Over recent weeks I’ve been talking about the obstacles that stop people from actually getting their book written. But I thought today I’d have a bit of a change of pace, and I’ll start talking about the actual process of writing your book. And yes, there is actually a process. Sometimes, people just jump in and start writing, and then they find themselves caught in the weeds and they can’t get any further. That’s because they didn’t follow the process because they didn’t realize there was a process. 

So today I want to take you through these seven steps to writing your manuscript. Now, notice that’s not seven steps to completing your book and publishing it. It’s just to get into the point where you have the first draft of your manuscript. 

I’ll tell you the seven steps now, and then over seven future videos, I’ll go into some more depth on the seven steps. But let me just summarize them today. 

Step 1: Define Your Goals for the Book

Step number one is to define your goals for the book. And I’ve kind of touched on this a little bit on a previous video when I talked about your why. Why is it that you’re writing the book? So it’s not just I’m writing the book to position myself as an expert, it goes further than that. Exactly what do you want the book to do for you in positioning yourself as an expert? Do you want it to help you get more sales, or do you want to get speaking engagements? Do you want to be recognized as a thought leader and sell a lot of books? All of these are valid reasons, which you need to get clear on. So that step number one is defining the goals for your book. 

Step 2: Choose and Refine Your Topic

Step number two is choosing and refining your topic. Now, I want to point out here that a topic is not a subject, they’re two different things. Your subject area might be, let’s say for example, you are a lawyer, and your subject, your area of expertise might be family law. That’s a subject. But that’s too big for a book. You can’t just write a book about family law because nobody is going to read it. It’s going to be too big, too general. Your readers are looking for the answers to specific questions, so you might want to write a book, for example, on the importance of getting your financial situation on paper before you start your divorce proceedings. That’s actually something that was a book I talked to somebody about. So that’s the difference between a subject and a topic. 

People do not want thick, heavy books containing everything you know about the subject, so it’s important for you to narrow that down. The interesting thing, and the encouraging thing, is that sometimes when you narrow it down, you don’t have one book, you have several books on several different topics, each one an aspect of your area of expertise. 

Think about the questions your clients ask you. Think about the things you feel they should know, they need to know, and refine that, and that can become your topic area. 

So you’ve defined your goals for the book — now you need to define and refine the topic.

Step 3: Pick a Working Title

Step number three is picking a working title, and this is kind of a fun thing in a way. You know, it becomes tedious after a while to just refer to this work as your book. You know you talk about my book this, and my book that, and my book will talk about this, and when I get my book published. And it’s kind of hard to make it real, but if you give it a title, it does become real in your mind. It doesn’t have to be the final title. You could play with a number of different titles, but something that kind of describes what your book is actually about. 

When you come to something that is close, you think it might be the final title, start publicizing it. And the first thing that I recommend you do is make it part of your email signature line. So you can say, “Author of the upcoming book,” and then the title. So you’re starting to promote yourself and position yourself as an author even before you’ve actually finished the book, and you can’t do that unless you have some kind of title. 

Step 4: Decide on the Style of Your Book

Number four is to decide on the style of your book. Is this going to be a thought leadership book? In which case, it’s going to need a lot more content, and probably, the chapters will be longer and the structure of the book has to be very specific and very carefully thought through. 

Is it going to be a how-to book? In which case, is it going to be a process, such as a seven-step process for doing something. In that case, a how-to might be the style of your book. 

Is it going to be a memoir? And if it is a memoir, is it going to be light-hearted and fun or is it going to be teaching lessons that you’ve learned from life? 

These are questions you need to decide before you actually start to write, otherwise, you can end up writing the wrong book.

Step 5: Create a Table of Contents

Next, create a table of contents. You’re really getting down to the nitty gritty when you write your table of contents. Again, like the title, it’s not cast in stone. It may not be the final, it probably won’t be the final table of contents, but it gives some structure to your book and it gives you some idea of the order your subjects will appear in. 

So again, just jot down all the pieces that you want to include in your book, the things that you want to write about. Jot them down, and then decide…get rid of some of them if you’ve got too many. Try to keep it to about 10 subjects and that will give 10 chapters. 

Write down the order that you’re going to present to your reader, and that can give you the outline of a table of contents. Now, you might have some subchapters, but you don’t need to worry about those right now. You just want a general outline for your book, which comes from your table of contents. Once you’ve got a table of contents and a title, you’re really starting to realize you’ve got a book coming. 

Step 6: Decide on Whether to Record Your Book

The next question is to decide whether you will record your book. Now, this is one of my pet peeves and I’m going to discuss it in more detail later. But many people will tell you, “Oh, well you should record your book. If you don’t like to write, you should record your book, and then just have it transcribed.”

The first part is correct, the second part is not. It’s a good way to get started. In fact, I have a program called the 90-minute author that is based on exactly that, where I interview the person based on their 10 questions .And then I have it transcribed, but it doesn’t stop there. 

If you approach it this way, understand that a transcript that has just been tweaked is not a book. It’s a tweaked transcript, and they’re not the same thing at all. So if you are prepared to put the time and effort and probably money into getting your book adapted and edited into book shape, then it’s a good idea to talk your book. It’s sometimes a good idea to do it just to get your thoughts out to begin with, and then instead of transcribing it, just use it as the starting point for writing your draft. I’ll talk about that in some more detail later. 

Step 7: Start Writing the First Draft

And, finally, number seven is to write the first draft. The only thing I will say to you about the first draft is it is a first draft! The purpose of a first draft is to get the words down, either on your screen, and preferably then on paper. You don’t have to worry at this point about beautiful writing, about correct grammar, and great language, and all those things that are important and that will come later, because that happens during the editing. The purpose of the first draft is to get the words down. 

Once you’ve got your table of contents done, just start with that, and work your way through it. Write down your thoughts on each item in your table of contents. Now, of course, there’s more to it than that, and I will be talking about that in some detail as we go through this series, but for now, just concentrate on doing those : define your goals for the book, choose and refine your topic, pick a working title, decide on the style of your book, create a table of contents, decide whether or not you’ll record your book, and write the first draft. Those are the seven steps to getting to a point where you have a working manuscript of your book, and then comes the hard work after that. 

So start thinking about these things, start asking yourself this week about the goals for your book, and just work your way through these, and see whether you can get to the point where you’re ready to start the first draft of your book. And I’ll talk to you next week.