5 ways to write your first book (even if you hate writing!)

1. What to expect from this course: Have you ever wanted to write a book, but you're not the world's best writer. Well, in this course I'm going to be going over five ways that you can write your very first book. And only one of them involved you doing pretty much any writing at all. And I'm telling you this from experience back in 2017 when I released my very first book, which aren't under being Amazon Best Seller. I did this book and 80% of it, I didn't have to write. And I use one of the techniques that'll be in this course. And then in late 2020, I released these two books, 1600 pages worth, both of which went on to crack the top ten and Amazon. And I only wrote the introduction for those books. And that's another technique I'll show you in this course. My belief is that everyone has a book inside of them. Went out of the 21st century just because you can't write or just because you're running fields aren't the best, doesn't mean you should cut yourself off from the possibility of having that bucket list dream come true or being a published author and becoming a best-selling author if that's what you want, or the very least, writing a book and getting it out there just as a sense of accomplishment or having it as a useful aid or useful tool in your business. If you've ever wanted to write a book. But you thought, oh, I couldn't do it, I'm not a writer and it's too hard, then I strongly encourage you to dive into this course and look if you are naturally gifted writer. There's gonna be some tips in there for you as well. We also have a little bit of a tip as to how to edit and proofread your book because I know that's a stumbling block for some of you. And then you'll be in a position to get that manuscript of yours published story for another day, but you'll have a proof read, edited manuscript. Good to go. Ready to tackle the next stage of becoming an author. So let's get to it. 2. How to TITLE your book for success: Now the first place I'm going to get you to start is the title and the subtitle of your book. Now, the reason I get you to do this is because very often what I found in the writing process is you might want to reference the title of your own book. So you might be wanting to explain why you title your book a certain way. And of course you can't do that if you haven't picked a title. I also think that picking a title gives you a very definite direction as to where you want to point your book, what the purpose of your book is in terms of the subtitle, what the subtitle is. And I'll give you an example of this right here. So this is one of, I've actually read this book, The Subtle Art of not giving a, you can read the word there for yourself. I want to say it. I don't know what Skillshare's policy is on using swear words, but I've loved the title of this book. You've probably heard of this book. And the reason you've heard of this book, apart from it being a good book, is that's a pretty catchy title. Now, why is it catchy? Is because it's not polite or typical. The title here is the subtle art of not giving a f. Then the subtitle is that little texts on the Neith, which says a counter-intuitive approach to living a good life. So what I'd advise you to do is this is just my opinion. Title and subtitle Your book using a similar sort of formula. For example, I titled one of my books off to seeing that title of that book. I loved it so much that I thought I would do something along, do something along similar lines. You can see here I used the title. I know, I know I'm standing up for myself. I am such a b. And again, I'm looking to use that word. And that actually came from more things. I saw an Instagram post. I think this was around the time of the Women's March. And someone had put up an Instagram post of a woman holding up that placard with that that phrase on it. And I thought that's an awesome Fridays. I got to use that as my title. Then you can see the subtitle underneath, how to embrace your inner badass, struck like a goddess and stop apologizing for yourself. And you can see other bits and pieces of the cover there. But in terms of the title and the subtitle, what I'm going to suggest is that your title is pretty catchy, pretty out-there, something that has to grab the attention of your target audience. And then the subtitle is something that more explains what your book is going to be about. So just to recap, title something that is catchy, pretty out-there, could almost be considered quasi offensive. And that's if that's not your style, then don't do that. But the title is something that's going to grab someone's attention. So you don't want it to just be kind of the column base. You want it to leap out. Then the subtitle. And there's a, there's a, there's a portion in Amazon Publishing if you decided to publish a book on Amazon, that is actually just for the subtitle. Subtitle is the explanation. You still want it to be catchy, but an explanation of what the book is going to be about. And I think having that title and subtitle as you write the book is really going to help keep you on track. I don't think that it's possible. I think a lot of people would tell you to just start writing. And I agree with that. You want to just start writing, but I do think there is some prep work to do. And this is one of them. Find a title, a catchy title, and don't make it perfect. You can obviously adjust it as you begin the writing process. You want it to be probably somewhat similar, but you can adjust it if it's not quite catchy enough. Get the title, get the subtitle. And in the next video we're gonna go into outlining your book. 3. Outline your book BEFORE trying to write it: When it comes to writing your first book, there are so many people who have a book inside of them. And they've begun and they've just never finished. I know so many other people who have publishing a book while becoming a published author on their bucket list. And to me it's a great shame because none of the book writing process is difficult. I've done a course also on book publishing. None of the book publishing course. Well, none of the book publishing process itself is rocket science. It is all pretty simple and it's all pretty predictable. The biggest thing that will get in the way is actually use the buzzword, hear the word to really look out for is perfection. Perfectionism kills more books than anything else does. To really try to minimize that. Firstly, I just wanted to bring that up to make sure that anytime you're letting perfectionism creeping, just understand that more than likely it's not perfectionism. What it is is fear. It's fear of being judged because once you've put the book out there, people are probably going to read it. Then you're just worried that someone's going to say something bad about it or say something like, Who are you to write a book? Who do you think you are? So just be mindful of that. That