So, as promised the other day, I'm about to start serious work on my first book. I've had the idea in my mind for a good few months, but lacked the free time to commit.

As of 2013 I am setting aside one day per week to work on my own projects, plus whatever  evenings I have free. The plan is to build up passive income through web apps, books and other content - with a vague target of £1000 a month by January 2014.  My short term target is just to get something out there, so I am committing to finishing a book within the next 30 days.

I've read several times people claiming that you can't create a quality product in such a short time, and I do plan to have something substantial at the end: a 20,000 words, 80 page, book.

But I'm confident this is possible. A couple of years ago I talked about how much writing I get chance to do, since then my work has accelerated via contributions to Wikipedia and elsewhere. This is a lot of practice, particularly in rattling out quality content in short timeframes.

So lets do this; 30 days, one ebook about...

The Book

To help keep me motivated I selected a quirky format. The book is called "How not to write an Ad". Based loosely on How not to write a Novel, it is a fun look at some of mistakes advertisers make, with practical advice on avoiding pitfalls (I'll talk more about the content in a later post).

I've broken it down into 20 sections, across 3 or 4 themes, with the aim of writing 1,000 words for each. This should help make it easier to keep to targets.

Motivation

Over the next week I'm going to publish a public "progress" tracker (if anyone knows of existing apps that do this then please mention them in the comments!) where you can see how far I have gotten. Hopefully that will get me on track.

Selling

Of course, writing the damn thing is only part of the story. I need to starting building interest so that when I have something to sell, I have someone to sell it to!

This is the learning curve for me; I know I can write fairly well, but I've never been the best at promotion. A quickly compiled list of ideas include:

  • Write about the process here to attract attention
  • Post to social networks to gain traction
  • Write guest posts to promote the book
  • Advertise??
  • Affiliate schemes...
The last two I am not sure about; is an advert on one of the big ad/copywriting blogs worth the investment (~£500 for a month). And, how do I find affiliates to market my material... (extensive research has yet to uncover a solid way to put me in touch with great people who post affiliate material).

What this does highlight is that a 20,000 word book probably needs in the region of 10-20,000 words of marketing and promotion to gain traction. Which should be an interesting experience.

But that is next weeks chore; tomorrow is a big writing day. Stay tuned!