Writing Tips Guides

Did you know Americans alone spend $8.5 billion a year on how-to and self-help information products, programs, and services? A recent Google search on the phrase “how to” yielded 2.37 billion results.

Why do people buy self help and how to books? Most readers buy books to solve problems or help with filling a need. For example, when I started speaking for a fee I needed help with jumpstarting my speaking abilities.

Browsing in the bookstore, I was attracted to Lilyan Wilder’s book “7 Steps to Fearless Speaking” I read her back cover. I noticed she could help with 7 easy steps. I skimmed the table of contents, read a few lines and immediately liked her easy to read style. I decided to purchase the book.

Because I wanted to hear from several authorities on the subject, I picked up another book by Nido R. Qubein, “How to Be a Great Communicator: In Person on Paper, and on the Podium.”

His cover design was white with clean lines and a personable picture of him on the front. His style of writing was not an easy read but I still decided buy his book as well. Which brings us back to my original point; people buy self help books to solve problems. To identify your targeted market, pinpoint a problem they have and the solution of course.

Problems come in all shapes and sizes. Usually a general category problem applies to all types of markets.

Hobbies and Games. Is your golf game, bridge game or tennis as good as you’d like? Are you considering taking up gardening? Want to improve your computer game skills? What ever the case may be, your desire to improve or change your level of performance is considered the problem.

Health Education. The first thing you do when your doctor diagnoses you as a diabetic and you need to lose 20 pounds. You go look for a book that will walk you through step by step to control diabetes. You look to someone that has solved the problem to learn from their experience.

State of Mind. Are you feeling stressful about gas prices, the economy or banking system? Are you noticing unexplained physical symptoms possibly related to stress? Once again, you have a problem and you are looking for a solution in book form. Someone who has outlined easy steps to de-stress in our society.

Careers and Finance. Worried about lay-offs, down-sizing, retirement? Self help books that offer financial solutions to economic problems during shaky times are guaranteed to succeed.

Advertising and Marketing. We live in a competitive society. Small business owners and managers everywhere need a growing database of customers and clients. Therefore, they seek out how to books with solutions on improving their advertising copy, improving their business image, improving their sales copy, growing their bottom line or improving their website.

Each of the categories above describes a problem and a need for a solution. The main goal of your marketing plan is to identify the problem your book solves and then present the solution. The more intense the problem and the easier you can make your solution, the more readers will seek out your book.

Your task becomes to reorganize your knowledge into bite-size reader solutions. Appeal to the masses, by letting them know what’s in it for them and how easy the solution is inside your book. For example, let’s consider the book title I mentioned earlier about speaking. The title could have been: “How to Overcome the Fear of Speaking” instead of “7 Steps to Fearless Speaking” The latter is more appealing because it alludes to only 7 steps to the solution.

Don’t wait any longer. If you put it off, you can be this time next year without fulfilling your dream of writing a successful book. You have the solution to your audience’s problem. Now write it down. While you’re at use the tips above and write a book that sells well. Make it different. Make it count. Make it yours.

Are you ready to discover how I wrote 9 books and how you can too?

Visit here How to Write a Book to receive FREE 7 lesson mini-course Jumpstart Writing Your Book and Book Writers Kit! From Earma Brown the Book Writing Coach at http://www.bookwritinghelp.com

Speech writing is a talent, and like playing basketball, it is a fact that some people will do it better naturally than others. However, exactly like playing sports of any kind, it is also something that that you can get better at with practice. In this article I am going to explore several techniques as to how you can improve your speech writing abilities, and also how to approach writing a speech for ceratin different circumstances. Whether it be for a wedding, where perhaps you are the best man, or for an important business meeting where you really need to impress.

First though the good news!

The good news is that you are already a ’speech writer’. You just don’t know it yet! Ok. What do I mean? Simple. The truth is that you have already spoken to people before. You have already been constructing dialogue long before the harrowing thought of having to write it down and deliver it came into the equation. You speak to your friends, family and work colleagues (though maybe not your boss!) without having to pre-plan everything you say. You just react. Well, the good news is that writing a speech is not really any different from that. It simply takes the process one step further along and has you writing it down.

Where the panic sometimes comes in is that to write a great speech there are three further elements that are useful to consider. The first of these is empathy. Speech writing is an empathetic medium. It is concerned both with connecting with yourself, but also with your audience. In a sense it is all about building bridges. And the best speeches are always going to be where the audience empathise with you or your message. In a way it is a bit like being a surfer. As you deliver a great speech it is as though you are riding a wave of emotions, both internally, but also in the mind of your listeners. And the more engaged they are with the message and sentiment of your speech, the more they will connect with it and get benefit from it.

