Thursday 3 December 2015

Write and Sell! – How to write and publish a book in 14 days

This blog is supposed to be about photography, but from time to time, my other interests creep in. I recently released a brand new book, Skriv och sälj!: Skriv och sälj en bok på 14 dagar  (Write and Sell!: Write and sell a book in 14 days). The book is out on AdlibrisBokus Dito , and Bokon.

Writing a book usually takes 6-12 months. How do you write it, and start selling it, in just 14 days? Can it be done?
Yes, it is unusual, but not unprecedented. For example, Michael Moorcock, one of my favourite authors, used to write his books in the Eternal Champion cycle in about a week. He wrote more than 50 of them.

You might think writing and publishing a book in 14 days means you have to work very hard, but it does not. As you might know, I work with process improvement. Have a look at this computer simulation of two projects:

Notice how, at the start stage, the blue and the yellow project works at exactly the same speed. At each stage, the speed is exactly the same in the two projects. And yet, if you look at the other end, where the work is finished, the blue project finishes twice as fast as the yellow project. (Yes, I wrote the simulation, several years ago.)
The reason why the blue project finishes faster, is that it uses something called load balancing. You can load balance almost any process, including writing and publishing books.
As it turns out, with writing and publishing, load balancing works great! Writing, and publishing, a book in two weeks is entirely feasible, and you actually work less than a writer trying to do the same thing in 6-12 months.
And, of course, if you write, say, one book per month, while your competitors have finished and published one book, you have finished and published, and gotten paid for, 6-12 books.
That is pretty good. Also, with every book you write, your sales per book tend to increase, at least if you write well enough to make your readers want more of your books. For me, being able to reduce lead times in this way, means I can take on more work. It also means my management consulting customers know they get the real deal.

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