One of my friends, Jay Conrad Levinson, the author of the Guerilla Marketing book series and the best selling marketing book series in the world, has authored 56 different books in his lifetime.
To me, that’s a great number to look forward to. I’m intending to break the record of the total number of books an individual can write in a lifetime, because I think there’s lots of stuff in my head that’s waiting to come out into a written form. (hence the blog, heh)
I recently started stepping up on writing my peak performance books (I’ll keep it a secret as to what they are, but suffice to say that one of them is 80% done, and the other two are 20% complete), and I realized there are a lot of people who tell me how amazing my books have been
Well, personally, I don’t think I’ve achieved anything great, but when I tell others that they also have a book in them, they tell me all sorts of things.
“Oh, I can’t do it. My English isn’t good enough”
“I don’t have time to write”
“I want to write but I get the mental block all the time”
The trouble is not that they don’t have skills in writing, but they don’t have the pre-requisite skills to be able to be a writer in the first place .You have to have world experience. You need to learn how to use words to affect, influence and capture the imagination of others.
And the most important thing is that writing a good book merely requires you to provide information that is useful in an appetizing way. This is an art that can be learnt.
The way I started was through the process of persuasive language. There’s always something that enables people to buy into whatever you say or sell. In reality, good authors are able to affect the hearts and minds of their readers. After all, they appeal to a specific segment of readers.
I’m quite privileged to have been able to write several books with great co-authors. But I can tell you that the first one is always the toughest one. It’s like building a muscle. You have to strain and stretch and sometimes stumble before you get to a point of being able to make your next book easier and more effective.
What I can say for the first lesson is this – you really have to start off with a sense of excitement in what you want to share. That will be your first point of exploration. And, uh, if you don’t have much exciting stuff in your life, perhaps it’s time to explore yourself and figure out the reason why. That itself is going to be pretty interesting already.
The rest of it are just mere details.
