For any first time non-fiction book author there are two enormous hurdles to overcome in order to succeed in publishing their book. You must face the blank page and get started and then you must get through the first draft.

These hurdles are not as high as they first appear and with the two strategies you are about to learn, they will shrink even further.

Staring down the blank page is like deciding to go on a cross country trip. Say you are in New York and decide to go to California. If you you just hop in the car and start driving west, every turn will be difficult because you really don’t know enough about where you are going to make a good choice. The wise traveler pulls out a map first and picks a few major stopping points on the trip. Then the specific roads to take to each point are selected. Once the trip is planned out, the driving begins.

The Road Map to a First Draft of Your Book

Most first time non-fiction authors don’t start out by looking at the map. There is a map for creating non-fiction books. The book map includes major way stops and the roads in between. When the writer consults the map, it becomes much easier to plan the journey. So, what is this map?

The map is other successful books. Spend a little time at the bookstore looking at similar books to the one you want to create and it becomes easy to see that there is a basic structure to all of them. Author and product creation consultant Fred Gleeck calls it the 24/4/2 system.

Books in the non-fiction world can be roughly broken down to 24 main topics (the chapters), 4 sub-topics inside each topic, and 2 paragraphs of actual content for each sub-topic. Organize your information around this road map and write the content and you will have a text that will work out to be approximately 120-150 pages in paperback format. This is a respectable length for a non-fiction book.

Creating the outline of these points is the “planning your trip” portion of the writing journey. The topics and sub-topics outline where you want to go. Writing the paragraphs for those sub-topics is the actual trip to your first draft.

So, step one is to create your 24/4/2 outline for your book.

Choosing the Fastest Way To Write

Once you know where you are going, it is time to choose the fastest vehicle to get you there. For me, dictation is the key to speed.

Rather than sitting down with a pen and paper, or at your computer keyboard, have a friend sit down with you and interview you based on your 24/4/2 outline. Your friend will ask you to explain each sub-topic and your responses will be the paragraphs in the first draft. Momentum is vital, so don’t stop to look up information or verify facts. Leave what I call a breadcrumb note for yourself and move on. A breadcrumb can be as simple as saying, “find statistics to back this up.”

After everything is recorded, hire a typist to transcribe your recording. That transcript is your very rough - but completed - first draft.

Now it is time to go through the text, cleaning up your breadcrumbs and smoothing out the language. After this first pass, you will be ready to share the first draft with some reviewers and get feedback for your second draft.

Finishing Your Book

There is still a lot of work to be done to move from the first draft to a completed book. But completing this draft is a major milestone and creates a momentum for the project that greatly increases the likelihood that your book will get finished.

Many first time writers start plowing into the writing without a plan and get lost in the content. Frustration builds until they abandon the project. But, when you have a first draft to show, the project becomes ‘real’ to you and other people can react to what you have created.

Plan your trip by consulting the road map and then get yourself a fast car!

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Have you written a book in this way? Do you have an even better method? Don’t let me have the last word, leave a comment and share your story!

Associate Content approved my recent articles today and made me offers. That is the fastest turnaround I have had with them so far. Up until now it has always taken me at least a week to get offers for anything (but I was also submitting more articles. They might deal with them in batches and the ‘bulk’ submissions are slowing them down???)

The speed of approval was the good news. The actual offers weren’t that great. My article titled “Speed Write Your NonFiction Book Using Dictation” got a whopping $5.10 offer and my article titled “How to Fly Without Getting Sick” got a truly underwhelming $4.61 - and that one was an exclusive submission.  Since it ended up taking me about and hour to write and submit each, I’m way off my target goal of earning $20/hour.

On the slightly brighter side, I’m $9.71 closer to my new monitor. That is better than last week, but I’ve got a lot more writing to do!

Since I didn’t see much benefit to submitting an exclusive article, I think I will submit most as non-exclusives so I can use them again and squeeze some more money out of them (but that money will not be counted toward the new monitor purchase.) The writing article will be going up on this blog immediately - I might get some Adsense income from that one.

So here is the running tally:

2 Articles Sold - $9.71
Balance Required to Buy Monitor - $590.29 - $790.29
Remaining Number of Articles to be Written at Current Average Price ($4.85/each) - 122-163

Looks like I have a ways to go. I had better find some more profitable subjects if I want to get this done before my 14 week old daughter graduates college.

