11 Tips for Starting Your (Blogged) Book Project

You want to blog a book, but you struggle to get started. You aren’t alone. Many wanna-be writers don’t ever begin on their manuscripts. It’s worse for wanna-be bloggers and book bloggers because they need to start a blog as well as a book. The blog technology alone, although not too complicated, can stop non-techie types before they start blogging their books.

These 11 time-tested tips that will help you move forward and begin writing the manuscript for your book or blogged book project.

Tips to Get You Started Writing (or Blogging) Your Book

1. Create a vision of Successful Authorship—for yourself and your book. Create a mental image of where you and your book are going so you arrive at your destination.
2. Know your readers. You can’t write a book your readers need or want if you don’t know who they are or understand them.
3. Know the competition. You can’t craft a book that is unique and necessary in its bookstore category or the blogosphere unless you know the other books and blogs published on your topic.
4. Create your book structure—in detail. Write an outline or table of contents as well as chapter summaries. These provide the writing guide you need, especially if based on what you know about your readers and the competition.
5. Craft a pitch. Until you can do this—in less than 100 words, you don’t know what your book is about or how it will target the market. That makes it hard to write a marketable book.
6. Write first, research second. Research time slows down the creation of your manuscript or the blog posts that make up that manuscript. You need that information, but it’s easily added once you have the majority of you content down on paper (or screen).
7. Set aside time to write, and make that time sacred. Make writing a daily commitment that can’t be missed.
8. Write first, edit last. Editing requires a different set of mental muscles, and it’s easy to become muscle bound if you edit too early. Work your writing muscles until you have a manuscript or most of a manuscript. Then work your editing muscles.
9. Trust the process. If you discover that you need more information or different information for your book, so bet it. If something needs to go first that you thought needed to go last, move it. Writing a book is a process. If you discover you write better at night than in the morning, switch your schedule around to make that possible. If your book or story go off in a new (and better) direction, feel grateful rather than frustrated.
10. Dare to begin. You have to start writing at some point, so give yourself a deadline. When the day arrives, begin writing…no matter what. No matter how many false starts you make, keep writing. Even if you think what you have written is terrible, keep writing, until you can say, “Done.
11. Know when to say, “Done.” Have a deadline for when to finish as when to begin. Otherwise, you might be tempted to draw out your book project indefinitely.

It doesn’t matter is you want to write a book or blog a book. These 11 tips will move you closer to your goal: a finished manuscript and successful authorship. Use them all. Don’t hold back. And begin writing or blogging your book before the end of the year.