Write Ugly and Write Often to Finish Your Book

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Two statistics that we cannot prove but hear all the time:
- Most people never read a book after they graduate high school or college.
- Most people have the desire to write a book.
If writing a book is your desire, that’s a great place to start. But you need to clearly define the purpose of your book and your expected outcomes.
“Begin with the end in mind.” — Stephen Covey
Ask yourself:
- What will the book do for your readers?
  - What are you teaching or sharing that benefits them?
- What do you want it to do for you?
  - Just writing a book probably won’t make you rich. Most self-published books sell less than 100 copies, and of all books, 250/year is average.
  - Bigger publishers expect to sell 4000-7000 copies and call that success. Selling 30,000 would be huge!
So writing a book is clearly not an alternative to the lottery! It’s a lot of hard work and the pay isn’t what you’d expect. But there are benefits!
- Nothing establishes your “expertise” faster.
- It feels great to see your book for the first time (and every time if you do it right).
- You mom will love it.
- It’s a giant business card.
- When you hear from a reader and their life or business was impacted, it validates all of the time you invested to give birth to your book.

With your purpose clearly in mind, it’s time to start writing.
Map out time to write. It doesn’t matter if you have a great outline or great tools if you don’t take the time to write. Some people get up at 5 am to write early, others write late into the night.
Set time or word count goals. Even if it’s only 30 minutes or 1000 words a day, it will add up fast! This is how you master your craft and get your work going.
One strategy that will help outline your content is to outline your content!
- Start by imagining the chapters or sections of the book.
- Then break each down into bite-size pieces.
- Each subsection is like a blog post and all of those posts tell the story of the chapter, and the chapters tell the story of the book.
- Don’t try to write a book, write each piece of the book and put it together at the end.
Reuse content you already have to get a jumpstart.

Even if you start out strong, you will probably hit the wall at some point. Writers block will set in. Doubt will creep up. Procrastination becomes the new normal.
Fight through all of that. Set a deadline and get an accountability partner. You have to push hard to get the work done.
Show up everyday. Do something that moves the book forward every single day, even if it’s just a bit of key research. Write something even if you erase it the next day.
It’s okay to write ugly. It can be full of typos and errors. Just write. Get the ideas out of your head and clean them up later.
One of the hardest things is knowing when it’s done. The truth is that it isn’t done, it’s simply time to call it done. There will always be another idea, another story, another typo to fix.
Besides, this is only the first draft. There’s a lot more to do to get the book printed!

Define your purpose and expected outcomes, both for your reader and yourself.
Map out your time to write. Put it on the calendar and show up consistently.
Outline your book and break it into chunks. Michael Hyatt’s Writing a Winning a Book Proposal [affiliate link] ebooks (fiction and nonfiction) are worth every penny.
Start writing!

034 – Write Ugly and Write Often to Finish Your Book