Book Writing Skills
Book writing, like any skill, takes time to develop. You need to learn skills like writing the first draft, self-editing, arranging your ideas and so on.
Your strengths and weaknesses, life experiences and even the books you read play a crucial role in shaping the author you will become.
Dont worry if you get things wrong.
Stephen King threw the draft of his first book in the bin. His wife fished the book, Carrie, out of the trash and encouraged him to finish and publish it.
It took me three years to write my first novella and a year to write my second book.
After that, I got faster.
Tip: Blogging and journaling are great ways to practice writing and explore ideas for a nonfiction book.
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Phase : Doing The Work
Now, it’s time to get down to business. Here, we are going to focus on the next three tips to help you get the book done:
5. Set a total word count
Begin with the end in mind. Once youve started writing, you need a total word count for your book. Think in terms of 10-thousand work increments and break each chapter into roughly equal lengths. Here are some general guiding principles:
- 10,000 words = a pamphlet or business white paper. Read time = 30-60 minutes.
- 20,000 words = short eBook or manifesto. The Communist Manifesto is an example of this, at about 18,000 words. Read time = 1-2 hours.
- 40,00060,000 words = standard nonfiction book / novella. The Great Gatsby is an example of this. Read time = three to four hours.
- 60,00080,000 words = long nonfiction book / standard-length novel. Most Malcolm Gladwell books fit in this range. Read time = four to six hours.
- 80,000 words100,000 words = very long nonfiction book / long novel. The Four-Hour Work Week falls in this range.
- 100,000+ words = epic-length novel / academic book / biography. Read time = six to eight hours. The Steve Jobs biography would fit this category.
6. Give yourself weekly deadlines
You need a weekly goal. Make it a word count to keep things objective. Celebrate the progress youve made while still being honest about how much work is left to do. You need to have something to aim for and a way to measure yourself. This is the only way I ever get any work done: with a deadline.
7. Get early feedback
Start Writing By Developing A Writing Habit
The number one reason authors fail to publish a book is because they never finish the book they intend to publish. Why?
Because they didnt form a good writing habit.
Feeling overwhelmed when writing a book is natural, but you must remember that this journey always begins with the first page. And in order to write your first page, you must take action.
For example, schedule your writing time daily so that you can stick to a solid writing routine that will allow you to make real progress.
This is why having a writing habit will develop your writers flow.
But before you can start your habit, youll want to know how much you need to write during each session in order to stay on track for your writing goals.
For example, writing a book to grow your business?
Youll need about 40,000 words and roughly 134 pages.
If you wrote 10,000 words a month, youd be complete in 4 months.If you scheduled yourself to write 3 days a week, for a goal of 10,000 words a month, youd need to write 833 words per session. Thats pretty easy with talk-to-text tools!
Want to know the number for your specific genre or book goal? Check our our Word/Page Count Calculator here!
Your writing habit can start small. Dont overwhelm yourself thinking that you must write your every thought on the page. You can start with a few paragraphs, a sentence, or even just a word.
The purpose of this exercise is to commit to your writing session every day until it has become second nature.
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Hiring The Worlds Worst Proofreader
Once youve made any major changes and addressed the suggestions of your editors, your book is almost complete.
But before its ready to publish, youll need to do at least one complete read-through to catch any remaining typos or errors. A writing tool like Grammarly or a different grammar checker can help.
However, youre probably the worst person to catch those errors.
Youve likely become so familiar with the content and its layout that youll miss typos that will be obvious to someone else.
What to do Instead
If you can afford a professional proofreader, or if you have a talented friend who can help out, brilliant.
If you have to do most or all of your proofreading alone, heres the secret: dont proofread your ebook in the same environment you wrote it. Try changing the font style and size and printing it out, or reading it on a tablet. Youll be surprised at how errors stand out.
Voice Tools That Will Help You Write Better Without A Keyboard
Writers are constantly looking for the best software to manage their creations.
People experiment and switch off between writing tools that add more features and some that declutter the workspace to promote creativity.
However, while the average person types at 50 to 80 words per minute, that same person produces 110 to 150 words per minute when speaking. Why not consider a writing tool that keeps your hands off the keyboard and puts your voice to work?
Lets explore five tools that let you manage your ideas and write full articles and stories without even touching a keyboard.
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The Pros Of Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word has a lot of peoples preferences because theyve been around in that niche for much longer. We trust them more because theyve done it for more time, which may or may not be stupid.
One of the things I like the most about Word is that I can quickly save my files in whatever format I want and upload them to a client in seconds. Its much more convenient than having to set up an account and share documents with clients, write ebooks then change the file type, etc.
Not only that, but theres much more customization altogether. Word is always changing things up, but they usually keep the old stuff too which winds up providing tons of content.
What Is A Book Outline
A book outline is a structured document that plans out and sequences the information that your story will include. It is a wireframe or skeleton of your book, and will be used as the roadmap during your writing process.
Your books outline is an agenda, or roadmap, that includes the main points or events that you will write about in your book.
Its not uncommon to use a map when we go on holiday. And certainly, if we want to build a house, we use a blueprint. In football, the coach puts together a game plan. All of these make the actual task easier .
Writing an outline for your book serves the same purpose it is a guide that you can follow to write your book.
A book outline will essentially be the same concept for both fiction and nonfiction books, but the outline format and style will vary on the genre.