Back to the article mines,

The Go-To Guy! 

In my last post on this project I mentioned that I had cranked out 11 article outlines on a cross-country airplane flight and just needed to flesh them out before uploading them to Associated Content to sell.

My hope was that I could spend a few hours one afternoon or evening to crank out the finished articles and submit them, but life hasn’t quite worked out like that. Living with a 15 week old daughter in a studio apartment is challenging and the ups and downs of her day have a huge impact on the time and energy I have to work on this project.

Starting today, I’m trying to get the process moving again by writing one article on my subway ride to work. From the time I sit down on the train to when I arrive at my stop, there is about 20 minutes for me to work. This is just about right for the time I allotted for drafting each article.

Today I wrote an article titled “Speed Write Your Non-Fiction Book Using Dictation.” The total article length was just under 700 words. I typed it up over lunch and submitted it to Associated Content.

One of the drawbacks to working this way is that I hand write each article and then go back and type the hand written text before submitting it. I’m not a very fast typist, so this added another 20 minutes to the process. Including about 10 minutes to log in and upload the article, I have spent about an hour creating and submitting this article. That is going to reduce my overall hourly rate for writing - but I’m getting closer to my monitor and taking advantage of time that is usually not profitable to get the work done.

I also decided to submit this article as a non-exclusive article. The subject matter is relevant to a couple of projects I am working on, so I want to have the freedom to re-use the text (although I will probably rework it before using it anywhere else.) I will submit future articles as exclusives to see if the payments offered are better. If the difference is small, I’ll just keep doing non-exclusives to keep my options open.

If you would like to see the types of content I have been paid to write, visit my user profile at Associated Content.

Who knows, if I can get a seat on the subway going home tonight, I might knock out another article!

**UPDATE**

I wrote 1 1/2 articles on the train ride home. I typed up and submitted “How To Fly Without Getting Sick” as an exclusive submission. It took about the same amount of time as the earlier article to complete and submit. That’s 2 down and 8 1/2 articles to go in this first batch.

The Go-To Guy!

It is time for an update on my writing challenge.

This past weekend I traveled cross country for a conference (New York to Los Angeles.) I decided to devote a portion of my westbound flight to writing articles for this challenge.

I planned to write on subjects I was familiar with which would limit the amount of research required. I also chose topics that would not require quoting lots of facts and figures. The topics were writing and home improvement.

There was one home improvement topic I needed to do a little research on, so I had about 25 pages of printouts from a quick Google search on Thursday night. I relied on personal experience for the rest of the articles. When I got started writing, I fell into an interesting pattern.

As I started to write, I found myself outlining the articles with just enough detail to capture the idea and provide an outline of the complete article. Because I wasn’t laboring over details, I got on a roll and moved through the articles quickly.

In less than 2 hours, I outlined 11 separate articles - 9 on my original topics and 2 that just popped into my mind when I got in the groove. (That works out to 11 minutes per article.)

This process reminded me of when I worked on an automotive assembly line building cars (this is just one of the many interesting jobs I’ve held!) When you break a project down into the primary steps of production, and then complete one step for multiple products at the same time, you move much faster than if you complete every step for one product before starting the next product. You get into a rhythm and you stop thinking about the process and just do the work.

The outlines still need to be expanded into full articles, but I think that can be done quickly since they are already clearly outlined - I’m just expanding the thoughts into complete statements.

I should have the first batch ready to submit for payment within a few days.

The Go-To Guy!

There is nothing like having a specific goal to help focus your work. I want a Dell UltraSharp 2407FPW 24 inch LCD Widescreen Monitor! I also want to get it using money I earn online using nothing but my computer, freely available Internet resources, and my writing skills. Lastly, I don’t want to work for peanuts and wait forever to make this happen. I want the monitor now and I want to earn at least $20/hour for my efforts.

I posted a personal challenge on the 5 Bucks a Day members forum today. That, and this post, are my official proclamation to the world that his will happen - I will have a new Dell UltraSharp 2407FPW 24 inch LCD Widescreen Monitor!