being said, the best way to keep yourself on track is to come up with an outline for the book. Now when I say outline, I do mean outline and it's super simple. There are two possible ways that you can do it that I would suggest. Number one, and I'll show you it here. Number one is simply using a bullet point list. Now, this list is a list that I use to write this book here, from fear to freedom. This was a first book that I ever wrote, the first book I ever published. And I was lucky enough to have it hit number one on Amazon, worked pretty well for me. And if you ever get this spoke, you can actually see in the table of contents, it's the actual chapter headings for this book. In terms of the outline, what I suggest is that you just bullet point now I have the entire list here straight up because I wanted to show you that even for a book that is about 30 thousand words in total, or just shy of 200 pages, which is not long actually, it's a relatively short but a good size book, especially for your first book. But to write a book of that size, it's really pretty simple. So bullet point it out with the intent that each bullet point will eventually become its own chapter. Now, you can bullet point even further and maybe write out individual writing points for each chapter. I don't feel like that is necessary. That's up to you. You can see here that I've actually chunked various chapters into various parts of the book. For example, when I started writing this book, when I initially had the concept for this book, I knew I wanted to include stories of women who'd made it through incredibly hard times. So I call that part 110 stories of courage. I also knew that I didn't just want stories of women who'd survived incredibly tough times, but also strategies for how the reader themselves could make it through hard times. So you can see PO2 here is strategies to help yourself or others. Because I knew not everyone reading would be reading my book because they were suffering from mental health. But they might be reading because they wanted to help someone else they knew who was suffering from mental health because that's how prevalent mental health issues are these days. That was PO2. Then I also knew I wanted a part three that would be dedicated to resources. For example, when Australia, he and I know in other countries, we have lifeline, which is a free phone service. It's our tech services as well. If you're in distress for whatever reason you can ring up and a trained phone counselor will get on the phone with you and help talk you through whatever it is you're going through. And you can reach them without having to pay. So that's a great service. I wanted to include resources like that. In my book. I started the concept of this book with having those three chunks or those three parts as I've called them, those big three parts. And I knew that each one of those parts, it's gonna be a bit too big throughout the chapter on. Then I've broken it down into subheadings. Here. You can see under the ten stories of courage, not only do I actually have interviews or stories with ten individual women, I also have an introduction to part one. You can see here in part two, I've used the same sort of structure. So part two, when it comes to strategies, I've also put an introduction in there. And then I've gone helping yourself as a chapter. And then I've also written helping someone else as a chapter. And then part three, the resources that was a chapter onto itself because it wasn't super long. So that is a very simple way of outlining your book. Again, if you want it to go into more detail than this, you could, let's say in the introduction or let's say in helping yourself down here on PO2, if you wanted to just bullet point for yourself, certain parts here. So talking 0.1, talking point to talking 0.3, then you absolutely could do that as well. I didn't feel it's necessary. But the overall moral of the story here is structured out, use bullet points. So you can sort, you can begin to see the skeleton of your book. Now another way of doing something well, another way of achieving this result is to use what's called a mindmap. Now if you haven't heard of mindmaps, what they're famous for, amongst other things, is working more along the way that your brain, a lot of people's brains are supposed to work. A lot of people's Brian supposedly don't work very well in lists because your brain doesn't really see things in the list in bullet point form. But we tend to see it as nodes connected to other nodes connected to other nodes. So this is the exact same thing as what you just saw in Google Docs, but done in a mindmap. And this software is called free mind. I'll put a link to it below. It's free and you can probably use it, I would imagine on, not on your PC, which this is, but also Mac. But you can see here, I'll put the center node. The title was from fear to freedom. And then I have on the sub nodes of it introduction forward part one, part two, part three, and the bonus material in the sub nodes, for example, for part one, as you just saw on the Google Doc introduction. Then the tin individual stories with a ten individual women. And in part two, once again, I have the introduction here and then helping yourself, helping someone else. Now this doesn't necessarily create anything differently to the bullet point lists. And it's not better or worse. But you might find one or the other. Systems works better for you in terms of brainstorming the outline of your book. If you are more of a list type person, then use something like Google and Google Docs and you can draft it out like this. I personally for myself, have used this more recently, used this option mole more recently, because I just find it's faster and I'm quite comfortable working with lists. I also liked the fact that I can indent the bullets and I can see very clearly the structure. Having said that very often, I do like using mind maps like this. I have found that it works better for me when I'm actually drawing out the mind-map on a piece of paper. For me, there's something very different. It engages a different part of my brain to write or draw something out, then typing it. The reason I didn't show, show you me drawing it out is because no one needs to see my drawing skills or lack thereof. This free mine software and allows you to use mind-mapping, but in a format that not only is easier maybe to use, but also you can share this with someone. If I drew it out on a piece of paper, I'd have to take a photo of my mind-map, send it to someone, and then you also couldn't edit it later. But the moral of the story is exactly the same. Outline your book with the intention of being sort of these end points on the end nodes in the mind-map or the end bullet points in your bullet point list. Those are going to be the chapters that you are going to write. If you want to go into more detail for each chapter, you can. And if you want to chunk