Write a Book by Blogging ItDave Young

This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “A Shortcut To Writing a Book.”

The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.

Transcript:

Shayla: Thank you for joining us today for the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking today with founder Dave Young. And, Dave, writing a book, I mean, it’s something that I think a lot of people have on their bucket list, “I want to write a book,” but they don’t know where to start, how they’re going to get there, but you’re telling me that’s sort of a special project that Shortcut Content can help with.

Dave: Yeah, we’ve actually helped with a few of these, and it’s interesting because a lot of our clients, because of the way we do this, they don’t want people to know that this is what they’ve done. It’s sort of like using a ghostwriter, but you don’t want people to know that you used a ghostwriter. And so we’ve done two or three books where part of agreement is nobody’s ever going to know that we’ve helped with these books. It makes it hard to get testimonials or to toot your own horn about it, but I’m proud of them nonetheless.

But the way it works is we help somebody outline their book, what it is they want to say, and how the book needs to be laid out, and from there, we basically have these same recording sessions. It’s more customized, so our standard delivery is that we do a series of five minute conversations once a month in a single recording session. If we’re doing a book, depending on the size of the book, and how many chapters and how big they want the chapters to be, those recording sessions can very a little bit, and it can be done in a way that speeds up the recording process. Ya know, we might record an entire book over the course of a month.

The other way to do it is to serialize is and publish a chapter every week for a year. One of my recommendations is to actually publish them. Don’t tell people that you’re blogging your book, just do it. So you create all the content, you outline, and in your mind, you create it as if you’re writing a book and by putting it out on a blog every week, you’re hopefully building an audience. Hopefully, you’re doing something to get at least your friends and people that might be interested in your subject to read that and you can get feedback on it, you can get to the point where those people are anticipating the next post that you’re going to make, and, in essence, at the end of a year, when you’ve finished writing your book, those are the people that will actually buy it. It’s surprising, but the people that will actually buy your book are people that like you and have been reading the things that you’ve been writing.

This is actually a model that has worked for a lot of people, including fiction writers. We don’t typically help people with fiction, but I know of several instances where writers have blogged their entire novel onto their blog and then when they’ve published the novel, the same people that have read their entire thing, because they read it one chapter at a time, dribbled out to them over the course of a year, are the ones that want to buy it.

Shayla: Well, it’s just like following a TV show, I think. I mean, you may watch it as it’s released each week, but those same people are going to stream it and again if they love it.

Dave: Absolutely. We want more of what we like. And if we like you and your writing, then we’re going to want to read more of it, and we’ll want your book sitting on our bookshelf. It makes a lot of sense. Whether it’s a one-off project where we help you create a specific book or a specific genre, and most of the ones we have done have been business books. They’re typically one-off projects, so they need to contact me about it. I’m happy to quote something, but it’s not really, we don’t have a product on our website that says, “Write your book- it’s $10,972.” I have no idea. I don’t know what your book is about, I don’t know how long it’s going to be, I don’t know all of those things, but I can help you figure those things out and then we can come to a price, and even figure out if we want to take it as far as preparing the manuscript and getting it ready for publishing, even if that’s as e-book or a Kindle book. Those kinds of things aren’t rocket science and we can help you with that.

Shayla: And it all starts with just a simple conversation with you, right?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely, give me a ring. The contact information is on our website at ShortcutContent.com.

Shayla: Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.