Just back from the quarterly master mind for my private clients! Each quarter we spend a full day Friday working on our businesses and then have an out-of-the-box experiential event on Saturday AM. This Saturday (this morning) blew my socks off! I’ll blog about that later, because this is amazing, put money in your pocket, techniques but in a way I’ve never seen before.
Yesterday, one of my highly successful business clients presented a technique she has just learned to write a book in 6 hours. I’ll walk you through it step by step just like she presented it. There may be parts you don’t want to do and that’s okay. Just remember the closer you stay to the model, at least the first few times you do it, the better your results will be.
Start off with the front and back cover.
Write the title and sub title, then get a cover designed. The cover should be formulaic:
Title
Sub Title
Picture
Your name (author)
Then do the back cover.
Elevator pitch of the book
What another would say about your book
Your bio
Print both the front cover and back cover and hang them up where you work
This will focus your book and make it more real to you. Now it’s possible that the eventual cover looks nothing like this, but for now, it does.
Step Two: Start with a blank piece of paper (probably a big flip chart).
Draw two big circles, one higher than the other and connect them with a line.
The first big circle is labeled “topic”. Off of the Topic Circle draw three more circles and connect them with lines.
The second big circle is labeled “answer”. Off of the Answer Circle draw three more circles and connect them with lines.
The topics sub-circles represent sections of information about the topic. This is the “Why” and “What” of the book. So, let’s say you are writing a book about Twitter. You might have a circle that says “instant messaging.”
Off of each of these sub-circles are 3 more sub-circles and off of each of these have 12 lines. These lines represent 12 statements about the sub circle (or chapter). Six should be negative (never instant message about every boring detail of your life) and six should be positive (occassionally instant message positive inspiration quotes).
Complete this for all of the circles. If you have more than three topics, save them for the next book. By keeping this form, you’ll write a balanced book. One of my challenges is ending up with a chapter with 3 pages and another with 30. This will avoid that problem.
Now go to the “Answer” circle. Each of the 3 sub-circles has 3 sub-circles to further define the “how to” part of your book. Each of that 3rd level has 12 statements - 6 positive and 6 negative.
The positive and negative statements become tweets you can use to promote your book, even as you’re writing it. For example, the statement has a bit.ly link that goes to your page with the book with a Coming in Two Weeks (or whatever) statement.
Each of the descriptions of the subcircles become Facebook comments (which can be longer than Twitter’s 140 characters) And the longer circle explanations become blogs. All of this promotes the book.
Can you really write a book in 6 hours? Well, apparently some have - but you have to be able to dictate it. I’m not sure many people can type that fast!
Let me know what you think! Will you do it?
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