your chapters into individual parts in your book because you feel they belong together, then you can absolutely, absolutely do that as well. Outline your story. Now. 4. Book writing method #1: Write it: So the first way of writing a book is writing a book. No surprise there. What I'm going to suggest is now that you've got the title and subtitle of your book and you've done that outline that you concentrate on setting a time. This is just what works for me. The goal is gonna be workout what time suits best, whether you're a morning person or evening personal, like when do you feel most creative? Set aside a time scheduled time into your calendar. And I want you to also set aside a writing space where you feel that you can write without any sort of interruptions. And your goal whenever you sit down for this scheduled writing session in your writing space is, let's say two, right? One chapter at a time. That's what worked well for me. And with the way that I taught, I would sit down for about, let's say an hour, maybe a bit longer. And I wouldn't be able to write about a 2 thousand or 3 thousand word chapter in one sitting. Now that is not a hard and fast rule. Obviously, I would definitely suggest setting aside a scheduled time. I would definitely suggest working out whether you're a morning person or an evening person or an afternoon person, when do you feel most creative? I'm not saying when you can work by the way, I'm saying When do you feel most creative? Because for me, yes, I can work in the often and yes, I can work in the evening and sometimes I'm even up super late, but I definitely feel most creative in the morning. So that's what I need to write the book. Set of scheduled time. According to what works best for you. Find a space that works for you, and sit down with a goal of writing one chapter in one session or something thereabouts. I certainly do not advise you trying to sit down in your first writing session and sit down for six hours and try to bang out the entire book. I don't think that is the best solution to doing it. The other thing I will say is when it comes to sit, working out where you want to sit down to write your book. It may not be the most helpful thing to sit down somewhere at home and try to do this. The reason being is if you spend a lot of time in your home environment, for example, this is my home office here. Sometimes it can be hard to sit in front of that computer where you do so much of your busy work and maybe you watch YouTube or Netflix. You, it's a psychological anchor. When I come in front of this computer to just start having to do busy work, or for it to be about entertainment. That's not great. If you want to get creative. And this is what I did, is I would go to a cafe because I love coffee and it wouldn't matter so much where the cafe was. But I tend to love cafes that had at this point I was when I wrote this book that I'm thinking about, I was living on the Gold Coast of Australia and have you don't know about the Gold Coast. It has beautiful waterways, beautiful canals. And it was, it's always sunny in the Gold Coast and I loved the water. So what I would do is I would find a cafe that had a beautiful view of not even the ocean, but I've sort of canals. So inland canals, inland waterways which are very common with beautiful boats. And it would make a point of going to one or two different cafes. And that's where I felt most inspired. I could go there auto or coffee. They bring my coffee and then I just sit down and write. I would turn my phone on silent. And I could just sit down and write or type as it were. And I found I could get in the zone very, very simply when I had a cup of coffee and a nice view and a little bit of white noise behind me. Now, my point is to this story, you have to work out what works for you. But somewhere in-between scheduling a writing session in, let's say an hour or two, whatever works for you or whatever you can do. Working out what time works best for you in terms of creativity. Working out, where would you enjoy writing and what would help you make? What would help make you feel creative and inspired? And it may be your home office, it may not be. There's nothing wrong with going out to a cafe somewhere near the beach, or near a park or near a forest, near babbling brook, whatever it is, work out what works in inspires you. And then set aside a chunk of time. To, as I said, my goal was to write a chapter at each session. Now the reason I advise doing that is because very often what happens you sit down if you get into the groove and you're typing, typing, typing. And you're feeling really intuitive. If you didn't have to stop. And then you come back to that chapter. Let's say you stopped midway in that chapter. And then let's say you come back tomorrow or in a couple of days time and you come back and see what happens. You are so in the flow you come back and you go. I can't remember what I was thinking. I can't remember what I was writing. Why was I writing this? Why was I talking? Like it looks good but I can't room and you can't get back into the groove. It's almost like you need to begin typing that chapter out entirely again. So you've lost, you've wasted that writing session. That's why I suggest trying to finish one chapter at one writing session. And that means you need to condense your chapter and make the chapters short. I actually think that's a good thing because when you're thinking about the reader, it gives them a sense of accomplishment. If the chapter is not too long, they can sit down at the lunch break and read one chapter in a go. The other thing I would say, just as a final warning, and this will apply to all the different methodologies of writing your book that I'm going to suggest to you. Do not edit as you're typing. Don't try to fix the spelling or the grammatical mistakes. Just get the word out. This is a first pass. So get the words out and do not edit. There will be plenty of time for editing and proofreading later. But editing whilst you are writing, creates the same sort of issues as not writing a chapter in one go. You can edit a sentence and then that interrupt your flow and then you forget what you are going to write next. And it just ends up costing you time. Remember, or costume inspiration, which is even worse. So remember, we want to sit down and get one chapter out and not aim for perfectionism. Perfectionism is really going to cripple you as an author. 