Dennis Becker, the author of “5 Bucks a Day” and owner of the members’ forum for owners of the book, has recently been adding a number of free download resources for the forum members that are related to article writing and selling articles. (Membership to the forum is included with the purchase of the “5 Bucks a Day” e-book.) Two specific e-books added to the members download area are Content Speed Writing and Increase Your Associated Content Profits. I plan to apply what I learned from these books to getting the money for my new monitor.

As a member of the forum I have learned a number of ways to earn money online. One of them is writing content articles and selling them to sites that pay authors for original new content. Usually, forum members focus on building projects that will earn them $5/day continually. But, one of the discussion threads introduced a way to sell articles for a quick profit.

Since I want my new monitor now!!!! I decided to use this short term article writing/selling strategy to earn the cash for my new monitor. I outlined the details of the plan in the original forum post. Basically, I think that I can write 30-40 articles in 20 hours which will earn me between $600 and $800 (enough to buy the monitor on eBay.) My target hourly income rate is $40 per hour. I would also like to have the work completed and the money in my back account within 4-6 weeks.

Bookmark this thread, or sign up to the RSS feed, to keep an eye on my progress. I will be posting updates of my progress.

The Go-To Guy

P.S. Of course, I will have plenty of pictures and video of my new monitor when it arrives!!!

Jonathan Leger, author of $7 Secrets and the excellent scripts for viral promotion, has kicked out another excellent report: Write That Report!!!

I grabbed a copy and it is very good (no surprise there.) If you have been wanting to try a $7 report but just can’t seem to get one going, this report is for you.

Jonathan walks you step-by-step through the process of writing a report from selecting a topic to outlining, fleshing out, polishing it up and creating a PDF. No surprises, just a solid process.

Of course, his whole point is to use these with his $7 Reports method. If you haven’t already purchased $7 Secrets, he includes it with your purchase of this report 2-for-1! (this is an un-advertised bonus! Get your copy before he changes his mind!!!)

If you want to check it out, here is the link:

http://www.WriteThatReport.com/

The premise of the $7 reports system is that people will perceive a $7 price tag is very low risk and would be willing to purchase a short focussed report without a hard sell. Then, by using a set of scripts that Jonathan includes with the report, you let your first level customers sell the report and keep 100% of the purchase price. The money goes directly to the affiliate’s PayPal account - no waiting - and the report author gets the name and email address of the customer. The script also includes a mechanism to include a one time offer (OTO) who’s cost is split between affiliate and report owner.

The scripts are pretty amazing and it is hard to believe they are included with a $7 report. But Jonathan claims to be making very good money with this system. The $7 Secrets book explains the whole system in detail!
Keep an eye out, I’ve got a couple of reports in the works already!

The Go-To Guy!

Write That Report, by Jonathan Leger Squidoo Lens

Article marketing is a low cost strategy to direct traffic to a website and begin to develop one-way backlinks to its pages. For new online ventures it offers a great way to build traffic to a site and to establish its authority in a particular niche.

Article Marketing is also an excellent strategy to quickly get a new site listed in search engines like Google and Yahoo!

The basic process for article marketing is this:

• Write a series of short 350-700 word articles related to the content of your website
• Add an author’s resource box to each article that contains links back to one or more pages on your website
• Upload the articles to various article directories like www.EZineArticles.com or www.GoArticles.com
• Wait for other publishers to reprint your articles and resource links
• Wait for search engines to index your articles (and the links back to your site) from the article directories and also from the websites that reprint them giving you relevant inbound links and new visitor traffic

The process works. I wrote my first small batch of articles over a year ago and continue to see traffic from them today. I even make a dollar or two every now and then from ads on the pages that the resource links are pointing to. If I had more articles out there, the overall traffic would rise. But those first articles were a test to see if the process worked and were not well written for the task of making me money (or even getting me good search engine ranking.)

Once I proved to myself that the basic system worked, I next had to learn how to write articles that compel people to click on the resource links and how to optimize those links to improve my search engine rankings. The best SEO in the world won’t help if your content isn’t compelling and the most compelling articles are pointless if they don’t improve your business.

Optimizing the links was easy. I just had to include the primary keywords for the page I was directing traffic to in the anchor text in the link. Like this: Energy Efficient Home Construction information. Every article gets unique words based on the page that is being linked to. When multiple articles link to the same page I make subtle alterations to the link on each article so that the search engines don’t always see the exact same text and devalue it as duplicate content.

