How To Write A Book For Fun And Profit

How to write a book. Why would you want to write a book?. Is it to satisfy a yearning deep down inside to release a book?, or is it more an inkling to make some money?

Or, is it both?.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll be talking about nonfiction, but fiction can be a ton of fun too, and perhaps, just perhaps you could hit the bestsellers list. Nonfiction books are generally written to solve a problem, lose weight, make money, write a book, train your cat, etc.

Fiction books are written to entertain. They include fantasy, detective stories, mysteries, romance, science fiction, children’s stories, etc. Who doesn’t love a good novel?

I started writing books, a little over a year ago when the great pandemic of 2020 struck, I had never written a book before, but I had been meaning to write a self-help book for a long time. I bought a program on how to create books and turn them into audiobooks. This, to me, seemed a very good business model.

I don’t believe books will ever go out of fashion. Physical books will always be around, however, Kindle Books are overtaking the sale of physical books quite rapidly, and audiobooks are now more and more popular.

How To Write A Book – Finding Ideas

Audible is owned by Amazon, the plan was to upload the book as a paperback and ebook to Amazon, then to turn it into an Audiobook for Audible. This has worked out very well so far.

How do you get started? I realized that this was a big sticking point for people, mainly due to a lack of ideas. After doing a lot of research on the Internet I came up with a lot of great ideas to help people find profitable topics for nonfiction books and I published a book called AWESOME KINDLE BOOK IDEAS . This book is only around 9000 words, which goes to show you that you don’t necessarily have to write 30,000 – 50,000 words to create a book that sells.

Ideas are everywhere. You can use websites in the niche you intend to write to find ideas and material to help you create your books. You can also find ideas simply by asking questions in Google, “What are the ten top problems people face in business?”, for example.

From these answers, you can find topics, and even chapter titles. The internet is awash with ideas. Google is the gatekeeper. Ask and you will receive.

How To Write A Book – Getting Started

Who Am I To Write a Book?.

Who are you not to write a book? Authors do not come down from another planet with all the ideas and skills in their heads to write a book. Authors are just like you and me. Why shouldn’t we write a book?

At one time, it was much harder to become an author. You had to get an agent, your agent had to peddle your book around the publishing houses and if you were accepted, you would get your book published and you would be paid royalties after all publishing and marketing costs were taken into account.

Today, you can do away with 95% of all that. You simply write the book yourself or get a ghostwriter to do it. You then create the book cover or can get a professional to do it for you. You upload your manuscript and book cover to Amazon. When published, you market your book, and initially, you ask people to review your book.

You are in control. It’s your baby. The more you market the book, especially in the early stages, the more you are likely to sell. After a while, your book will start to sell organically if you have plenty of reviews. My latest book HOW TO WRITE A BOOK will fill in all the blanks.

How To Write A Book – Creating An Outline

Now that you have your topic for the book, you need to create an outline. An outline is a skeleton of how your book will look. Before writing your outline, you need to know who your target audience is, who will be buying your book?.

Most people who start out as a novice when writing a book will aim the book at anyone and everyone, hoping to capture as many people as possible. This is what I call a “scattergun” strategy. You need to know who your target audience is before writing the book. “Who am I writing my book for”?

Are you writing it for men or women?, What age group are they ?. How many people in this age group have this problem?, Do these people actually buy books on this subject?. You can find out all this information through Google.

Once you have all the relevant information, you can now create your outline.

The outline is like a mini version of your finished book. You create the introduction, the chapter titles, the proposed topic for each chapter, the order and sequence of the chapters and then you provide the resources where that information can be found (blog posts, etc), you can use this information to help you write the book.

NOTE: Don’t copy other people’s work. Use information freely available on the Internet to give you ideas on what to include in your book.

When I wrote my first book “MILLIONAIRE MIND CRUSH” I didn’t actually know anything about creating outlines, in fact, I knew very little about writing books at all. I just went ahead and did it. I do think I could have finished the book more quickly had I created an outline. I spent nearly a year writing it and changing it around until I was happy with it.

How To Write A Book – Create A Plan

After you have gathered all the information you need to write your book, and you’ve created your outline, you now need to get down and write it. I used to just write at any time of day for any period of time. This was not a very productive way of doing things.

What I do now is, I work for two hours every morning writing my book. I work a lot better in the morning as I’m more awake. Some people work better at night, it just depends on you. Once I’ve started, I don’t do anything else. I turn off all distractions and concentrate purely on writing.

I would suggest you do this too. Since I’ve been doing this, my productivity has almost doubled. I now find I can create a 30,000-word book in three or four weeks. Some people are much faster. Other people take longer. There is no hard and fast rule.

Writers Block

Sometimes, I can not write a thing. When I get days like that I tend to go out, go down the beach to have a good old clear out of my mind to remove the fog. You will get blank days too where you just can’t seem to write. This tends to be re-balanced by the good days when you are unstoppable.

Once you have finished writing your book, before you publish it, you will need to know a little bit about formatting and making your book pages look nice. Formatting concentrates on things like font size, page color, word count, page number, line spacing, paragraph breaks, and everything that goes into the visual appearance. You will also need to edit your book. Basic spelling and grammar can be checked using a free tool called Grammarly, and you can hire an editor if needed on Upwork .

Formatting can be done using Kindle Create for a PC or Mac or if you want something a little more fancy and you have a Mac, I would recommend Vellum. This is what I use for all my books. It’s a paid program and works very well, plus it makes the pages of your book look wonderful and very professional.

There are many aspects to writing a nonfiction book. More than I can mention here in a blog post. If you want to know more, click here and grab a copy of my book How To Write a Book, it’s a detailed but very easy book to read. It’s written in plain language and will help you on your book-writing journey.

I hope you got value from this post.

If you did, please leave a comment below and share this post.

All the best

Keith

FTC Notice. links in this post may be affiliate links. This is where I may receive a small commission if you decide to click the link and buy the product.