5. Book writing method #2: Dictate it: Okay, The second way that I'm going to suggest that you can write your book writer chapter is dictating using voice or speech recognition software. Now, this is not my personal favorite way of writing a book. I have dictated chapters before. And it's kind of, it's kind of felt like an in-between ground to having to write it. Because when you're speaking into dictated, obviously you need to think about what you're going to speak. And you want to kind of dictated as you would want someone to read it. And speaking the way we speak and the way we write are not the same. For me. It felt like a bit of a confusing middle ground between writing it, just typing it out myself, and then just going through what is another way that I'll show you, which is to just fall on speak it and then have someone else transcribe it. Having said that, I've tried that and this may work for you because the moral of the story here is you've got to find out what works for you. Just because it doesn't work for me, it doesn't mean it won't work for you. So the easiest way that I've found to do this at the moment as a time of recording, early 202022 is Google Docs, which is free. And if you go to the Tools menu and you go to voice typing, you will need to connect it to your microphone. So that's a hardware issue. But you will see this microphone here and I will say Click to speak. Now, I'll click it now. The Quick Brown Fox jumps over the lazy dog. Full stop. New paragraph. This dictation software actually works pretty well. Full stop. What do you think? Question mark. Would you use this to write your book? Question mark, new paragraph, the end, full stop. Then we hit that microphone to again, stop it. You can see that works really, really well in terms of the accuracy. I'm actually pretty blown away. Or you can maybe see here, for example, what I just noticed straightaway is that w there is not capitalized after the full stop, nor the capitalized after the question mark. But those are not huge things. It certainly seems to have gotten all the words right. It hasn't mixed up any words. You could hear that I use words such as full stop, question mark, new paragraph. And the software was intelligent enough to not write the words full stop on your paragraph In knew what I meant. Any of these dictation softwares have their own little nuances that you will need to become familiar with. Having said that, a lot of them have pretty similar to Google Docs. The only reason why I'm recommending it is because Google Docs is free. So you might as well give that a go. If that works for you, you could certainly go somewhere. Remember when it, when it comes to writing a chat, if you're going to dictate it, I'm going to offer you the same overall advice as I did for the writing, as if you're going to type the chapter. So set aside a time, pick an appropriate space, and then try to work on one chapter at a time. Now obviously, when it comes to picking an appropriate place, I mentioned that I loved going to a cafe to type with a little bit of noise in the background. And obviously a cafes in public that may not work so well with dictation software, because the dictation software, your microphone may pick up noises in the background. So that's something to be cognizant of. But having said that, same rules apply. So I would definitely say as you're doing this, try not to edit it because you're going to see that the software is putting up words, they're just speaking them. And he'd be seen in correct word or you see it misses a full stop or you see it misses a new paragraph. Resist the temptation as much as possible to go in there and fix it now because you will lose your train of thought even more so than with typing, I believe is if you're dictating something as you get blown off course, it can be very difficult to try and get back into that group. That's dictation. Give it a go. If you feel that it's something that works for you and with Google Docs, you can give it a go for free. All you will need is a microphone doesn't have to be a fancy microphone. Most laptops certainly have microphones built in these data. If you're using something like a Zoom video conferencing software, you'll have a microphone already there. Or if you have a separate webcam, they often have microphones built-in. So that's dictation. 6. Book writing method #3: Speak and transcribe it: The third way I'm going to suggest that you could write your book is simply by recording it, not worrying about the dictation and trying to say things like full stop on new paragraph because as I said, that's not my personal favorite way. I found that a bit distracting. But just speaking your book until the TRO existence. So what I mean by this and the way that I've done this in the past is I will take my phone, my mobile phone, go into the car where I know it's going to be quiet because the car is kind of like a portable sound booth. And I will go in there and I will just speak a chapter. I'm not using any dictation software, anything like that. You can use voice memo, voice recorder, or literally just record the video and then you speak your chapter again. Try not to edit it as it goes. If you do find that you've misspoken something, then speak it correctly because, but keep the editing, the self editing to a minimum. Again, our goal is to get one chapter out. What you're going to do after you've finished recording that chapter is to send it to a transcription service. Now the transcription service that I've used in the past, and I do recommend them because they work very well, they're very accurate. And the turnaround is very quick. It's called rev.com.com. And you want to look at the transcription service, not the captioning service or anything like that. Transcription. And you can see here that it's a $1.20-five minutes. So it does cause and that's in US dollars, by the way, not Australian dollar. $1.20-five per minute. It's got a 12 hour turnaround time. So you can have this in less than 24 hours and it has a ninety-nine percent accuracy, which I can more or less vouch for. I've used this service in the past to not dictate, but just to speak entire chapters. I've recorded it on my cell phone as a video that you can actually send them the video. Or if you have a video editing software suite, you can take the audio out if you want to, and then just send them the audio because that file is a little bit smaller. But then when I sent them the file and had a transcribed, not only was a turnaround super quick as you could see, the 12 hours sometimes, let's say 24, but 12 hours, that's very quick. Not only was it a turnaround time very quick, it was extremely accurate. I don't think when I spoke one chapter, I don't think I needed to make any corrections at all in terms of spelling, that might have been one or two or chapter. But when you're talking about 3 thousand words in a chapter and only needing one or two corrections. That's probably more accurate than you or me typing to begin with. It was extremely quick, extremely accurate. The dollar, $1.20-five per minute, really, for me was worth it. Because most of us can speak much more quickly than we can type. You just going on, you're going, you're going into random. You don't edit as much when you're speaking. You will just go into your car, ran for 20 minutes and then at the end of that, send it to arrive and they come back with a transcription. And the good thing is