Sam Beddall
Contributor
So I was reading through Gary Halbert' s Boron Letters again today and one of the chapters hit me in the face.
Throughout the book Gary talks about building and selling targeted reports to various audiences via direct mail, with very specific tips on every step of the process. Albeit outdated in some of its vocab and approaches, it suddenly hit me that the underlying process that Gary was talking about was priceless for self-publishing authors!
The ridiculously simple steps looked something like this:
- Find a category/genre you are enthusiastic about and/or think you have a chance of selling in.
- Buy and read the top 3 or 4 books in your chosen category/genre and take notes on the best bits of each.
- Create a blueprint for your own book, weaving all of the best bits of your competitors' work into a coherent pattern that makes sense and helps your prospective readers in a much more concentrated (read: effective) way than the other books.
- Get writing. Fill in the blanks.
Artistic? Perhaps, yet not in the conventional sense. Smart? Indefinitely.
Oh and if you're writing fiction this way I strongly recommend you check out Lester Dent' s Master Fiction Plot formula (just google it). I'm using it at the moment while I'm travelling around Australia, scaling up the word counts he recommends in order to write something slightly larger
Now, just to sell your work... Plenty of threads to help with that.
Best of luck. Keep it simple. Remember that complexity breeds fear. Anticipation is your enemy. A calm mind is all you need.
Do it now!
Sam
Throughout the book Gary talks about building and selling targeted reports to various audiences via direct mail, with very specific tips on every step of the process. Albeit outdated in some of its vocab and approaches, it suddenly hit me that the underlying process that Gary was talking about was priceless for self-publishing authors!
The ridiculously simple steps looked something like this:
- Find a category/genre you are enthusiastic about and/or think you have a chance of selling in.
- Buy and read the top 3 or 4 books in your chosen category/genre and take notes on the best bits of each.
- Create a blueprint for your own book, weaving all of the best bits of your competitors' work into a coherent pattern that makes sense and helps your prospective readers in a much more concentrated (read: effective) way than the other books.
- Get writing. Fill in the blanks.
Artistic? Perhaps, yet not in the conventional sense. Smart? Indefinitely.
Oh and if you're writing fiction this way I strongly recommend you check out Lester Dent' s Master Fiction Plot formula (just google it). I'm using it at the moment while I'm travelling around Australia, scaling up the word counts he recommends in order to write something slightly larger
Now, just to sell your work... Plenty of threads to help with that.
Best of luck. Keep it simple. Remember that complexity breeds fear. Anticipation is your enemy. A calm mind is all you need.
Do it now!
Sam
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum:
Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.