Empathy is something however that can be taught. The ‘trick’ is trigger points. And no, I don’t mean that you should shoot your audience to make them like you! No. What you have to realise is that every great speech has trigger points. Moments where the speech builds to a crescendo, and a memorable line or sentiment is delivered. What this means for your speech writing is that you should tailor the speech so that every so often the speech has these points. It could be a moment of great passion. Like in Martin Luther Kings ‘I Have a Dream’ speech where he uttered those lines. Or moments of comedy perhaps if you are delivering a best mans speech. Remember to write them in.

The second element of a great speech that you must have is momentum. Speeches are defined by the momentum they create. In the same way that a good book has a beginning, a middle and an end, a great speech is one where the tension is building until the end before being released. The audience should never feel this lapse, because it is in the building of this tension that you create the momentum that drives the speech forward and keeps people interested. This is one of the key failings with most speeches, namely that they lack direction. They end up being a convoluted collection of anecdotes, but without a driving momentum. Every speech must have a message.

The third key element is Practice. Never underestimate the value of repetition. Drill that speech so far into your head that you could deliver it under any pressure. It was said of the Romans - ‘Their drills were like bloody wars. And their wars were like bloody drills’. The point is that they practiced! They didn’t control an empire for over 1000 years for nothing. And the same is true of your speech writing.

So, get busy. Get writing. Speak with Passion. Empathise with your audience. Draw them in. Deliver trigger points throughout. Build to a crescendo, and remember to practice. It makes perfect.

Want more information about writing a KILLER speech? Then read our speech writinghow to guide at http://www.anecdote.org Where we have a world of writing resources at your fingertips, including Topics for Persuasive Writing information.

Is your book organized? The best non-fiction books are organized like a paved road guiding readers through their chapters. That paved road of organization includes mile markers, exit signs and other road markers for each chapter. Think about it; we easily get lost unless the path is clear. It’s stressful to take a journey without a clear road to travel.

Most people enjoy a journey (even a book journey) on a paved clearly marked road. Instead of leaving your readers to follow a mucky path of disorganization through your book, use repeating elements to create a can’t-miss-it road like the yellow brick road in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ movie (1939).

In John Maxwell’s “21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You” book, he skillfully uses repeating elements. These repeating elements form a paved road that leads you clearly through each chapter. Each chapter has the same basic form (road). To create chapters that guide your readers like a yellow brick road include these 10 elements:

1. Sizzle your chapter title: Create grab you by the collar chapter titles. You can immediately follow up with a subtitle that emphasizes and explains the title’s meaning. Or you may consider a brief quotes.

2. Insert brief quotes: You may follow each title one or two quotes from your speeches or other authorities in your field which support the title.

3. Write an Introduction: Begin each chapter with 6-8 paragraphs of introduction. The introduction may include a short story presenting the chapter’s main principle or underlying thesis. For short books 3 to 4 paragraphs work best. You don’t want your introduction to over power your chapter.

4. Create an opening statement: For example, you could open each chapter with a thought provoking question or a startling statistic that show where your audience is now (before reading your book.) Many authors begin with a short analogy or story. Whatever you decide to open with, create an attention getter to hook your reader.

5. Prepare a thesis statement: After your short introduction including your hook (opening statement), write your thesis. Keep it simple; let your readers know what benefits await them if they keep reading. For example, one author friend uses sizzling bullet points to entice the reader into the chapter. You may place them right below quote or directly below introduction.

6. Write 7 to 10 points: Next, you may be write lessons or present tools used to achieve the goal presented in the introduction. Condense your material as you develop each point. Some lessons may require one paragraph and others may need several.

7. Include case studies: Incorporate one or more story form case studies that support the chapter’s central idea.

8. Add self-evaluation tools: Add brief questions that permit readers to measure their progress with each of the principles described inside the chapters.

9. Summarize your chapter. Each chapter may end with four to eight paragraphs that summarize the central idea and supporting points. Don’t forget to hold the carrot out at the end: insert 1-2 sentences at the end of your summary to entice your readers with benefits waiting in the next chapter.

10. Use engagement tools. Create active participants of your book readers using engagement tools like worksheets and note sheets. Make lists, questions to ponder or boxed tips to actively engage your readers instead of allowing them to be observers.

Step out of your comfort zone and create a yellow brick road for each chapter. Use the simple template above and before you know it you’ll speed write your book to completion. Enjoy the journey. Life is made easier.

Earma Brown, 13 year author and book writing coach
Get a free Book Writing Course when you sign-up for iScribe newsletter on book writing, publishing and marketing. Send any email to iscribe@bookwritinghelp.com or visit her at How to Write a Book for more book writing resources and tips.

Everyday someone hops a train to start writing a book. Unfortunately as one person gets on the train to write a book there are several people who decide that it’s hopeless, they’ll never complete their book and get off the train.

