Monday’s planning tip for authors

For thousands of authors around the world, the first step to planning and writing a book is to answer 7 deceptively simple questions. These questions  must be addressed before your project can proceed further. Your responses will help you focus your efforts and clarify your vision. The questions include:

1. What is your book about? Describe the topic you want to explore and the information you want to share with your readers?
2. Have you identified an approach to your topic? There are dozens of approaches to organizing and presenting information. What aspects of the topic are you going to emphasize? How are you going to organize your book?
3. How will readers benefit from your book? What problems will your book help your readers solve? What goals will your book help readers achieve?
4. Are there existing books on the topic? How carefully have you analyzed existing books on the market? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
5. How will your book be different (or better)? There is no reward in writing a book that resembles one that has already been written. Your book has to be noticeably different in order to succeed.
   
6. Have you chosen a title? The ideal title concisely targets your market, explains how readers will benefit, and  and expresses the book’s uniqueness. How effectively does your title satisfy these criteria?
7. Why do you want to write a book? What are your goals in writing a book? How are you or your business going to profit from your book? Profits from book sales are rarely enough to make a major change in your standard of living. Success comes from the way you leverage your book into products and services after it appears.

The act of answering planning questions like the above helps you focus your ideas and clarify your goals. Planning a book is a process, not an event. If you’re like most Published & Profitable members, your answers may change as you look deeper into the questions and you explore Published & Profitable’s resources (articles, assessments, audios, mind maps, videos, and worksheets) in greater detail.

Get started today! The easiest way to get started is to use the the Proposal Planning Worksheet now located in Published & Profitable’s Sample Contents area. Simply answer the questions online, in the spaces provided, and press “submit.” By return e-mail you will receive the results in a format that you can use as the basis for the first draft of your book proposal.