If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know the ways a book can help your business. To offer a quick recap, think credibility/authority, visibility, growth, and money. (You can read a full post about this HERE) A book will bring you credibility in your particular subject area, so think about what that area is. What are you known for? What do want to be known for? Then think about who your audience is (remember: It’s not everybody!) and how you’ll get in front of them. Word-of-mouth will be a huge asset with regard to book sales, but you need a bigger-picture plan, too.

After hearing again and again that every business needs a blog, you finally took the plunge and added one to your website. You published some posts, and waited to be flooded with awesome new leads.

But nothing happened.

What went wrong? A blog isn’t “Field of Dreams.” Just because you built it, doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will come.

Do you have questions about writing? Lots of creative entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and bloggers do. Here are some that I’m asked regularly enough that I thought, “Hey, that would make a good roundup blog post, Jodi.”

I hear statements like these all the time from bloggers and creative entrepreneurs. Or they say they want to write a book but that “now isn’t the right time.” That might be true for a small number of people, but for others: nope. These are all just excuses. The truth is, you only REALLY need two things to start your book today: a plan and accountability.

Chances are, when you’re writing a blog post or article, you save your notes in a Google doc or maybe even in Evernote. A book is much more complicated project to organize, due to the volume of material. Whereas you might save an article or two to read before writing a blog post, you might have 50 or 100 bookmarked for book research. A Word or Google doc can become unwieldy and overwhelm you when you realize just how much information there is to keep track of, let alone in an organized manner: articles to read, websites to look at, hashtags to search on Twitter, people to interview. Enter Trello.

When writing roadblocks come up, you feel like the loneliest writer on the planet. I promise, though, that this happens to all writers — professional, first-time, whatever. The important thing is to have a plan to work around these creative blocks and get back to writing. So much writing advice tells you, “Sit your butt in the chair and get the words written. If your goal is to write 1,000 words, then sit there until you write 1,000 words. Period.” That sounds great in theory, but that’s not always realistic. Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not suggesting that, at the first sign of not knowing what word to write next, you throw in the towel for the day. (Sorry!)

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.