My hope is that you will be the one who starts the journey of writing a book and stays on to completion. Staying on track to write a book is not without effort and diligence; even so you can do it with an easy road map (a system.) If you’re reading this article, I’m almost certain you’ll have to change your priorities, the times that you write and the amount that you write. This is why writing a book is so difficult for some because it requires you to change your priorities. Or at the least it requires you to move your book writing project to one of the top 3 priorities in your day.

Most of us, don’t want to change, we put our goal of writing a book at the bottom of our list and think voila, and someday soon I’ll have a book! In reality, this way it could be years before we reach our goal.

The people who get off the train of writing a book are most likely the ones who didn’t use a roadmap for success. They did not sit down and create a book writing plan. You must have a plan for your book writing; if you don’t then there’s no point in starting. You might be on a program that brings you close to finishing your book but because you didn’t have a plan or a practical goal you abandon it and say it was not working.

The road map for success in your book writing program is to have a specific, but sensible goal. Be specific about your book writing goal. Do not tell yourself that you would like to write a book by the end of this year. That is not a specific goal. You have not set a start date, you have not set an end date and you have not stated what book you would like to write.

A specific book writing goal is stating that you are going to start your book writing program on January 28th at 5:00 a.m. during which time you want to complete your 156-page book ‘10 Ways to Stop Divorce Before It’s Too Late’ and it will end at midnight on June 30. Be as precise as you can. Now you have the beginning of the road map to start your book writing journey.

Your next step in this plan is to be practical. Your goals have to consist of a goal that can be achieved. If you state that you would like to write a book in the next few weeks working a couple of hours a week, you are setting yourself up for failure. Not only will you not achieve this goal but also it will cause you to possibly give up because your plan was unrealistic.

Start your book writing plan with a goal that you know you will be able to achieve if you just challenge yourself to achieve. Writing a book in 6 weeks working at least 20 hours a week is something you can do and you will not have to say good-bye to your family and become a hermit to achieve it.

Don’t wait any longer; begin your book writing journey with a road map. Start seeing yourself writing and completing a book by your end date. Before you know it, you’ll have a finished book in your hand all because you started with a road map to guide you to the finish line.

Earma Brown is an expert in book writing and publishing advice.

She focuses on innovative and unique techniques to helping others get their book written in record time. She has been successful in using these techniques to write her own books and bring them to market faster.

For a limited time, you can claim the Jumpstart Writing Your Book mini course free at How to Write a Book

Get other FREE resources now at http://www.bookwritinghelp.com

While it would take a much longer article to describe all of the things I tried that didn’t work in writing a book, it’s worth noting some of the many mistakes I made that others might see as opportunities to make faster progress.

Hopefully, others will avoid these pitfalls in similar projects. Here’s an example: Many public speakers will tell you that you can simply dictate 10 hours worth of material onto a tape and then hire a writer for very little money who will turn that material into a finished book. Perhaps that’s the case if your message is about your humble beginnings and how positive thinking made you a success.

I tried that approach for several book ideas. In each case, I found an intelligent, hard-working person who wrote much better than I do. I armed the writers with an outline for a book and invited the writers to interview me until he or she had enough material. We recorded those interviews and had them transcribed. The writers even got a floppy disk of the transcribed material so they could simply edit the interviews if that was enough for them.

M talented collaborators did their best. They worked hard. They wrote lots of material. They asked lots of good questions. But they could not produce manuscripts that captured the essence of what we wanted to describe. I devoted long and painful hours to the process, and these collaborations just didn’t work. It became obvious that I could write the material faster than I could explain it to someone else who would then do the writing.

When people first learn about the project to accelerate all forms of improvements by 20 times, they often have a reaction like Peter Drucker’s: Some smart CEO will want to take this perspective and gain enormous advantages by permeating his or her company with these practices.

I spent many years writing to CEOs who had such reputations, visiting CEOs we knew who had that orientation, and making presentations to senior officer groups. I remember one such visit when I felt very confident that we would get the go ahead.

To ease matters, I offered to do the work for no fee. That offer only gained me the reaction that each person in the room would rather go home five minutes earlier every night than spend even five minutes on learning and employing the problem-solving practices we had created.

Why? I’m sure the answer varied from organization to organization that turned us down. Our general impression was that people were overworked and fearful of losing their jobs. The continual downsizing of American organizations had been going on for some time, and there weren’t many people left who did anything other than run from fighting one fire to putting out another one.

A little known fact was that many of the executives who had great reputations for installing new ideas were mostly doing so after these ideas had been around for 20 or 30 years. In addition, executive pay had reached the moon. Due to a combination of more emphasis on stock options and larger performance bonus opportunities, a senior management group could earn more in five years than a similar group would have earned in a lifetime two decades earlier.

