Photo: Tim Swaan

Writing your book is part art, but ultimately comes down to a lot of hard work. If you want the kind of quality writing that will stand out among the hundreds of thousands of titles released each year, you’ll need the skills of a professional collaborator/writer.

Here’s a process that will help you think about producing your book in smaller, manageable steps, rather than staring into the face of one big project that may seem overwhelming.

Here are my seven steps to writing your book:

1. Define the central message
   What is the one central idea or theme you want to get across to your readers? Naturally lots of information and more granular detail will flesh out your book, but there should be one overarching objective.
   You’ll also want to look for books that are similar to what you have in mind so you can refine your objective and message into something that has its own niche and purpose.
   Example: For my first book, Bring Your Teen Back from the Brink, we wanted it to be “an easy-reference handbook for parents to quickly educate themselves on how to deal with a drug abusing teenage child.”
2. Define your audience
   This one is pretty basic: Who is the audience you want to reach? It’s too time-consuming and costly to market a book too widely, so narrowing your target audience is important. With success in reaching that first target, you can branch out to others later.
3. Build a book outline
   This step uncovers all the subtopics that will support the objective defined in step one. Dump them out of your brain and onto paper or a computer doc, then arrange them into a logical order. Your outline becomes a working table of contents and the roadmap for the work ahead. (I’m happy to make this an interactive session where we work together to get this done.)
4. Research and interview
   In this part of the process your collaborator (me) interviews you based on your outline, then transcribes and rewrites it into narrative form. Preliminary research may inform the interview questions, but your writer will do much more extensive research post-interview, to find supporting facts and references for the material uncovered. This stage will require your biggest time investment.
5. Review and re-write
   It’s taking shape now. You’ll get to read through draft chapters as they come together, providing feedback for revisions until the writing is done. Get others to read the drafts at this stage and you’ll get fresh perspectives that will give you an even better finished product.
6. Final formatting and publishing
   This may sound simple, but there are many details to attend to here to get the manuscript into shape so it fits publishing requirements and is discoverable by those seeking the content you have to offer. Self-publishing makes it “easier” to get a book into circulation, but there’s a whole skill set needed to do it. Trust me, you don’t want to waste your valuable time figuring it out.
7. Marketing your book
   Believe it or not, the previous seven steps are probably the easy part of this whole process. While digital self-publishing has opened producing a book to anyone, only a very small percentage ever sell more than a few hundred copies. Be exceptional! Carry out this final step to set your story free for those who can benefit from your expertise.