I got motivated to turn out some products–books–the other day. I’m off to a convention at the end of the month where I am teaching two workshops. I’d like to bring something new and more professionally produced.
I have a number of short books based on longer works I planned on writing one day (currently stalled in the proposals stage), workbooks, ebooks, and articles, essays and blog posts related to these topics. For quite some time now I’ve known that if I put some of these together into a “package” and edited it, I’d have a book–or two or three. So, I began looking at my table of contents, altering it, dropping sample chapter and other content into a document and formatting it to look like book pages. I then printed these out, three hole punched the pages and dropped them into a binder. Wow! I had the makings of a book.
Now, can I produce two books by the end of June? I don’t know. I’ve been sitting on these darn projects for something like six years. I’m not sure I want to rush through them, especially since one needs expert review and a foreword. (Well, both could use forewords…) However, there is something said for getting that first edition out or even bringing a book in a binder to the conference and selling it as an advance copy. At least I will have made major progress on the project.
But here’s the main point: All writers tend to have a ton of content that they simply sit on. I don’t mean literally, of course. Look in your computer files and the files in your file cabinets. Look at your blog posts. There’s a gold mine there of content you could compile into a book.
Take my advice…I’m taking it, too! Stop sitting on all that content. Use it. Even if you don’t create the book you originally thought you’d write, produce a book or ebook out of the content you have. It’s not doing anyone any good under your butt (or in your computer).
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