that transcription will be automatically sorted into paragraphs and things like that for you. You will want to edit that and you will definitely want to read the transcription. The one thing I will say, if you're someone who says a lot of ums or likes, or they will sometimes transcribe those into the transcription. Now there are options for you, for you to tell them. Don't put those words that I say like the arms and the Rs and the UE knows or like all the time to not, Please don't put those in my transcription. But to be fair to them, they can't be a 100% accurate when knowing whether you want something that you've said to be the final transcription or not. The good side of it is it's extremely quick. It's quick way for you to speak. It probably faster than typing. And it's got a very fast turnaround. If you use a service such as riff, the downsides to it is it won't entirely be accurate. You will have the ears and the nose and the lights. And the final thing is you may, and I've used this and I've used a version of this which I will get to in the next video to help write this book. Because when I said I wrote this book, I really only wrote the part two and part three. The part one with all the stories. I actually used rev to transcribe. And this is in the next spot, but to transcribe interviews with other people, not me ranting, but transcribing interviews that I did with other people. The editing that I did do was to make it look a little bit more grammatically like typed or written English versus spoken English. Because as I've mentioned before or alluded to before, the way we speak and you will know this the way you speak is different to the way you write. And I've had friends read this book. When I've mentioned that to them, they're gone all yeah, I was like I thought I read a little bit differently. Now, having said that, they didn't dislike it. In fact, if anything, they found it easier to read because when we speak, we tend to use less flowery language. We tend to use shorter sentences. In many ways. There could be an advantage as well, but it's just something to be cognizant of when you send that transcription away and it comes back. It's obviously going to be a transcription of you speaking. If you want to make that look a bit more written or a bit more formal than you want to have a bit of editing to do. Having said that, I feel to really great way of doing it this way is a really great way of getting past any sort of writer's block you feel, you feel you might have. So you're not sitting in front of the if computer and going on, what do I type next? What do I type next? Once you start speaking, you're going and you have to keep speaking. That is speaking. And transcription. 7. Book writing method #4: Interview and transcribe it: This method is one of my favorite method methods personally speaking, and it's the method that I used to write in inverted commas, the ten stories that are included in this book. And that is, I conducted a video interview actually in-person. I sat down with cameras, recorded a video interview with ten women and they told their stories. I didn't say much. I just gave them some basic word prompts to help them tell this story, recorded this story, had it transcribed by Rev, as I suggested to you in the previous video. The videos were somewhere between 20 minutes to 40 minutes long. I did do a little bit of editing. I didn't just send the role of video footage without editing it because there's stuff at the beginning that you don't need this stuff at the end, there might be a bit of a break or blooper in the middle. And as you saw, rev charges you by the minute, you don't want to just have ten minutes of silence or doing nothing at the beginning of your video and be charged ten minutes for transcribing silence. You sit down with your interviewee, or it might be through Zoom, which is a free software which most of you hopefully are now familiar with because it's blown up during the pandemic, Everyone's now using Zoom. You can certainly interview someone through that. I also use a piece of software that's called stream Yard. Stream yard is a bit different in terms of it's very good at live streaming interviews. You wanted to start a live stream interview show stream yard. You can do that. They do have a free plan for that as well, and I'll put all the links below. But basically speaking, you will sit down, think about the interviewers well before what questions are you going to ask? And you don't want to be talking too much because we don't want to transcribe your questions probably into the chapter. We want to transcribe your interviewee her story or history, her thoughts or his thoughts as the chapter. So you don't want to be talking too much. Maybe you want to prep your interviewee for that as well. Maybe you have a standard list of questions. You can send those over to the interviewee beforehand so they can prepare and know what you're going to ask them. But then it's really simple whether you're in-person or virtual. You ask the question, what will you start? Make sure you start the recording. That's a big one. Don't go to that place where you're like, Oh, we've done the whole interview and I forgot to hit record to start recording. Asked the question will let you indigenously speak through the whole interview. Aim for whatever you want to aim for. I will say a 20 minute interview ends up being a decently long chapter, shortish one, but still okay. 40 minutes. Given the way most people speak and the rapidity you will, the rate at which most people speak. That ends up being a fairly longish chapter. But basically record the interview, edit out the bits that you don't need. Send it to rev or a similar service. They'll transcribe it, send it to you. And Bob's your uncle. Now at the same rules apply as to previously when I said you could go into your car ranch or chapter out speaker checked into existence. You get the transcription. Remember I said you might need it. Edit it if you want it to look a bit more like written language versus spoken language. And you don't have to do that because a lot of people prefer the spoken language because I find it much easier to read with a shorter sentences. But if you wanted to one that transcription of your interview comes back. Of course you want to proofread it. Of course you want to make sure that everything that is in that interview, especially because it's someone else, you want to make sure that it's error free. And then yes, if you want to, you might want to edit it so that it looks a bit more like written English versus spoken spoken English. One final point on this, the great benefit of doing it like this if you set it up, is that you can use the video recording of your interview as bonus material. So many of us have social media profiles or we're looking to build an online business. And yes, you put the written interviews and I've seen many, many big names do this. You've put the, put the transcription of the interviews into your written book, but then you can release the video interviews as bonus material. You can charge for them potentially, or you can give them. Why give them away as bonuses for people who may be sign up to your email list. And that is a massive advantage. It just looks like you're adding more value. And it looks like you're more of a savvy business person, more than premium businessperson. If you go, Wow, I not only get the written interview in the book, I can actually watch the interview on YouTube wherever you want to send it over. So that is a big advantage and something to consider. 