Writing your book is work.
“I am just so over this! I just want this book to be finished already.”
Frustrated with the book writing process?
I had to smile as my client vented her frustration to me recently. She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before.
“More than 80% of Americans want to write a book.” This quote is taken from an article on Forbes.
Do you know the percentage of people who actually finish and publish their books? Well, the statistic on that is a little harder to find, but my research showed that it was less than 8%…
Honestly, I think that may be playing generous with that stat, considering around 60% of the books you see on the bookshelves are written by ghostwriters.
If you’ve never written a book before, and indeed if you’ve never written a book that actually sells before, you think it’s easy.
How hard can it be to take an idea, one you know is an awesome one, and turn it into a book?
It’s just words and time.
Words…you use those all day long, right?
Time… fine; you can make the time to get it written.
So, why isn’t it that easy?
Why isn’t writing a book easy?
Let me count the ways… or maybe give you three because this is a blog post, not a novel.
Your readers don’t care what you like; they care about what they like.
People read because they want something. A solution. Entertainment. To learn a skill. To gain something.
People have short attention spans these days.
Compiling information from an idea into a book requires a novice writer to learn a new way of presenting things.
Even seasoned writers encounter frustration points in their writing process. Entire chapters are moved because they don’t flow well upon review…(Thank you, Scrivener, for making that easy!)
One client came to me with quite a lot of arrogance about the process. I almost didn’t take them on, and even during the process, I thought heavily about firing this client. I stuck it out but declined to work with them again when they returned to me for their second book.
They thought I would be floored by the pages they turned in for review because they were so smart that anyone would be overjoyed to read their words. (Yes, these were words actually spoken by this individual.) They were crestfallen when I did what they paid me to do- gave feedback to help improve their work.
At one point in the process, they spoke of how they thought this would be easier because they were so intelligent and because what they did for a living was the actual “hard” work- whereas this was “just writing.”
Writing a letter to grandma is easy. Perhaps, to some, writing a blog post comes easy.
Books are not easy.
Writing a book is not easy, it’s work!
Presenting information, keeping people’s attention, and ultimately giving them huge value from one page to the next takes hard work, strategic work, and attention to detail that you never thought about.
Everyone who wants to write a book should. Geeking out about books is my favorite thing.
Writing, completing, and publishing your book will feel amazing when it’s you are holding your finished product. However, the process of getting there will not always be easy.
Write your book. Expect it to feel like work. Expect it to feel hard at times.
Expect to want to shut the pages away and keep them locked in your computer forever.
I absolutely have these thoughts often when working on my own books.
Push through it… because the reward comes after the hard work!