Most executives didn’t plan to stick around any longer than it took to cash out with their big payday. Something like this project required people who wanted to enjoy improvements for many years to come.

Marketing-oriented people will tell you that you can sell any idea to the media. Just write press releases; follow up with writers, editors, and producers; and you will be overwhelmed with demand for your idea. That wasn’t my experience. Fearing that we had gone about it in the wrong way, we sought help in pursuing this path.

Marketers of ideas seemed underwhelmed by our project. One organization is considered to be unbeatable in this area. I spent months making daily telephone calls trying to get someone to speak with us. Finally, a sales representative from that organization called me back to say that they were very busy but that the CEO of the organization had agreed to discuss the project for 15 minutes by telephone three months in the future. Okay.

On the appointed day, there was a snowstorm in the CEO’s town. The CEO didn’t make it to the office in time for our scheduled call. I tried for the next six months to reschedule. O never got another slot. And that was one of the more promising leads I had for marketing and writing help.

Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through 2,000 percent solutions and receive tips by e-mail by registering for free at

http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and above all accurately so they will be guided by its light.

-Joseph Pulitzer

All of our communication eggs for the 400 Year Project (demonstrating the feasibility and encouraging people to make improvements 20 times faster from 2015 through 2035) were not in the Web site basket: We also planned to create a series of books and articles that would begin sharing helpful information about our project.

One such source of material already existed, and it’s always a good idea to repackage material in new ways that will appeal to different people. Since 1992, I had been analyzing the behaviors of CEOs whose companies grew their stock prices the fastest during the prior three years through an annual series of articles.

This research was the first (to my knowledge) tracking study of CEO best practices, and I had high hopes for what it would reveal. My idea was to locate practices that other company leaders could use to grow 20 times faster than usual.

The study did indeed become a potent source of information. Carol Coles and I used the insights we gained to write about the importance of continuing business model innovation in a later book.

While the CEO tracking study continued, Carol Coles and I asked Robert Metz to assist us in creating a book that would outline a process that almost anyone could use to accomplish 20 times as much in a given area with the same time, effort, and resources. We correctly saw this book as the first major output of the 400 Year Project.

While most people try to write business books to boost their consulting and coaching businesses, our intention was to boost interest in and activity for finding new solutions through the 400 Year Project.

The good news was that we already had such a process that could be adapted for the purpose: the universal problem-solving process that Peter Drucker had noticed that we always used. He had correctly perceived that we had moved past our clients in creating innovative practices.

The key to our effectiveness was a master process that could quickly resolve most problems with superior solutions that no one had ever employed before. In early 1995, Peter began insisting that we take this process and turn it into a universal resource. Otherwise, he was concerned that a tool of immense practical value would be lost, potentially for centuries.

We were flattered by Peter’s high opinion of our work’s potential. The bad news was that Carol and I had no experience with turning processes we used into books.

We turned to Robert Metz to help us. Robert had written a number of investment-related books and had authored one best seller. Robert had helped new authors before and felt confident he could shepherd us through the process.

Having heard a lot about interfering agents and intractable publishers, we asked Robert to advise us on how to get an agent and a publisher. His advice was to simply write the book and then look for a publisher. In this way, we were likely to be able to write a book that contained the content we intended rather than the direction that a publisher wanted us to take.

Beginning around 1997, we started the conceptual development of that book. We needed to lay out a format that people would enjoy using for learning. Early on, we decided to fill the book with as many examples as possible and to make the information accessible to those with many different learning styles.

That approach was quite a challenge because most people have read or experienced relatively little in the way of advanced practices. We had to take the most solid information available and reduce it to tasty bites that contained the essence of the lesson without cloying our readers’ appetites for more.

In one-on-one conversations about the project, it was obvious that people loved specifics and were confused or bored by general principles. But we needed to express general principles, or people wouldn’t know what to do next. What model could we use to get around this problem?

The story of Scheherazade came to mind. She married a king who had executed a string of brides after each wedding night. To stay alive, every night she told her husband a new story that ended in a cliffhanger. She continued to tell the stories for 1001 nights, gave the king three sons, and so avoided execution.

Could we similarly string together a large number of fascinating stories, stories so rewarding that readers would race forward to find the next one? Well, it was worth a try.

Robert, Carol, and I were all accomplished storytellers and had large repertoires of stories we had accumulated from our reading and contacts. We could draw on those resources and see what we could do.

Have you been working on your stories to illustrate what you want others to learn? You’ll need as many as you can when you are ready to use books to help attract attention.

Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through 2,000 percent solutions and receive tips by e-mail by registering for free at

http://www.fastforward400.com .