Welcome back to Off the Shelf, friends! We’re trying something a bit different with Off the Shelf in 2017. Instead of me posting reviews each month, an entrepreneur friend and I will be trading reviews of the same book. This month features a review from my editorial colleague Liz Thompson of House Style Editing. | The Happiness Equation By Neil Pasricha 

Let’s call a spade, a spade: A book is A LOT of words. Even if you, say, blog a couple times a week, a couple thousand words at a time, you're producing 5,000 or so words a week. A book, on the other hand, is tens of thousands of words. In other words, it’s a lot more words than you’re used to writing. That said, you’re producing 5K words per week (good for you!), so you’re in good shape to build a daily writing habit. It doesn’t matter WHAT you’re writing. It just matters that you ARE writing.

Sometimes you’ll see the writing process as having four steps: writing, revising, editing, and publishing. In that scenario, prewriting is included in the writing phase. Prewriting is a separate step from writing. I cannot over-emphasize that point! If you sit down to write 50,000 (or more words) with a topic and a few key points, but nothing else, you’re in trouble. Prewriting is the legwork and preparation to make the actual writing easier and faster. So really, the writing process has 5 steps:

1. Prewriting
2. Drafting
3. Revising
4. Editing
5. Publishing

You already know the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Unfortunately, we all still judge books by their covers. Design impacts our buying decisions all the time, but today I want to talk to you specifically about the importance of a good book cover.

But first, let’s think about your book like a food truck. You could buy Joe’s Tacos out of a beat-up, red van without a name on it. Or, you could buy Joe’s Tacos out of a shiny, teal-and-yellow-striped taco truck. Same tacos, but which one are you more interested in? Your book content is the same, but a book cover may attract or repel readers!

Almost without fail during Book Brainstorm Sessions (my version of discovery calls) and even in initial conversations with new clients, I hear this sentence: “But I’m not a writer.” That’s the point where I smile and take a breath, and we have a chat about mindset. I bet if you’re reading this blog post, you’ve had that same thought (or even said it out loud). Simply put, if you’re going to write a book, you must shift your mindset from that of a business owner writing a book to that of a writer. When you’re done writing, you can switch hats back to business owner — promise.

Welcome back to Off the Shelf, friends! We’re trying something a bit different with Off the Shelf in 2017. Instead of me posting reviews each month, an entrepreneur friend and I will be trading reviews of the same book. In the spirit of National Organizing Month, first up is the best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I had somehow never read.