Becoming A Bestselling Author! | The Tips To Make It Happen
Have you been wanting to write a book for some time but struggle with creating a strategy that actually helps you to make it happen?
Well, you're in luck because today I'm going to pull back the curtains and share the exact strategy and steps that I took to become an eleven times bestselling author. Let's go.
Master Your Schedule
The first step I took to really get myself ready and prepared to write my book was I began to master my schedule. The truth is, we often let our hours flow by, and then when the day gets away from us, we wonder why.
But instead what we should be doing is planning out our schedule instead of letting our day tell us how the hours should be spent. And I'm one of those people that loves all things productivity.
Cool fact: my very first book, Quick Tips for Busy Women, was actually focused on productivity. I knew that to make room in my schedule to make writing happen, I had to be proactive, not reactive. So I took time to reflect on my schedule.
I looked at my schedule and I determined what was working and what wasn't. And I used my 3D strategy to actually make it happen.
3D strategy
Delete
Delegate
Do
I look at the way I was typically spending my time and I determined what were those things that I was wasting my time on that could totally be deleted. And then I looked at it and I asked myself, OK, what are these things that I can really be strategic about delegating? Such as taking my daughter to Girl Scout or even cooking. Trying to get support with these things and coordinating with other parents helped me to be able to delegate where necessary. When I deleted the things that weren't necessary, I delegated the things that I still kind of needed to do or get done but got support with it. It freed up the time for me to invest in the things that I really needed to do. This was a game changer for me because all of a sudden it felt like I had all this time that I didn't originally think that I had.
Dedicate an Hour to Book-Writing
Research says that the average American wastes over 2 hours every single day.
After I was able to take back my time, I committed to 1 hour every single day, which I now call my Power Hour, that I would be dedicated to the book writing process. Now, this looks different every single day. Some days I was writing; some days I was reaching out to editors or graphic designers and cover designers; some days I was really strategizing what I was doing and some days I was doing market research. But I plugged it into my calendar each day to know that I had 1 hour dedicated to this vision.
We are creatures of habit. And in knowing that and getting my schedule aligned, I decided to start sitting down and really maximizing an hour before I focused on writing my actual book. And so what I did is I just took an hour a day for a week, and I just mind-mapped the ideas out. I outlined and free-wrote and did all of these things so that I could get into the rhythm and the routine of making writing my norm.
I didn't realize how powerful this was at the time, but essentially what I was doing was I was initiating the habit of writing, and it became such a powerful resource to use during my writing process. If you're wondering when you'll find time to write and you've tried this strategy, I'd recommend also looking at the free time that you have throughout the day. So this may look like your lunch break, while you're sitting at your kids' practice, those sorts of things. You could also consider maybe waking up a little bit earlier or going to sleep just a tad bit later. It doesn't necessarily need to be an hour.
But here's the thing that I want you to realize: even those small, seemingly meaningless steps add up to massive results. Even if you're writing 20 minutes every single day, at the end of the week, that's 140 minutes. At the end of two weeks, that's 280 minutes, right?
So it actually begins to add up.
And you'd be surprised how many words you can get written when you're writing consistently. Also, the more consistently you write, you get into the habit of writing. So it doesn't feel like such a block when you're writing. It just flows almost like water out of a faucet.
Do Market Research to Determine Who You’re Writing To
After that week of really prepping and planning and mind mapping and outlining, I determined my topic area as well as who it was that I was writing to. And this is so important because often what happens is we know, okay, I want to write an autobiography, but like, who is it that my autobiography would speak to? Right? Or, I really know that I want to write on this particular genre, but who is this genre or this topic that I'm writing on going to actually relate to? Because here's what I actually learned the hard way.
If you write to everyone, you actually relate to no one. Now, I'd like to add a little caveat. While this is a step that I highly recommend, and I thought that I had really narrowed it down, it wasn't something that I had perfected until I got to my second and beyond book. And that's why I'm really passionate about this step. So after I narrowed it down, I started to do some market research.
I started to talk to my ideal reader, and I met with ten people that were my ideal readers. Being busy and wearing multiple hats - that was my ideal market for busy single moms. I asked them questions like:
What are your biggest struggles with productivity?
What are the struggles that you’re having?
What are things that you've tried?
What are things that you wish you had access to?
What's working?
What's not?
And this information was so powerful because it really informed my writing. It helped me to know throughout the book, as I was writing, who I was talking to, and it really put me in their shoes to see what it was they needed, and to make sure that I was actually supporting them in that way. It also helped me with one of probably the most important pieces of the book writing process, which was creating my cover and my title strategically.
Create the Cover and Title Strategically
Cool story: When I first started writing my book, I decided that because I was talking about productivity - everyone could benefit from it. And so I made my book very neutral, even down to the cover. On the cover it was pink, but it had black writing and it had a briefcase. I figured the black writing, the briefcase would resonate with corporate men and the pink writing would resonate with moms or stay-at-home moms or even college grads, things like that.
My title was called “Quick Tips”. At the time, my justification was these quick tips work for everyone. But what I realized is it was actually extremely confusing because “Quick Tips” means nothing to no one, right? Quick tips for what?
Quick tips for graduating college with a 4.0? Quick tips for getting your kid through high school? Quick tips for your first marriage? Whatever.
"Quick tips" is such a vague term that it spoke to no one. So it was no surprise later that when I actually went to publish this book, no one purchased it other than my aunt, my uncle, my mom, and my cousin. I had very few people purchase because they weren't sure what this book meant. So soon after publishing that book, and understandably, being pretty defeated because I put my blood, sweat, and tears (figuratively) into this book, and no one bought it other than my loved ones who wanted to support me, I knew that I had a message that I wanted to get out there.
