I have a confession to make. When I first heard about the 48-hour Author weekend workshops or the fast-start KPI program, I wasn’t really sure if that was possible. You know, how can you write a book in a weekend? Well, the answer is simple. You can’t.
But you can plan and outline a book in a couple of sessions. If you’ve got some surrounding information to guide you on the planning and the theme picking, also writing a hook, what’s called a hook and doing a little exercise I like to call purpose definition statement. So you want to actually create this purpose statement that says who you’re writing the book for, what message you’re sending them and why they should be interested, what pain or problems or desires they are [00:01:00] interested in.
Now, going back in time to 2006. Print on demand was seen as the holy grail of book publishing because it came in and it offered people a way to get their book out to the public without printing hundreds of copies and sitting it in the garage and then slowly selling them. Like I did with one of my first books, Sack Your Financial Planner.
I sold it by advertising. But print on demand, obviously, they can buy it once you’ve digitally distributed it out through IngramSpark or through KDP. But unfortunately that is not the holy grail because you’ve also got to have an author platform and it’s necessary to have a way, a selling system basically, a way for people to find that book and be interested in it.
[00:02:00] You don’t just get interested and buy a book just because you’ve seen it on Amazon or on a marketplace of any kind.
You actually maybe follow an author, you’ve read a few of their articles, you like their ideas, or you perhaps have read a review of a friend of theirs, a blogger, and you’ve gone, oh, that’s pretty good. Yeah, I’ll look into that. It’s quite interesting.
And that aligns with the readers needs and wants. So to build this, it’s called having an author platform and having an author brand. Anyway, that’s a topic for another day. At this moment, I want to talk about starting fast. So that requires an outline and know your topic and your category.
So, your topic matter should be really defined. So, to have your theme of your book set, you need to start looking at all these other books as well. What’s their theme and what are they [00:03:00] really saying in one sentence? There’s a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat.
It is obvious from the title what the theme of the book is going to be, and even what category it’s gonna be under. It’s obviously gonna be a type of a self-help book, and it’s gonna explain all the things that people want to know about the types of eating you can do that is actually not normally known.
And that leads me to the hook. A hook could be why 5 million French women can eat what they like and never gain a pound. Whatever that could be a hook, you know? So it’s something interesting that people go, Oh my God, really? So it’s also keying into a deep set desire for a lot of women who want to, eat what they like and still be a beautiful weight.
Just, something that’s right [00:04:00] for them. So that’s what we’re thinking about when we’re planning our book. We want to have that statement that uncovers the target audience and their hidden desires, what they really want to achieve, what’s the kind of life lessons, if you will, that you are giving them in the book that’s to come.
As well as the actual topics that you know about that you want to talk about. Try to match that up with what people are really seeking out there. And another level you can bring in is what’s in the media right now. What’s, what’s kind of in the Zeitgeist, I think it’s called that people are talking about because maybe too much is becoming automated, for example.
Are we losing our creativity, our problem solving skills? So that broader picture is what I’m talking about, you need to be really looking at [00:05:00] that if you’re going to get a deep book rather than a shallow one. So, when you do your fast start, you don’t want to go shallow, you want to actually think deep, and then your mind mapping process will bring out all those little subtopics that can be very interesting for people.
Okay, I hope that’s helped, thanks. If you’d like to learn more about book creation and publishing, I have a course which teaches novice authors how to brainstorm and self-publish their book. It’s called Book Creation Self-Publish.
