How to Write Your Own Book

If you’re like most people, you’ve said “I should write a book” at some point in your life.
Whether you’re talking about your fascinating personal story, the history of your family, your unique knowledge about your business or your acquired expertise about how to train a dog, etc. You may also simply be a great storyteller and have the next great novel inside your head waiting to get out.
Writing a book is no longer limited to “real” writers who work with publishers. With the internet, you can write your own book, publish it and get it listed on Amazon.

Write Your Own Book – in 10 Steps

Find an Idea

Every great book starts with a great idea. Your first step to writing an ebook is to start brainstorming about ideas for your book. Even if you already know what general topic you will write about, think about how you’re going to make your book unique from the others that are out there.

Create an Outline

After you have a clearly defined topic for your book, the next step is to create a rough outline. Don’t worry about making this perfect the first time because chances are pretty good that you will revise this, a lot, as your ideas come together and you start looking at your content as a whole package.

Do the Research

This may not always be necessary, depending upon your topic and level of expertise or knowledge, but if necessary, you should try to do any research required before you start writing. If you “get in the flow” when you actually start writing, you won’t want to interrupt that because you have stop writing to do more research.

Start Writing

Now, it’s finally time to start writing your own book. The important part of this is to get started. Many people struggle with getting started because they want it to be perfect. If you wait for this, you book will never get written. If you’re struggling getting started, just write whatever pops into your head, even if it’s bad. Chances are that you will end up rewriting most of what you write the first time anyway, so just getting something down on paper is the first step when you want to write your own book.

Write Every Day

Once you get started, make a commitment to write every single day, even if it’s not very much. If you only write half a page a day, in a year, you’ll have 182 pages! Don’t worry at this point if what you’re writing is good, it’s important to get everything down on paper the first time, before you can start fixing it.

Edit Your Outline

The next step of how to write and publish a book is to review your original outline. In most cases, you will find that items need to be added, removed and moved around in your outline. Update your outline and then rearrange the content in your book.

Edit the Content/Writing

Now that you have a final outline, it’s time to review what you wrote. When you are trying to write your own book, this step will usually be much easier because now you have something to work from. You can fix all the stuff you didn’t like the first time.

Format

With the content now set, you should go through the book specifically to look at formatting. Don’t try to do this while you’re editing or reading for content, because you will definitely miss things. Focus on consistent looking chapter titles, paragraph spacings, indentations and bulleting.

Proof Read

The next step is to proof your entire book. At this point, you should be very critical and look for every single thing that doesn’t look right. During this step, it is also good idea to have someone else look at your book too. Of course, as part of this, you should run the entire book through an online spell checker. Simple grammar and spelling errors will definitely turn off your readers!

Publish

The final step of how to write your own book is to get your book published. We will cover the self-publishing options in a later article. Follow us on Twitter to get an update when the article is published!