You’ve got an awesome story. People tell you all the time that you should write a book. Your mother thinks you’re brilliant! You have a way with words, so what more do you need?
If you’ve already written a lot of successful books, you may not glean much from this, but if you’re still fairly new to the whole world of publishing and writing books, then hang in there with me. In my genre of devotional and inspirational book writing, I’ve traditionally published well over one hundred books. They have had varying degrees of success, but that’s the end of the story. We have to start at the beginning and focus on the steps you might take before you even write word one.
Let’s get started! If we were at a writing conference, you might have five minutes to pitch your idea and convince me that you’re ready to write. My first question might be something like this. “Tell me your book idea in one good sentence.” In other words, you know your book idea so well, anyone would grasp it. This sounds easy, but the fact is that writers often don’t know what their big idea really is. They have lots of pieces of ideas that could work, but they haven’t figured out what direction they want to go in. They aren’t even sure if they have a good idea. So, how do you know if you have a good idea?
- You know because you believe in your idea so much, you cannot stop thinking about all the ways to put your book together.
- You know because you’ve done your homework. You’ve checked to see what other books exist on the topic you want to write about. You’ve checked to see what makes your book similar and what will make your book stand out because it will provide new information, or a different perspective.
- You know because you’ve been writing blogs already about this idea and you’ve gotten feedback from readers suggesting they’d like to know more.
- You know because you can imagine the spin-offs that might come from your “Mother” book so that you might serve this content to different audiences.
- You know because you’ve been researching your intended reader, learning what influences their book-buying decisions, and their book-reading habits.
- You know because you’ve needed a book like this yourself and you haven’t been able to find it in the marketplace.
- You know because you have the right credentials to write a book like this. You have the right education, work experience, qualifications to make you a believable writer in this genre.
- You know because somewhere in your spirit, you have a sense that this is something you are meant to do.
So here you are, you’ve figured out that you have a good idea for a book. You have not begun to write. You should not begin to write. You still have work to do before you start.
Meet me back here soon and we’ll look at the best ways to start shaping your ideas to see if they are book worthy. If you do this kind of work up front, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money, and frustration because you will have built a roadmap that will guide you all along the way as you write.
Hope you catch a lot of good ideas and don’t let any of them slip through your fingers.
Blessings to you.