8. Book writing method #5: Have interviewees write it: Okay, my final suggestion for how to write a book, sometimes without actually writing or typing, is the methodology I used for this book, Confessions of a pageant queen. Now this book pushes the limits of what amazon allows you to do. It's 800 pages thick, which is the maximum, roughly speaking, the maximum number of pages you can put in an Amazon book. And it wasn't enough. There are two volumes of this book to give you an idea. This is L to the other volume is 82 K. In total, this project had interviews with a 160 pageant queens from around the world. Now, I didn't sit down to interview a 160 people. That would drive me insane. I would probably take me years to do. But what I did, these are written interviews. The interviews that the Queen's featured, the ladies featured the women featured in that book. They feel that the answers to themselves, what I did was I had a list of just like I said with the previous one, have a list of interview questions. I had a list of ten interview questions for everyone in this book. And if I open it up to any chapter, I can actually give you an idea of some of them. So for example, the first question was, described yourself in a paragraph or two. I would, I emailed everyone who was interested in featuring in the book. I emailed them the list of questions and a list of questions was described yourself in a paragraph or two, they go and write their answer. And then the next one was what made you decide to enter pageantry in the first place? If I wrote their own answer to that, then I wanted some questions in there that were a bit lighter, a bit more humorous. One of the questions that I put in there once described your most embarrassing moment, pageant or otherwise. But long story short. I sent them, I e-mailed them a list of ten questions. I mean, you could put it up on a webpage if you wanted to. And then the ladies involved wrote their own answers to the questions. I told them it should be a paragraph or two for each answer because I didn't want one chapter to be 5 thousand pages long. And then the next chapter two B, three words long. But there was obviously variation in the length of the chapters, but it wasn't too bad. They went away. Rope it answers. Send them, email them into me. And then I calculated them into a bulk into a Word document. And that's a discussion for another day in terms of how to set up that Word document so that it's ready for print because that's more of the publishing side of things. We're just talking about the writing side of things. But if you want to create a project such as this, it's a really good way of getting people involved. You don't have to do any writing yourself. You might just want to write the introduction. You might want to put your own chapter in there if you wanted to. You don't do the writing. You do have, you do however, have to do a lot of the editing and the proofreading you can't rely on unlike rev, where as advertised, 99% accuracy when you have people sending you in submissions and sometimes not from. Sometimes, at least for me, English wasn't their first language. You can't guarantee that their spelling all their grandma is gonna be great. I did have to ask a few people too. I told him I can't take that submission. Spelling and grammar is too bad. Please go improve read it yourself and I do encourage you to do that. There is a downside to that. And the quality of the writing is going to be much more dependent on them. Then you, having said that, The ultimate advantage of creating a book such as this, through getting people to submit written answers to stock standard interview questions is a number of people you can get involved. As I said, in total, there were two volumes of this book. A 160 people, a 160 women. Now, with the previous book with from theatre freedom, there were ten women involved, which is still a good thing. But you got to think when it comes time to selling your book. If you've got me involved in your book. There was a chapter in your book dedicated to me. What are the chances do you think that I'm probably going to buy the book when it comes out pretty high. It's not a 100%. I'm gonna tell you that it's probably, maybe 50%. I can only guesstimate from the Amazon statistics. It doesn't tell me who bought the book, but I can only get some of that. At least half of the women involved in that project board it. That's 80 copies sold straight off the bat. That's a big reason why Not only this volume, the second volume, but the first volume and indicate they both hit the top ten in Amazon with no promotion on my part. The quality of the writing, as I said, in some places it's a bit dubious because I didn't do it myself and I could've done a better job proofreading and editing, definitely. But I didn't have time and I didn't want to. Because when it comes to that stuff, I'm a perfectionist. I knew it was going to drive me mad, so I had to make my piece, as I told you at the beginning, make peace with your perfectionism. This is not the place for it. I know there are spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes in here. Having said that people loved this book and it hit the top ten. And to me that's, the bigger result, is that it's sold well, people loved it. And people got to say, Hey, I'm featured in a published book, which people think is really, really cool. So that is a huge advantage to doing any sort of book where it's a collaborative effort, whether you do it in video interview format, like I said with this, of course, you probably can't include 160 women in that, 116 men or children or whatever it is. Then if you want to go the whole hog, go crazy. Come up with a list of ten standard questions. Well, I haven't any questions you want. Tell people, write a paragraph or two for everyone and then get a mass number of people involved. And you've already got some sales in the bank. Because if you put people into a published book, especially one that's written and looks pretty nice. It doesn't look cheap. Then you're going to have some sales in the bank and that will help you hit, that's one of your goals. Help you hit the tops. The top lists are the list of best sellers in Amazon. And that can help bring some money in, which I understand is not for everyone, but given that you are