Isn’t that a happy accident? Book already written? Yep, I write them in my sleep myself.
Totally joking, of course.
What I mean is that you aren’t actually starting from scratch. As a business owner, you’ve already written SOMETHING about what you would like to write your book about. Once you know your audience and your purpose, you can look back through what you already have written to see what would work best for your topic.
Take a look at these places for ideas:
Blog posts—If you’re a consistent blogger, then you have a huge repository of ideas for your book. Reviewing past blog posts can give you ideas for your entire outline. And if you’re not sure of your topic, you can look at the topics of blogs to see what you could piece together. However, you have to be careful that you don’t just string a bunch of blog posts together and call it a book. Flesh out your ideas, add stories to illustrate your points, and include resources to give your blog posts the value that people would want to pay for.
Articles—If you’ve written for any publications, review the topics that you have been asked to cover or the ones you pitch that are met with the most excitement or readership. You may be able to create an outline from the topics of your articles and then flesh them out to create each of the chapters. As with the blog posts, add in anecdotes, etc. to create an experience greater than what a reader of all your articles would have.
Talking points for speeches—Look at talking points from some of the presentations you’ve given. More than likely, the talking points are already in the form of a book outline. All you have to do is write what you would normally say. This could be the easiest way for you to write a book! If you struggle to write but do much better when you are speaking, then simply use dictation software. Many computers also have capability for dictation now. Search online for the standard macros for your computer.
Why is all this important? Sometimes you know that you want to write a book, but you just don’t know where to start. Having an idea of what will generate ideas for your book is huge for getting you on the path to completing your work.
Overwhelm shows up in all shapes and forms. If the idea of writing your book is overwhelming, but you know it has to be done, then looking through what you’ve already written can help boost your confidence and calm your fears. Yes, you’ve already talked A LOT about your topic. Yes, you can expand on what you have. Looking at what you’ve already written will ease the process.
And once that book is done, you can use it as a client connection tool for your business. Remembering the end point you want to reach can help motivate you to actually do the digging through your writing and get you to a point where you can actually work on the book.