Making the articles compelling so that readers want to follow the links and come to my site is more challenging. The most effective articles for this marketing method give readers a taste of the topic and lead them to deeper subjects they need to explore to really be satisfied. The resource box should promise them this next level of information and the links will lead them to the new information.

I realize that this explanation might not be clear enough, so I’ll give a quick illustration:

Say you are selling camera equipment for product photography - cameras, lights, display stands, backdrops, etc.

You write an article about how adding a photo to your eBay auctions can radically improve your profits. Your readers will be eBay sellers who want to make more money and your article leads them to realize that good product photos will improve their income.

In the article you make a special point of the importance of professional quality images to set yourself apart from the crowd. You further explain that with a modest investment in the right tools and some basic training anyone can learn to take the kinds of images that will make big money. If you write this well, the reader will now want to know how to take a good product photo and what equipment is needed to get professional results.

In your resource box you promise them free tutorials for taking product photos they can use in their auctions. These links will land them on pages where they will learn techniques and discover the basic tools they need to take good photos (with ads for the gear highlighted in the tutorials, a newsletter sign-up form, and maybe an offer for an e-book guide to taking professional product photos.) The link text might be something like “Learn 5 Simple Steps to Professional Quality Product Photos.”

Another article pointing to the exact same set of tutorials could focus on showing aspiring catalog photographers how to build their portfolios. Still another would entice model building hobbyists into taking professional quality photos of the models they build to show off their skills, etc. You can find dozens of different ways to approach potential audiences for your products.

The article introduces a need and builds the desire for a solution, then the resource box promises to satisfy this new desire.

Model building websites, photography websites, and auction business websites will all begin to reprint your articles and steer their visitors toward your site. The search engines will also start to recognize your site’s pages as authoritative because of the growing number of inbound links. Over time your search engine placement will also improve.

Creating articles that work at this level takes effort. If your main goal is to simply to gain backlinks to improve search engine rankings, this is overkill. But if you are trying to warm up a new customer for a sale, you have to make the effort.

If you would like to see some of the marketing articles I have published visit my EZineArticles profile. (While you are there, please rate my articles - every little bit of promotion helps.) Hopefully you will be able to see the improvement in my articles over the past year.

Now, get out there and start writing.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Don’t let me have the last word. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

My Do-It-Yourself Bookbinding article has turned out to be one of the most popular articles on this site. It came from my desire to have printed copies of some of the many e-books I have collected over the years. Very often I don’t worry about putting a cover on the book and just bind the pages or I cover the book with plain heavy cardstock and hand-write the title. But what if you really want to put together a polished book that looks store-bought?

Take a look at the 3 books in the photo. I won’t make you guess which one I made - it’s the one in the middle! This was my first attempt at creating a cover that would pass for bookstore quality. An author I like gave electronic files of some of his books as bonuses for his newsletter subscribers (www.FredGleek.com.) This isn’t a tiny 30 page e-book, but the electronic version of a book he wrote for print. It is several hundred pages and I wanted to print it out to keep on the shelf next to 2 other books of his that I purchased. I think it turned out pretty well and I will tell you the simple steps I used to create the cover.

Here are the supplies you will need to create a professional quality book cover for your self published book:

• Card Stock Paper that is larger that your bound book block (I print to 1/2 of a standard page so 8.5″x14″ legal is big enough for most projects)
• Inkjet Printer that can print on your Cover Stock (for larger books you may need a large format printer)
• Photoshop CS or similar image processing software (I like creating graphics in Photoshop, but you could layout your cover in your wordprocessor)
• .3 mil Adhesive Plastic Laminate (thick laminate will work, but I prefer thinner plastic)
• Bone Folder - a handy tool that can be found at most craft stores or art supply stores (usually near the scrapbooking section)
• Exact-O Knife
• Metal Straight Edge

When I studied the book covers in my library I noticed that the main feature that differentiated them from plain card stock was the laminated coating that covers on the outside. I don’t know exactly how they coat the pages in professional print shops, but I figured that a simple thin coating of adhesive laminate would give a very similar result. My main goal was to protect the printing and make the cover water resistant and give it the glossy sheen of a trade paperback.