putting the effort into writing a book, it would be nice to make some money off of it. That's really one of my favorite ways of writing a book. And it doesn't really involve much writing. Just involves talking to people, collaborating with people, proofreading and editing to be sure. But I love working with other people. And the guaranteed, pretty much a guarantee that some of those people are going to buy the book. It's a smart business decision. That is one of my favorite ways of writing a book. 9. Edit & proofread (with a little help): Okay, As I mentioned right at the beginning of this course, one of the things I needed you to do with suicide, the perfectionism, and not edit as you're writing. Having said that, it is also very important that before you take that manuscript which you hastily wrote in a cafe somewhere, before you take that manuscript and just wake it onto whatever publishing platform you're going to use and release it as a printed book that people are going to pay you for. It is probably important. You do a bit of proofreading and editing. Now, there's a few different aspects of this, and I will show you, I'm about to show you some services where you can outsource this and get other people to do it for you and look if you are not blessed as a natural speller or you don't have that eye for grammar that I strongly, strongly urge you to get someone else to do this. It is not as expensive as you think, but it is much better probably than doing it yourself. Your time is best spent writing and creating the book. It is not best spent doing the proofreading and editing. There are people who are professional to doing that. Just before I show you how you can get other people to do it. There's a couple of different versions of this. One is a very base level of just proofreading. Which means if someone's doing it, whether it's you or someone else, they are just looking for spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes. They're not changing the structure at all of what you've actually written. For example, if there's a spelling mistake and you meant to write cat, and for some reason it's come up as cant or cant. Then all the proofreaders going to do is change that. There is a next level of editing, which is where people will actually change what you've written so that it reads a little bit better. I've alluded to this when I've talked about getting transcriptions back from Rev, whether it's you going in your car and speaking your chapter into existence, or whether it's an interview and you get that transcription back. I've alluded to. You might want to edit it a little bit so it looks less like spoken English and a bit more like written English. This is what that next level of editing is. It's more expensive and takes longer because the person is going to have to rewrite parts of your chapter. But it's a more thorough edit. I haven't found that to be necessary, but that's a very personal choice. It's up to you. If you're someone who tends to write very well and your grammar is very easy to read and it flows together well, then you probably don't need it. If on the other hand, maybe you're writing is not so good or you just want that extra level of security certainty then go for it. But having said that, here are the outsourcing sites that I recommend, that you don't have to do it for yourself. I'll just recommend to there's a lot of different other sites that you can use. This one here is called Upwork, Upwork.com. Now, I'm going to recommend Upwork Fiverr, 500k, double. These are both water called outsourcing sites. You can go to the site and look up pretty much any job in the world. And there's gonna be someone somewhere who can do it for you. You just have a look. I've put in book editing here into this search window here. And let's come up with all these results. Susan H, top rated book editor, book editing, $50 an hour, $20,000.99% job success, top braided. And then there's a description of what she can do. So you'd go through these and you can send them a message and work out which one you want to use. You will find some that are cheaper. So for example, $10 an hour. And then there'll be some that my chart, for example, a $125 an hour, doesn't necessarily mean they're better, probably means they're probably better. But it's more of a show that they are qualified and experienced now when it does come to so that's something that's called Upwork. And it's not just book editing. You can see on the side of your accounting and consulting Edmund support, customer service, data science, etc. When it comes time to do your book cover, for example, by putting on book cover, you're going to find a whole another list of people, and it's a different list of people. Fiverr is exactly the same, tend to be a little bit cheaper than name of Fiverr initially came from when they dig, as I call them, their jobs. They would offer them for five bucks. Not quite the case. Now, some jobs do go for five bucks, some go for a lot more. But again, I've put in book editing here. And you can see all these people offering book editing. You can see this one starting at $474.39. So definitely not five bucks. But here we go, starting at $14.82. And again, you could go book cover five or is probably even got a wider array of what's possible. I've actually had this music and audio here. I actually had someone compose and play short piece of music for my podcast. They came up with an original piece of music. It was so cheap, I ordered two, I ended up using one. Fiverr is a bit on the cheaper end. Does that mean I'll focus a bit more quality. Maybe. I mean, really you need to give it a go to see what I will suggest. Start cheap. So there's really nothing to lose. And when you go to find someone, look really don't hire someone who's new. Hire someone who has a lot of reviews. And depending on the platform. So for example, on Upwork, we want that a 100% job success or close to it, 98% job success. I would talk, I looked at someone who's been on the cheaper side, what you can afford, because if they can do it for cheaper, There's no point in paying more cheaper side, but good job success or good reviews. $50 an hour, 100% job success. When you get down to here though, for example, thirty-five dollars an hour and only 92% job success. And I know, I know you go, Adrian, 92% is still good. Year it is, but it's not good compared to 100% or 98%. And believe me, if the freelancer, the person who's gonna do your work is worth their salt. They will do everything they can to keep that success as close to a 100% as I can. So 92% on a site like Upwork is waving a red flag at me. That's what I would suggest. Go in the cheaper end of things and look for really high job success. This one here, 85% I would stay away from. In Fiverr, I would say exactly the same thing. Look towards the cheaper end. They do it by a star rating similar to Uber if you've done that. So out of five stars, I would look for