Marketing tip
The Easiest and Best Way
to Write Your Book
by Diane Eble
You want to write a
book. You have an idea. Great!
But you don't know where to
begin.
I have your answer.
Start with an
article.
You've heard the expression: "How do you
eat an elephant? One bite at a time."
The "elephant" is the book. The "bites"
are the series of articles that will eventually make up the
book—each article a piece of a chapter.
You can assure yourself of finishing the
book if you just tell yourself you will work on one little
piece—one article, with one thought—at a
time.
Set a realistic goal. If an article a week
isn't realistic, then try an article every two weeks, or one
a month. Either way, you'll be making
progress.
The Hidden Treasure in Your
Articles
Once it's written, don't just move on to
the next one. Whether you know it or not, your article
contains a hidden treasure. There is extremely valuable
information about your audience locked up in that
article.
You can unlock the treasure and put that
article to work for you to actually shape your book into
something you know people will want to
read.
How?
By publishing it online, and using the
feedback that's available to learn more about your
audience.
When you publish an article in an online
ezine directory such as ezinearticles.com, the directory
keeps track of how times people have viewed your article,
how many times it's been published in other places or
emailed to people. People are also allowed to vote on your
article, and to comment.
As you write your book, article by
article, chapter by chapter, you can get a feel for which
topics are most interesting to other people. You may find
out that some articles receive a lot of votes and comments,
others get none. This will help you reshape your book so
that you give people more of what they want, and don't bore
them with what they don't want.
This really gets me excited. Never before
has something like this been available to writers. Before,
it's always been a crapshoot as to what people really will
want to read. The Internet tools available now have changed
all that—to writers' everlasting
advantage.
You just have to know how to use the
tools.
What to Do with Your
Article
Once written, submit your article to ezine
directories. Start with ezinearticles.com
, the biggest and best directory. Look through the categories
and find the one that most closely fits your audience's needs.
Go as far as you can.
For instance, this article could go in the
"Writing and Speaking" category, but it's best if I go
further and put it in the "Writing and Speaking—Writing"
category. Now, I could put it in "Writing and
Speaking—Writing Articles" category—but I won't. Why
not?
Because you, the reader, are probably most
interested in this point in writing a book, right? I'm
telling you the best way to do that is to start by writing
articles, but that's not what's on your mind at first. See
how it works? You always start with your audience. It's all
about them—not you!
People will find online articles through
keying in words or phrases in the search box, so you will
want to figure out what kind of keywords people will use to
find the information in your article. All ezine directories
will ask you to submit keywords. Make your title and your
first paragraph, especially, rich with
keywords.
In addition to keywords, you need to
submit a summary of your article. This is like a little ad
to get people to read it, so you want to make sure it
summarizes well what you want to say, while enticing them to
read more.
The next unique thing about an ezine
article is that you can include an author's bio box, also
called a resource box. Here is where you can put something
in about yourself. Here is where you can also ask them to
take some action—sign up for your newsletter if you have
one, or your blog, or go to your website to read an excerpt
from another book you have, etc.
I suggest you put up a simple blog where
you can post your other articles, and say in the resource
box, "To read more articles on this topic,
visit http://www.yourblogurl.com
." Blogs are great because
they're free, quick and easy to put up and maintain, search
engines like them, and people can comment on them as well. Just
make sure that the articles on your blog and the ones in the
ezine directories are at least 20 percent
different.
Use the information you're learning about
your audience to rethink your book's content as
necessary.
Caution
One caution about using this technique: Do
not submit the content of every single chapter to online
directories!
Two reasons for this.
One, a chapter is probably too long for an
article anyway. One chapter may end up being the equivalent
of several articles. You'll want to submit only 500-900
words tops as an ezine article. Use something that's
representative of the chapter. All you need is a sense of
how people like your content.
Second reason you can't submit all of what
will eventually be your book's content is—no publisher will
touch it if it's already been published.
However, if you can approach a publisher
and say, "pieces of several of these chapters have gotten
10,000 views, been picked up by 2000 other ezines, and
received 300 comments"—well, let's just say a publisher is
likely to be convinced you have an audience, even if you're
trying to sell your first book.
Further Resources
…
-
If you're
having difficulty coming up with ideas for your book or
articles, read "
Two Never-Fail
Ways
to Overcome Writer's Block." The second
technique is especially good for coming up with ideas so
quickly you'll be amazed. One of my clients used this to
restructure her book in two minutes! She used the same
technique for each chapter and in one day, got the whole
book ready for editing. My 16-year-old son, who has
writer's block big time, also used this when he needed to
write a paper. Within 15 minutes we had mind-mapped his
paper's ideas, and he was on the computer typing his paper.
Amazing tool!
-
The second
resource is Jeff Herring, "
the article
marketing guy." I've been listening to
Jeff's free teleseminars for some time now, and have
learned a great deal. All the ideas I've tried from him
have produced great results. Jeff also has all sorts
of
great programs and
resourceson article writing
and marketing. I believe he is about to start a
4-week module called "Article Writing & Marketing
Secrets," coaching over the phone on how to submit
articles so you and your articles can rise, maybe
even soar, above the completion in your niche. Check
it out.
-
Finally, for an updated list of 50 ezine article
directory sites, with
links,
click
here.
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