I laid out my cover in Photoshop, setting the page dimensions to match my paper. This time around I didn’t try to print on the spine or back cover - just the front. This choice saved me a lot of measuring and tweaking. If you want to wrap all the way around, measure the thickness of your book block and make your page size equal to twice the page width plus the spine width. Then, lay out your cover text and art.

When printing, make sure your printer is set to print the whole page edge to edge (most new photo quality printers are capable of this.) If you can’t print edge to edge, make sure that Photoshop does not scale your image to fit the page - this will throw off all of your measurements. If your cover has full-page artwork, set the page dimensions to have an extra 1/4″ on the outside edges of the cover. You can trim off the extra when you are done and there will never be a white edge where your graphic stops.

When the cover is printed, cut a length of laminate off of the roll that is a little larger than the cover. Peel off the backing paper on one end. Next, stick that edge to your working surface and then peel back the rest. This will help you to hold the laminate straight and tight as you press it onto the cover. Position the cover underneath and then slowly press the laminate onto the page and smooth out any air bubbles. Work from the center out. Press the laminate down firmly over the whole cover to ensure solid contact.

Next you will need to crease the cover where it will bend around the spine. Line your straight edge up in the spine of the book and use your bone folder to score the spine. Fold the cover along the score and you are ready to glue it to the book block.

Apply a layer of glue to the inside spine of the cover and then set the bookblock in place. I tap the spine on the table a few times to force the book block firmly into the glue and then leave the book on on its spine until the glue dries.

When everything is dry, take your Exact-O knife and straight edge and trim the excess paper from the cover. You should have a pretty professional looking book at this point.

I went an extra step and had my local copy shop trim the 3 open edges with their heavy duty trimmer. This was a little expensive, but I wanted to see how good it could look.

This technique works equally well for saddlebound book covers. Just buy cover stock that is exactly the same size as your pages, ignore the spine in your design, and fold down the middle when you staple the booklets together.

If you have any tips or techniques that you use to make trade paperback style covers, leave a comment and share your wisdom. Also, let me know why you are interested in binding your own books. The more I know about what you are trying to do the more helpful I can be with my tutorials and suggestions.

The Go-To Guy!

Click To Play Flash version Get Your Copy Now!* Read My Review of This Book

P.S. Easy Bookbinding* - Learn a simple 6 step process for creating professional looking trade paperback and hardcover books! This e-book course will walk you through the entire process in detail. You will be binding your own books in no time!

I don’t blog just for fun. This site isn’t a public diary of my life. My goals for AndrewSeltz.com are to share my knowledge and experience with more people than my friends, family, and co-workers and to collect that knowledge in a form that can be reused to create products and services I can sell - help and make money.

I have used a combination of Adsense, affiliate ads, and Amazon affiliate links to try and generate income. I’ve made a few bucks, but not even the minimum required for them to cut me a check.

A few months ago I found a site that promised I could make money by doing nothing but writing on my blog. The company, PayPerPost.com, pays bloggers to write about specific topics that their advertisers want to create a buzz about. You write an article, include a few links, and post it to your blog. After a preset time period (usually 90 days) they send a payment to your PayPal account. You don’t have to get anyone to click on anything and there is no guesswork - write about what they ask you to write about and they pay what they promise to pay.

There are limits to how often you can post per day, but you could easily grab a quick $10, $20, or $30 a day. I have yet to make enough in a month from Adsense to cover my Internet expenses, but 4 or 5 sponsored posts a month would do the trick.

I just received my first payment today for a post I wrote. The system works.

Consider adding PayPerPost.com to your revenue mix. It gives legit advertisers a venue for building buzz for their products and services and gives a measure of control to bloggers about what they promote for money on their blogs.

If you’ve had experience with this company, or made money with a similar strategy, leave a comment and let me know about it.

The Go-To Guy!

Every year there is a state fair near where I live. They have a good old fashioned midway. Huge colorful signs and a fast talking man with bad teeth promise to show you amazing wonders and human oddities if only you will pay a little money and step inside the tent.

I’ve paid once or twice to see inside the tent and it is usually not amazing or wonderful. It is usually just a gimmick - a fake. The Carny Folk conned me out of a little money.

You wouldn’t trust these people to help you with anything important and if you came across a business in your town using similar advertising it would probably make you suspicious.