someone who's got our high star rating. And then again, look for someone who's on the cheaper end to begin with. Because you will be amazed at the quality of the work that you can get done for $5.10 dollars, fifteen dollars. I've had book covers Designed on Fiverr and they've come back and you would never know that? I didn't pay someone hundreds and thousands of dollars to designer. There are people that I could pay hundreds of dollars, four thousand dollars for that would design a cover. And if I hold up their cover compared to the one I had done on Fiverr, you would be hard pressed to pick a difference at all. There would be that close together. In terms of outsourcing sites like this. There are other ones, but five or an Upwork are the ones that I recommend to begin with. And you just look for proofreading on editing. So again, you go to book editing, hit Enter, and then have a look at what comes up. I will say that there's almost always additional filters that you can apply. For example, when I told you about job success, if you wanted to put 90% and that will cut out anyone who's below that. And there may be, you can put an hourly rate and let's say 30 to $60. And then the earned amount again, if they've earned nothing, that means I haven't had any paid jobs, we probably don't want to risk that. We said, okay, maybe they've earned at least a 100 bucks. And then when you come up and you have a look, you will see that the list has been shortened down. And anyone in here is gonna be above 90% job success. The same goes for fiber. You can see the filters up the top seller details. You could go top-rated seller. You probably want a seller who speaks English. I certainly do. You can leave this blank or you can add whatever you want. Hit Apply. Fiverr will do its thing. Budget, you could go and maximum Macau, I don't want to pay any more than a $100. Let's apply that. And then let's say maybe you want it done within a week. Hit apply. And that will exclude any other freelancers who Canada within a week. And then when you go through this, you're pretty much guaranteed to find only those people who fit your criteria. In fact, you can see the entire list now has been shortened down to only nine freelancers for you to go through. You could probably even go through this and sort by best-selling newest arrivals. I was gonna say, can you sort it by low to high costs, but you can't do that. But sort by newest arrival. So this person here is a new arrival. You can see that I've only got 55 reviews, but there's still good reviews. Or you can go by best-selling. You can see this person here, 543 reviews. Then you can click in by the way, and you can see the work for some of their work or some of the details for yourself. So the moral of the story here, unless you are naturally gifted with proofreading and editing, don't do that yourself. It'll just be a waste of time. Be willing to spend a little bit of money to get it done properly. Go to an outsourcing site like an Upwork or Fiverr, find someone on the cheaper end, but someone that's got good reviews and quite a lot of good reviews or good writing. And then start from there. I would also suggest maybe you reach out initially to, let's say two or three of them. Message three of them and see which ones respond. If they don't respond to you at all, that's a bad sign. If someone responds to you really quickly, That's a good sign because it means I really on it and they're probably gonna be really responsive. And moving forward. If you want to use outsourcing sites, create your cover. If you want to use outsourcing sites to do your taxes, to do whatever it is to maybe turn your book into an audio book. You'll be amazed at what you can get done for a lot less than you probably think that outsourcing sites for you. 10. Get the class project done: Well, we're at the end of this course. Thanks so much for sticking through it and congratulations, congratulations on reaching the end. I just want to take this minute to remind you that the project for this course is to pick a title, Treatise of title and subtitle for your book. This is all stuff we've covered in this course. By the way, I'm not asking you to have to go and do something we haven't covered. So pick a title and subtitle for your course. If you remember, I suggested picking a title that was almost controversial, verging on almost defending some people. That's not really your style, I understand it. But pick something that really sticks out for the title. And then the subtitle is something that explains a little bit more about what your book is about. So do that number one, pick a title and subtitle. Number two, I want you to outline your book, whether it's using those dot points in a Google Doc or a Word processor, or using the mind-map software free mind. I need you to get to that point where you've at least outlined the book. So you know what the main writing point or talking point for each chapter will be. Then the third step I want you to do is to write or speak or dictate that first chapter. I really need you to do those three things for me because my belief is if you can do those three things, you're going to start getting some momentum. And you're going to start seeing that the process of writing a book is nowhere near as difficult as you might think. If I can get you to prove that to yourself, then the chances of you finishing your first book, at least some manuscript part of it, are going to rocket exponentially go through the roof. And then yes, we need to get you published and there'll be a course that I do later. I had done a previous course on how to publish a children's book. That's probably not what you're writing at the moment. But I will do a subsequent Skillshare course on how to publish your book. But to publish a book, you're going to first need a manuscript to actually published. So that's why I wanted to do this course first. So again, do those three things. Tidal one subtitle, outline, write, or speak or dictate your first chapter. If you can do those three things and put it in the project gallery, told me what the title and subtitle is. All income me to your mind-map or linked me to your, your bullet list of Chapter points. So you can see even send me maybe not in the gallery. You can email me your first chapter. And I can give you some feedback, not because I'm some sort of genius. It just because I've been there, done that and I know it can be very daunting the first time you do it. And you go, Who the **** am I to be writing a book? I'm not a, I'm not a genius. I'm not the world's leading expert on whatever it is. You have to get that little voice out of your head. The Berliners turned it down. Let's get you started. Everyone has a book inside of them, so let's start getting it out. Hope you've enjoyed this course. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below. And I hope to be hearing from you soon and seeing your published book even sooner.