Going for the title

If you are reading this blog, I am guessing that you might want to write a book. (Great!) If so, here is a simple step that will get you a long way towards successfully publishing it.

That step is to simply go to your favorite bookstore and purchase a book. Preferably a book in the field you yourself want to write in. Then answer the following question: Why did this book's title make me want to take it off the shelf?

New authors think that people buy their books because of the great content that hides within the 60,000 words or so of turgid prose that they write. That is only kinda sorta true. In reality, that one line on the spine (or the Amazon search) is what really hooks readers to explore further. If you can write truly great titles, you are more than halfway down the football field to making your book happen. And with the very best of titles, the book practically writes itself.

Look at the titles on your bookshelf. If they are nonfiction books, chances are that they sell a benefit, credential the book, or tell you everything you need to know about what's between the covers. For fiction books, they probably create a mental image that hooks you, or spill the beans on the book setting and its genre. If they are truly great titles, they probably make you smile or make you think.

When Tim Ferriss decided to title his book "The Four-Hour Work Week," I believe he had a bestseller on his hands even before he wrote a word. Conversely, there are some great books out there buried under bland, generic titles. So what's your title?

Divide and conquer

Many people will come up to me and say, "Gosh, I could never write a book!"

Here is my response to them: can you write a sentence?

Let's drill down on this a little further. Can you write a sentence that introduces something? Can you write a sentence that describes something? Can you write a sentence that summarizes something? Guess what: if you can write ten chapters with four or five hundred of these sentences, over a period of a few months – say, a few dozen a day – then you can write a book.

Most people look at book projects in terms of their enormity. I look at them in terms of a bunch of nice, small chunks that you can master. So if you are thinking about a book project yourself, don't think about boiling the ocean. Start with one sentence, and make that sentence absolutely incredible. Then put those sentences to work in paragraphs that teach people something.

Don't think about your next book project as being hard. Think of it as being lots and lots of easy. Then divide and conquer!

The secret to getting published: study the genre

I recently installed a new bookshelf along the wall of our family room - a beautiful, glass-enclosed space that overlooks the hills of upstate New York - and for the first time ever, devoted a shelf to hold one copy of each book I've ever written, ghostwritten, or contributed to. And it is quite a big shelf! Including things like foreign editions, second printings, and the like, there are close to 30 books there. And on average, I have cranked out one nationally published book every year or so since the mid-1990s.

So how do you get to be a "repeat offender" like me? Hard work? Well, perhaps, but I really enjoy writing and have never succeeded at anything just because of Calvinistic toil. Born with a silver-tounged pen? Nope, I was a C student in writing at Cornell decades ago. The right connections? Sorry, I live in the middle of nowhere, and was a humble lay middle manager with no agent when I first hit the bookshelves.

But there is one thing I do differently than almost any wannabe writer I know, and it is the single biggest reason I am successful: I study the genre I am writing in.

Go to a bookstore sometime, and you will see most people browsing through books. Go to one when I'm there and you'll see me pulling one book after another off the shelf, running my finger along the pages, muttering to myself, and occasionally even pulling out a calculator. (Did I tell you I have an engineering degree?) While other people are reading books, I am deconstructing them. And when I finally sit down to write, it is a thoughtfully composed performance informed by the style of the genre.

Studying the genre is NOT the same as copying another person's style. I have my own style, thank you. In fact, I have lots of them, having published in genres that include popular business books, social science, and even fictional stories. Rather, I have a good, general sense of the audience I am writing for.

Take business fables, one of my most successful genres. These projects never top 25,000 words, use short paragraphs, and are built around simple ideas. If I write a thick book with lots of jargon, no matter how funny or well-written I make it, I can't play in this market. Similarly, my non-fiction business self-help books generally tip the scales at 60-70,000 words, have a clear reader benefit in each chapter, are written in third person, and use lots of "eye candy" such as sidebars and examples to break up a wall of prose.

So, do you want to write a weighty tome like James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds, a thought leadership book like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, or a quick read like Seth Godin's Tribes? Surowiecki runs out his anecdotes over several pages, Gladwell hooks your attention with "aha" moments at the beginning of each chapter, and Godin uses tons of micro-examples written in second person ("You need to be using Twitter. Now."). Each of them "smell" the way they do because of reproducible points of style.

So go out there and break down your favorite books. Study their opening hooks, their paragraph lengths, their chapter structures, and the way they keep your interest flowing. Think of how these things might affect your own unique writing voice, and how you want your own books to be seen. Then get writing. Have fun!

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for YourOnlineWritingCoach.com!

Our intention here is not to be a marketing shill for my coaching practice. (Of course, if you are interested in being coached or having your material evaluated, I will gladly shill over at my regular website of http://www.youronlinewritingcoach.com/.) Here, our goal is to examine the fine art of writing for publication, and ideally to open a dialogue that includes you as well. Welcome!