I went back to the drawing board and really honed in on who my ideal reader was. That's when I did the market research. And then I created and wrote my book from that place, Quick Tips for Busy Women.
And this book means so much to me because when I first titled it, I titled it “Quick Tips”, and as I did my market research, I realized women were struggling with feeling busy.
Also, if you notice on the cover, there's this woman with all these things swimming around her head. That's what the women expressed to me. “It feels like I'm a computer open with all these tabs. I feel like things are always going around me and my life is spinning in circles. I feel like I'm wearing so many hats. I'm exhausted.”
I took their exact words, their exact expression of emotions, and I created my title and my cover accordingly. That way, from a distance, if someone is walking through Barnes and Noble, if they're randomly scrolling Amazon, they know immediately, “oh, my goodness, that cover jumps out. It stands out to me,” and they start to become intrigued.
This was strategically done because the truth is, you can have the greatest content inside your book, but books are judged by their cover. So what is your cover saying about your book?
Align Your Mind and Practice Affirmations
One of the initial steps that I took early on which paid off really well at this point, was to get my mind aligned. The truth is, whenever you're going towards a new dream, something exciting, you're going to notice some level of resistance in your body because what is tempting is for you to come back to your comfort zone, where it's safe, where it's familiar, where you've normalized it.
But the truth is, there is no growth there.
Knowing I wanted to become an author and deciding that I wanted to write a book, I noticed that hesitation immediately. I started to kind of resist it and convince myself that the dream was too much and that I should just stay where I was. But the truth is, I knew I was called to so much more, and you know that too. So the key is to get your mind on board.
When I started to write my book, I thought of all of the excuses:
No one will ever want to read my book.
I'll never be able to complete it.
There are a million books on this topic already.
I thought of all of those reasons, and you likely are struggling with some of those limiting beliefs, but one of the things that I did every single day is I affirmed myself in the opposite direction.
Affirmations are powerful statements that help you to reprogram your mind for success. The truth is, the way our subconscious mind works is whatever it holds is what it's drawn towards. So if you are focused on believing all of the things that could go wrong, you're going to, in turn, find all of the things that go wrong. But on the flip side, if you choose to focus on all of the endless possibilities, you're also going to be able to call those in as well. So what you'll want to do is you will want to create an affirmation around your writing journey that actually helps you to create the success that you desire and deserve.
And just the cool fact my affirmation was “I, Dr. Nicolya, am a best-selling author”, and I recited that so many times a day that you probably would have been sick of hearing it. But it's so cool to know that I recited that years before I ever became a best-selling author on one book, let alone eleven. And so I say that to say that what you focus on is what you find. So focus on those things that you want to find.
After that, I was so lit up and excited about writing this book that I went ahead and published it a second time. And when I published it a second time, I became an international best-selling author.
Talk About Your Book
Now the steps that I shared with you about getting my mind aligned, making sure my schedule, you know, was matching, what it was that I wanted to create, being strategic about how I created the title as well as the cover, and then publishing it from that place, really helped me to be able to become a best-selling author. But the key here was ranting and raving about my book.
You see, the average author only sells about 250 to 300 copies in the lifetime of the book, right in the bookshelf life.
So obviously, when you write a book, you are writing it for a purpose. You want it to be in the hands of the people that need it most. And I can guarantee there are more than 250 to 300 people that need to hear what it is that you're writing about. So learning this, I took it as a challenge, and I started to think about what is my big purpose behind writing this book. And my big purpose was to really be able to create a massive impact.
And so as I thought about the impact that I could create, I realized that it's actually a gift for me to be able to share this book with the world. You see, we often buy into the belief that selling is salesy or sleazy. But it is salesy or sleazy when you're selling things that don't benefit people. But if you know that something can change someone's life, or they could benefit from it, you're doing a disservice to not only yourself, but to other people as well by not getting it out there.
Recently, I went grocery shopping with my daughters at Costco, and I got this macaroni and cheese that was amazing, and it's like, put it in the oven, took it for 45 minutes, and it's done. And I called my mom to tell her she needed to check it out. I called my neighbor to tell her she needed to check it out. I called my daughter's best friend's mom to tell her she needed to check it out.
That's selling, right?
I know that these women are busy. They want a quick meal. It was actually really good, and worth the price. I would buy it ten times over. Why wouldn't I tell them about it? And if we think of sales in that same way, it no longer feels like this pressure. It no longer feels embarrassing. It no longer has to feel sleazy. It gets to feel seamless and dare I even say fun. A big mistake that many authors make when it comes to selling their book is they hope that once it's on Amazon or once it's in Barnes and Noble, the right people will just be magnetized to it and get it.
But it is your job to talk about it, to tell people about it, to rant and rave, to scream from the mountain tops and to get creative and let people know that it's out there so that they know what opportunities they have from purchasing your book. So that they know why they need your book so that they know why your book is written just for them.
When you get to that phase, you want to be creative with thinking about how you can get your book into the hands of the people that need it most. I have brought books to airports and given them to flight attendants. I've taken them to conferences. I have done training around my books. I have promoted my books online on social media. I have put my book link in my signature line, in my email. I have put my books up on my website. I've exchanged my books. I have done book clubs with my books. I mean, the options are truly endless.
So as you can tell, the book-writing process doesn't have to be complicated. If you are done hoping, wishing, wondering, and waiting and you're ready to take action to bring your book baby to life, I have just the thing for you in my complimentary training called Write Your Book in 30 Days. I literally walk you through the nine steps that I took to write my book in just 30 days. And I share this with you so that you can see that it's available for you as well.
If you're ready to make that happen, check out this link the where you'll get all the details about where to join us. I can't wait to see you there.