There are a lot of people on the Internet who would say or do anything to get you to ’step inside their tent.’ They don’t really care what you think about what you see inside. Their sites are full of keyword loaded gibberish and articles that have been duplicated a thousand times on a thousand websites. They use software that automatically generates hundreds and thousands of these useless webpages and then litter the Internet with them.

They just hope to get a lot of folks to step inside and maybe a few will click on an ad or one of their affiliate links - a nickle here and a dollar there.

What Do Search Engines Want?

Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines are in a constant struggle to weed these sideshow sites out of their results and push the most relevant results to the top of the list. Your goal with search engine optimization (SEO) is to get to the top of the results for the keywords that are relevant to your site and not get swept away with the Carny Folk.

Your primary focus should be on making your content relevant to other human beings. Then, use the tools and techniques of SEO to help the search engines better understand what your pages are about.

You don’t have to resort to trickery to improve the search engine placement of your site’s pages. If you keep the topic of each page of your focussed and use good basic SEO techniques, your search engine rankings will improve and you won’t have to worry about being mistaken for Carnie Folk the next time Google upgrades its filtering algorithms!

SEO Basics

Keyword Focused Pages: Each page on your website should be focussed on a small set of keywords. Don’t try to cover everything on one page. Break up your topic into focussed sub-topics and then create seperate pages for each one.

Create Internal Links: When you break your website up into keyword focussed pages, there will be natural overlaps in the subject matter on each page. Readers will be interested in these other pages too. When appropriate, direct readers to these relevant pages and use keywords in the links. This has the effect of encouraging users (and, by extension, search engine spiders) to explore all of your content.

Use Keywords in Links: Search engines value links. They also look for keywords in the link text. Don’t use ‘Click Here’ as your link text. If you are recommending another article, link on the article’s title (or relevant keywords you use to describe the article - ‘Learn Search Engine Optimization’…)

Title Tags: Make sure that every page on your site has a unique title with relevant keywords at the beginning that relate to keywords in the content of the page. Your site ’s name should go at the end of the title because the words at the beginning are valued more than those at the end when the serch engines rank your page.

Use H1, H2, H3… Tags: These tags identify headlines and search engines expect headlines to describe content (so do humans.) Keywords here have higher weight. (make sure the same keywords are also present in the text that follows.)

Emphasize Important Words: Bold and Italicized words stand out to the search engines as well as your visitors.

Use Keywords in 1st Paragraph: Get to the point quickly when writing your content. Readers and search engines will make a lot of assumptions about your article in the first paragraph, so make sure you give a quick overview at the top that uses your keywords.

Image Alt Tags: Always include descriptive text in the alt tags for your images. This helps people who can’t see your images make sense out of why they are there, and they give more content to the search engines. Do not simply stuff the alt tags with keywords - this is a Carny Folk move and search engines are wary of it. But, use relevant keywords when describing your images.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Cramming keywords into every search engine hotspot is a surefire way to get the search engines to dump or devalue your site. Remember, a search engine’s primary goal is to get relevant results to customers. Trying to trick them into showing a site that isn’t relevant will eventually get you delisted or demoted.

Avoid Duplication: Another search engine no-no is repetition of the same keyword or phrase throughout a page. This sort of repetition tells the search engines that you are stuffing the page with keywords (or worse, the page was created by a program designed to stuff keywords into it) and that they are not a natural part of your page’s content. Use a little variety in your content to avoid repetition - your human visitors will appreciate it too!

Benefits of Honest SEO

Honest search engine optimization has the side effect of making your content more readable to human beings. Since the search engines’ primary goal is to deliver the most relevant results to the human beings who use them, anything you do that enhances the user experience will make them happy too. Stay focussed on providing quality content to your visitors and then optimize the way you present it so that the search engines can understand it too, your site will perform better in the rankings.

When you provide value, other website creators will send traffic to your site to give value to their visitors. The links they create to your site will add value to your site in the eyes of the search engines. They are voting for you every time they create a link.

These SEO techniques and strategies will get your pages high in the search rankings. From there it becomes a game of inches where you will focus your attention on your best performing pages and make subtle changes to try and push them closer and closer to the top. When you get to that level you will have left the Carny Folk far behind you.

The Go-To Guy!