Highlights
0:50 – Overall strategy for accountability, creating checklists, and deadlines.
1:52 – The focus on “Why?”
2:25 – Here are some of the things that she said about the “why?”
Transcription
Hi, this is Roger Bryan and today I am going to be reviewing the book “Start writing your book today” by Morgan Gist MacDonald. Now the reason that I read this book is I had written a few books a couple of years back and I really felt like it’s time to write what would be my 4th book … Technically my 5th book if you count the cookbook that we did 2 years ago. I wanted to write a more robust book, something that was more impactful. I decided that I was going to start with a little bit of research 1st and this book had a lot of great reviews on Amazon. In all, the reviews were well warranted. I took down some notes because there’s a couple of things here that I thought were really interesting about this book that might help you if you are thinking about writing a book.
She really breaks down the overall strategy for accountability, creating checklists and setting deadlines. How many words you should write per day, how to keep track of that on a weekly basis, the overall structure and how many weeks it should take you to create your timeline all the way through your 1st draft. Then there was a very in-depth section on how to go through proofreading, editing, beta readers and all of those different types of things. Which were things that I was definitely not considering. I think on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give the book about an 8. I do really think that it’s written in a over-simplified manner for an audience that will probably never write a book.
For those that have written a book or for those that I know that coach people on writing the books, it might be a little simplistic in the actual strategy and maybe even a little overloaded on the overall review process. I’d still highly recommend it. One of the things that I really liked though was the focus on “why?”. I think that from working with students who have tried to write books and failed and looking at those that have written books and succeeded. I could see how her section on the “why?” for writing your book is really important. It’s an often skipped step. The concept of just creating a title, sitting down and writing and then publishing your book up on Amazon and thinking that you’re going to make a bunch of money, is a fantasy. If you’re writing fiction, it’s still not going to work.
Here are some of the things that she said about the “why?”. “1st off, you need to write this down. Why do you want to write the book? Can your experience in an industry help people? Maybe you’ve come up with ways to improve something inside your industry or where you work? Maybe you want to share advice you wish you would have had x years ago? You have an experience you want to share, you want to tell a story or you want a position yourself as an authority by sharing your experience in a specific field?” These are fundamentals that I think are often overlooked. You see a lot about being an authority in an industry, but you don’t really see a lot about thinking about the “why?” for your book.
You can tell that Morgan’s “why?” for writing this book is that she had experience in writing books, she had a system she wanted to share, and she was able to give advice to people, that without it they may struggle to complete their 1st book. With it, they have a much greater chance of success. When you sit down and you think about writing your 1st book or your 2nd and your 3rd, your 4th, your 5th, I would recommend this book as something that would give you a great outline. Her appendix says, “Access and tools and resources that you can find useful.” Pick this book up on Amazon if you’re considering writing a book. This is Roger Bryan, this is a review of “Start writing your book today” by Morgan Gist MacDonald. I gave it an 8 out of 10. Thank you.
