3 ways to make your book easy to write

How do you make your book easy to write?

I’ve had many conversations with people who want to write a book. BUT they’d love someone else to write it for them!

In a world where we often want things instantly, waiting a year or more for your book to be written and published can feel like a huge amount of time. Especially when you have something that you’re bursting to share. And you don’t want someone else to get in there first.

It can feel overwhelming dedicating a chunk of time to your writing when you have a business to run and a life to lead.

And when you don’t know where to start, it’s easy to faff around for years doing nothing, rather than getting on and getting your book done.

Of course, you can employ a ghost-writer if your budget allows. But I keep saying that writing a book doesn’t have to be difficult…

So how can you make your book easy to write?

On last week’s Make It Happen day I talked to one of my clients who is carrying out interviews for his book. As this is one strategy you may choose to employ.

I was able to give sound advice and answer his questions, because I carried out 11 interviews for my first book in 2009. Born from my NLP Master Practitioner modelling project, these interviews added huge value to the book. They supported the launch and ‒ given the profile of the people I interviewed ‒ helped the book to become incredibly successful.

For my fifth book, Book Marketing Made Simple, I used another strategy, which was actually easier than the interviews. I asked 14 trusted experts to provide their best tips and knowledge on some of the topics I included in the book.

Things like…

• Six steps to creating compelling videos
• Top five tips for Facebook advertising
• Top 14 crowdfunding tips
• How to give your first radio interview

These partners wrote 17.2% of the book in total.

That’s 9,428 hugely valuable words out of the 54,677 words that made it to the final manuscript.

Then a further smaller chunk came from a dozen case studies, which I wrote and agreed with the clients. Because stories and examples are a perfect way for your readers to see what it’s like working with you.

The rest of the words formed the heart of the book and dozens of book marketing techniques. Like most people, I had many thousands of words at the tip of my finger from training I’d run, webinars I’d delivered and information in my brain! And books I’d launched myself.

With each of these approaches – interviews, expert tips, and case studies or stories – you might think it’s cheating!

But why make things more complicated than they need to be?

Although I wouldn’t suggest having contributions if they don’t add huge value to your readers, if you want to make writing your book easier, you want to produce a good quality product – and partners to help promote it – these strategies are worth considering.

And of course, as I tell all of my clients, you don’t have to wait until your book launch to start shouting about your book, sharing your content and building your business from it. More on this next week.

There’s nothing I like better than making it easy to write your book…

That’s why I launched the Smart Author System. It shares my 10 principles to help you to write a book that helps you to build your business from the moment you start to write it.

If you’d like to join our growing community of authors who are successfully writing their credibility books, click this link to find out more.