- A fiction novel will include important storytelling aspects such as structure, plot, scenes, and characters.
- A nonfiction book will include important information aspects such as topic clusters, concepts, and intentional information architecture.
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How To Write A Book About Your Life: 10 Powerful Steps
Do you have an amazing life story you want to know how to write a book about your life, whether its just for you or so others can learn from you?
Writing and publishing a book about your life story is a bit of a different process from writing a novel or even writing about someone else.
But your story is important.
Its your life. Its your legacy.
This book will be passed down from you to your children and their children or simply stay in your family for years on years.
If that sounds good to you, we can help.
This is your story rather than developing characters for a made-up story, its your personal life you are sharing with readers.
Its a very vulnerableand worthwhileform of writing.
If you have an incredible true story to tell about your life but arent sure where to start on how to write your life story, we can help.
Surprise! Its not all about you.
Writing and Publishing Your Life Story
Learn the 3 Core Elements in every great memoir the hidden framework used in memoir bestsellers and get started writing your own in this free video training!
Here are the steps for writing a book about your life:
Capture Your Novels Progress
John Steinbeck faithfully chronicled his progress when writing The Grapes of Wrath in a notebook. He wrote about his thoughts, fears, hopes, and more. He wrote, “So many things to drive me nuts Im afraid this book is going to pieces.” Sounds familiar, right?
One tactic is, at the end of your writing sessions, to capture your thoughts on what should come next. Then, the next time you sit down to write, you know what to write about. Voilano more writers block.
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Speeding Up The Writing Process
If you’re looking for how to write a book as fast as possible, your word count goals should look a little more like this:
- 1,500-2,000 words per session
- 9,000-15,000 words per week
- 35,000-50,000 words per month
The figures above adhere roughly to NaNoWriMo, the event in which participants write an average of 1,667 words/day to complete a 50,000-word book in one month. It’s hard work, but it’s definitely possible to write a book that quickly hundreds of thousands of people do so every year!
But as any author who’s done NaNo can attest, it’s also a pretty grueling experience. Most authors find it exhausting to write such great quantities for so many days in a row and they still have to edit copiously once they’re done.
If this is your first book, make sure you take your time, set manageable word goals, and gradually build to bigger goals… which is where our next tip comes in.
There Are Many Books On How To Write Comics Like The Ever Popular How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way But Most Of These Books Tend To Skip Over The Most Important Part Coming Up With A Story
This article is intended to give you a good start to coming up with a plot, planning and writing your story, structuring your plot and designing your setting and main character!
Writing a story is not just about sitting down at your computer, although thats part of it. Whether you are looking at a blank piece of paper or a blank document on your computer screen, a blank page is never a good place to start!
In preparation for writing your comic book, you need to do some thinking first. This can be done in your head or with a mind map, scribbles in a notebook or on a napkin! But you need a starting point.
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Kdp Wizard Free And Premium
KDP Wizard is a Kindle Direct Publishing management tool. You can access all of your book data and files quickly and easily, all in one place.
It makes editing all your book information a much simpler task than waiting to go from page to page on your KDP dashboard.
It includes a Rich Text Editor for your book descriptions, so you dont need to go to Author Central and edit in HTML.
You can search & select categories easily, speeding up your listing process, or changing your categories.
With the app, you can access your search keyword profiles, authors, contributors, descriptions, pricing profiles, and more.
You can copy entire page attributes from one listing tab to another to save time when creating multiple new books.
It has so many features to help you publish and manage all your ebooks and books on Amazon.
KDP Wizard runs in your Chrome browser. So you can use it on both Mac and PC.
Figure Out Which Book You Should Write First
By now you should have a long list of book topics. And you might be wondering, which topic should I write about first?
Here are a few tips to help you choose the best starting project:
- Which one can you finish the fastest? Usually, this is the topic where you have the most experience. This is a good thing to keep in mind because the faster you can finish your book, the faster you can get it out in the world where it can earn you money and help people.
- Which one are you most likely to finish? Usually, these are the topics you are more passionate about. For your first book, I highly recommend choosing a topic that youre really passionate about to help make sure that youll remain interested throughout the entire process.
- Which one is going to make you happy? This is a little harder to define, but it might be something that strikes a chord with you. Maybe theres a certain book topic that stands out for one reason or another. If thats the case, then go for it! Remember, writing should make you
Now with these tips in mind, choose the topic for your very first book before proceeding to the next step.
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Develop The Main Character
Once you have your idea seed, the easiest part to start growing it is with your main character. Decide who will be the primary person the reader will follow through the story. Who will introduce your reader to your world? Whose perspective will the reader see your story through? Once you decide who this is you can ask yourself more questions about this person. Here are some brainstorming questions to get you started:
- What does my character want?
- Why do they want it?
- What problems is my character facing?
- What do the characters need to improve in their lives?
- What happened in the characters past to make them who they are today?
Answering questions like these will make your character take shape. It will give you a good idea of who your book will be about. Every good novel is essentially about a character who changes or transforms in some way. This is called a character arc. To establish a good character arc, you first must understand who your character is at the start of the story. This will help you figure out where they go and how they change.
Looking for guidance on how to write characters who leap off the page? This comprehensive character master class will teach you how to write dynamic characters. It will walk you through the steps of developing your own.