Welcome back to day two of the 28-day writing challenge! I’m inviting you to join me as I begin work on my next book. I wonder if you have decided to get a start on your own book during this challenge. Either way, you can do it with me or you can just watch as I go through the process. Let’s see how we will do with this 28-day writing challenge-Day 2 project.
My Current Project
I’m writing a new book on marriage. married. I have two previous books on the topic. The first one is “21 Ways the Principle of Leaving Will Benefit Your Marriage: Why You Should Apply This Shocking Key to Marital Bliss.” Then the second one is “From Mountains to Molehills: Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in Marriage.”
Some Background
This third one that I’m working on now is the “V” in the acronym “LOVING”. I had previously written a book called “The Loving Way to a Successful Marriage” and “LOVING” is an acrostic. So leaving is the L, overcoming is the O, and valuing is the V.
So I’m going to be talking about valuing each other and also having the same values in your marriage and what benefit there is to that.
Where to Find Content
In my book “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death”, I talked about one way of setting a blueprint for your book. I also talked about two other ways of writing a book and one of them has to do with speaking your book, so I have been speaking some blog posts. I may be able to do some more of those as I go along. I also talked about using previous things that a person had written.
So in my first book, I had four chapters in the section that had to do with valuing, so I have four chapters under my belt already. Then looking through the blog posts that I’ve done so far that relate to this, I think I can come up with three more chapters and just tweak those. I spoke those out to a general audience and applied those more generally. I’ll need to adjust them a bit to apply them more specifically. That gives me three more chapters. So now I have a total of seven chapters up to this point.
Book Length
What I’ve encouraged you to do is to figure out a target goal for your book. How many pages would you want it to be? I recommend your book be between 100 and 200 pages. It can be as low as 90 and go as high as 250 without stressing yourself to death. I decided to shoot for 125 for this book. Shorter books seem to be a trend. People like shorter books so they can get the information and be able to read them more quickly. Some of the longer books, people don’t finish. I hope this one, at 125 pages, would be one that could be finished easily. I decided to aim for 12 chapters.
Do Some Research
What have you come up with? What are you thinking about? If you’re trying to figure out the number of chapters, I suggest you look at similar books in your genre. Go to Amazon and look for the bestsellers in your category and see how many chapters and how many pages there are. I haven’t felt the need to do that this time, but if you’re new to writing, I strongly suggest you give this a try.
Also, looking at those titles and looking at the title chapters (we’ll talk more about that later) can be helpful, too.
Tomorrow I want to help you come up with the outline and blueprint for your book. We will do several sessions of brainstorming to be able to figure that out. In my case, I’m encouraged that I already have essentially seven chapters as a foundation. So I’m thinking that somewhere around five more chapters. That’s the encouraging thing for me: I will not need that full 28 days for the writing part of this particular book–if all goes well.
Information Gathering
I would like to do a survey for this book. I did that in the last book, “From Mountains to Molehills: Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in Marriage”, and it was very helpful. I would like to do that again for this book, so I’m going to go to Survey Monkey and create a survey. I would be glad for some of you to take that survey and of course, your results are anonymous.
Now the survey is not such a large sample as a scientific survey would be, but the advantage is that such a survey is very current and up to date. I’m looking forward to doing the survey.
Wrapping it Up
So by now, I would hope that you would have a working title. It doesn’t have to be set in stone. It doesn’t have to sound interesting to you. Just get to the title–what you’re writing about. My working title is “Valuing Your Spouse”. Of course, I want to come up with something more interesting before I finally publish this book, but that’s what I’m using for now.
So, come up with a working title. Figure out the number of pages you might be shooting for. If it looks like it’s less than 100 I would suggest you raise it up to 100 or 90 at the very least. If you have way over 250, you might want to consider cutting that down a little bit.
The number of chapters: generally a good number would be 10 to 20. Now it can be 21 or 22 or even up to 25. I guess you could go down as low as nine or eight. But, generally, you want somewhere between 10 and 20 chapters. If not you might want to rethink that a little bit.
Homework
Tomorrow we will go into that in more depth and I will give you more information about how you can do that. Also, I’ll tell you some of the things that I’m going to do with that too.
If you want to do something before tomorrow, go to those best-selling books on Amazon that relate to your topic, and look at all those on the first page. I usually go with the top 10. Just do some research and some looking around. When you do that, you may get some ideas for chapters of your own. Of course, you want to put those in your own words. The exact words in the exact order are copyrightable, but you can get some ideas. Ideas are not copyrightable. It is the expression of those ideas that you can claim copyright to.
That’s all for this session. I’ll see you next time. Remember: YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!