I’m an adult, I’m not scared of the dark, I don’t believe in ghosts or monsters. But I was scared – really, really scared – of this:
Not the program, Scrivener, – its cool, it was the outline – the outline for my next book. That File.
It was just so scary – I had to hide from it for a month. Eventually I decided it was too hard, I went around it – wrote a bunch of content for Lis’s Travel Tips – content which is quite similar to what will be in the book – but they were just long blog posts – I can write those!
As Tracey pointed out in the comments of my last post – you actually don’t need spectacular sales to make money selling indie non-fiction. Although she missed the future value of money ($3k today is worth more than $3k paid out over 10 years) – her point is valid:
Basically what I’m saying is that it’s about volume (amount of books you have) and repeat customers.
I knew that, I knew I had to write more books, for goodness sake I’d written one, why was the next one so bloody hard? I dunno maybe its just me – having done something out of confort zone one, doesn’t make it that much easier to repeat the exercise. Weird
However as a student of time management and procastination I knew that I couldn’t manage the problem if I didn’t measure it. The problem was two -fold:
- I was writing enough;
- I wasn’t writing my books
I decided to start counting words – yeah like rocket science, right?
I decided to start with the easier problem – the first one. I started writing – last week I wrote a total of over 8000 words (I don’t count comments, forums, social media, only words written as articles either on my sites or to promote my sites). It was a little scary – I was guest posting – something I’ve never actually done. But amazingly I persuaded some bloggers to publish my stories: Wellington Sculpture and Paris in the Snow . But it wasn’t as scary as That File.
OK so my output was up, and it was good for marketing – but I really needed more product to sell. I needed to deal with That File.
Now Dave in his clever little Pond decided to start with some motivational board. Post your goal – make it public, and either win or fail – if you fail – well it was bad – the Duck Booed
- Monday: Stated aim: 5000 words, achieved 5153, 13 articles for an auto-responder series. Yeah thanks to info in the Duck Pond – I’m finally going to send emails to my lists (want more Lis’s travel tips – sign up for the Newsletter here.
- Tuesday – I didn’t state a publishing aim – instead I spent the day sorted out how to actually use AWeber (yeah really I’ve never used it to actually send mail LOL) and editing some of the words I’d written so I appear literate.
- Wednesday – OK lets try writing today. 5000 words. Not sure what I want to write about: of course I have books to write, a ton of keyword focussed articles to write, hell I could even write some backlink articles. Did none of it – massive Duck Boo !
- Thursday – I opened up That File. It didn’t bite – it was more like -” hey hello Author – nice to see you, been a while”. The structure wasn’t bad. I found the notes that I’d written on the plane – fitted them into the plan. I decided I needed a chapter on a place I hadn’t been to – I did some research. By 10:30pm I had about 1100 words. But I’d promised myself 5000 words. By 1am I had those words.
Would I have stayed up if I hadn’t promised publicly that I’d write them – nope. Where they great words, nope, the grammar is awful and the typing was falling off markedly towards the end. Doesn’t matter – they can get edited, they are not final words, but they are a start, and having some words rather than a blank screen, is about 80% of the way to the goal.
So today is Friday – and I have another 5000 words to write on my book! Later!