10 Tips to Write a Book in Less than 90 days

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” – Mark Twain

Money’s Big Secret is now a #1 Amazon Best Seller:

I wrote and published it in less than 90 days. Here are 10 killer tips to show you how to do it yourself:

1. Start in the middle

The hardest thing about writing is knowing how to begin. So don’t begin. Start in the middle:

Write what you know. Just get it down. You don’t need to start at the beginning and you certainly don’t need to know the structure. Getting a book off the ground is about getting the core of it done. Employees of Facebook repeat the mantra, ‘Done is better than perfect‘. This is true of books too. Even when writing this article, I started with this paragraph, not the above.

2. Apply the Lean Methodology to writing

Eric Reis, author of The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses, explained how speed is the key to many of the technology businesses we know of today. He advocates a Lean Methodology: keep things simple and do the minimum required for things to work, as fast as you can.

Apply this Lean Methodology to your writing. Keep it simple and move fast. There is no correct length for a book any more. It used to be the case that the cost of publishing a book i.e. printing, binding and distributing it, meant that you had to have 300-400 pages otherwise it was not cost effective. Now with Print-On-Demand (POD), you can have a book just five pages long. [Tip: check out this video of making your own book binding machine]

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3. Write versions 0.1 – 1.0

Printing advance copies is now a minimal expense. Start in the middle, keep it simple and write fast. When you’ve got the crux of it, print it. A 150-page book can cost you as little as £3.50 to print and be delivered to you. Think of it as version 0.1. [Tip: upload advance copies to Amazon and use Amazon Prime to speed up delivery time]

Software developers follow the same approach. When they’re creating an app or website, they produce what’s called a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): the bare bones of what they can get away with. It looks ugly, probably horrible to use, but it works. This is version 0.1 and you should do the same when writing a book.

When I edited and published How To Live For Free with Deepak Tailor, founder of LatestFreeStuff and Winner of BBC Dragon’s Den, version 0.1 had a plain red front cover, no first chapter and the formatting was all wrong. It didn’t matter.

Get the book in your hands and you’ll now be able to get a feel for it: how it should be structured, formatted, introduced and finished.

Version 0.1 will be awful and that’s the point. Don’t worry about the smart witticisms, references or metaphors that only serve to trip you up. Get the basics done and then edit it again and again printing version 0.2, 0.3 and eventually, 1.0.

4. Gain perpetual motion with XYZ

As I wrote Money’s Big Secret, I would find myself getting into flow – words falling through my finger tips – but then come across a brick wall. What was that quote? Who was the spokesman? When did they say it?

Quotes, references, fact-checking, numbers, links to other resources… They only do one thing: stop you writing. When you get in the flow of writing, gain perpetual motion by employing my favourite writing device of all, ‘XYZ’.

This is something I learnt from multiple bestselling author, Neil Strauss. Whenever I don’t know something, for example, I remember a quote but don’t know who said it, I write ‘XYZ’. Then, once the book is finished I can search for all the ‘XYZs’ in the document and do the fact-checking later. Versions 0.1 – 0.7 are usually full of XYZs.

I’ll also use XYZs for vast swathes of text I know would be good but that I don’t have. For example, a case study or a relevant story. I’ll write something along the lines of ‘[XYZ – Find, test and write case study for The 3-30 Money Diet]’ and then come back to it later.

5. Read it backwards

Read your book backwards. Start with the conclusion or the afterword and read the whole thing from the last chapter to the first. This is to stop Author Blindness (AB).

AB is caused when you read your own words too often. You begin to memorise them and so your mind says them before you’ve read them. As a consequence, especially when using POD without an editor, AB leads to over-looking mistakes and formatting errors.

By reading it backwards you prevent AB and find the little details. It was only on version 0.6 of Money’s Big Secret did I notice many quote marks, ”, were formatted in the wrong font. It was a pain in the arse to go through and look for every punctuation mark, but if I hadn’t read it backwards I probably wouldn’t have spotted the mistake.

6. Test for Skip Gaps

At version 0.8 you’re ready to give it to someone to read. All the chapters should be there, the formatting should be OK and perhaps you’ll even have a front cover. You will definitely be comfortable with POD systems such as CreateSpace as it’ll be the eighth time you’ve done it.

Now it’s time to test for Skip Gaps. Give the book to someone to read and watch them as they read it. I often do this when I’m flying on a plane with a companion. It’s a time and space where you can sit next to them for a good few hours and watch them read your book.

As they read it, take note of when their attention drifts off, they have to re-read a paragraph, or they move forward. These are called Skip Gaps. I simply draw a little line along the margin and put ‘SG’. Then I re-write it and test it again. The aim being to reduce SGs as much as possible. A book is a user-experience just like any other. Test and improve it.

This is the same approach UI/UX designers take to websites. You don’t want people to be confused or distracted. You want them to pick up on the call-to-action (CTA) as fast as possible. For a book, the call-to-action is your main argument. For Money’s Big Secret this was two things: (1) Start investing as soon as possible and (2) make it automatic.

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7. Research before writing

For Money’s Big Secret I read over 50 books beforehand. I took notes, scribbled all over them, and used my knowledge system to index them (read this article I wrote for The Huffington Post on how to systematise your knowledge).

Writing is much easier when you know what you want to say. If you don’t yet, then it’s just a stream of consciousness and that’s boring. Go and research your topic first, find what interests you and make a note of it using a knowledge system such as mine above.

Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me, I’m Lying and Ego Is The Enemy, said he has a similar knowledge system utilising index cards. Once he has 10,000 on a particular topic he starts writing a book on it.

8. Publish, don’t ponder

Print-On-Demand means you can make changes to your book on the fly. Every change you make takes about 24 hours to review (via CreateSpace) but this means the idea of having big “Editions” is gone. This means you can improve your book with time and continue past version 1.0 to 1.1, 1.2 and beyond.

Money’s Big Secret was not perfect when I first launched it. There was one formatting error that I could not, for the life of me, fix; I still had interviews lined up with Money Bloggers and Personal Finance Experts after publication; and feedback from first readers was quickly incorporated back into the book.

A book is a product like any other. While it carries a certain intellectual weight: I’ve written a book, there’s no reason why it can’t be updated and improved as all other products are.

9. Do your marketing as you research

Every person you interview is a potential book sale, review, and marketing channel. This is also true of every person you meet between the time you decide to write a book and publication. Being quite a shy person, I found it difficult at first to tell anyone I was writing a book. I didn’t want to. Then I made it a goal to tell anyone I met and ask them to buy and review the book. It’s much easier to make a splash when you’ve already done this than to start with nothing after having finished the book. [Tip: Use a customer relationship manager (CRM) such as Capsule to keep track of people]

10. One topic at a time

I write my books in the same way as I have for this article: breaking it down into manageable chunks. When I’m really stuck – writer’s block – I will literally write, “What am I trying to say?” Then I answer the question in as basic English as I can, for example, “I want to show my reader how their money can grow faster and faster with time.” And sometimes that’s enough. I simply change it to: “Your money can grow faster and faster with time.” and continue from there.

Use subtitles as a writing tool to help you organise your thoughts and keep the words flowing. You can always remove them later and add connectors – sentences and stories that help bring it all together later.

ACTIONS

If you’re trying to become a key influencer in a particular space or niche you should write a book. It helps for credibility and acts as a strong business card.