If you think that you don’t have time to write a book, time compression is possible. Think of it like de-fragging your hard drive or consolidating all of the ketchup bottles.

With an embarrassingly-slow typing speed of 25 words per minute, you’d think that it would take me an eternity to write a book. The fact: it took me a grand total of 55 hours to finish a 138-page book, and I didn’t even break a sweat. How I know this: I tracked my time throughout the project. I included all of the time that I spent brainstorming, outlining, writing, editing, and doing miscellaneous stuff. I used a simple Excel spreadsheet to do my time tracking.

Part of why this went so well: I scheduled 2 hour blocks of time to shut out the world. The cell phone got turned off, and I didn’t even let myself entertain the thought of checking e-mail, checking my Facebook page, or indulging in any other such mind-numbing time-wasters. If I even got up to take a bathroom break, I noted this in my spreadsheet.

The lesson I took away from this: we tend to egregiously overestimate the amount of time things take. Take that into account when deciding whether or not you have time for something.

I decided, during an impromptu one-on-one today, that I was going to steal my friend’s idea. Check out his web site, DestinationWakeForest.com. He said to me that he was thinking of using his blog as the place to be fully transparent. I thought, “why not do that, too?” So, here I am. The cards are about to be laid out on the table.

I had put together a seminar for writers who wanted to write their books. After selling a grand total of three tickets and only collecting payment on two of them, I decided that there wasn’t enough time to sell the remaining seats. The seminar was scheduled for October. I’m now thinking that I led with too high a price tag. At $449, people seemed hesitant to jump on board. I think that what was needed was a more consistent funnel of lower-priced sales to lead in. So, I’ll be putting together some cheap or free writing seminars in the near future.

The third book needs to get done yesterday. In my first book, Pied Piper Entrepreneurship, I wrote out my goals, which included putting out 4 books by February 2010. I have finished 2 books now (including the first one). The third one will be letting God out of the box, and will also be fully authentic about the irreverent image of God that I worship. (Let’s just say that any strict fundamentalists will strongly disagree with my viewpoint). I may also be taking a political position in this book, I think, but I haven’t figured out how to do these things in a way that don’t needlessly alienate my audience. The theme will be writing the world into existence with words, specific to business.

The newsletter is going to be an example of why newsletters don’t have to be terrible. It is going to involve discussing cross-promotion of other businesses, for one thing. It will, of course, be cross-promoting other business owners as well. I expect to have the first issue out within 2 weeks. Suggestions welcome. If I implement your idea, I’ll give you a free copy of either one of my e-books.

So that’s about it. I realized that coming up with things to write about is a lot easier when I don’t worry about looking good, so you can expect to be hearing from me more often!

If you’ve self-published a book on Lulu.com or another print-on-demand publication web site, you’re familiar with how the process works. If you’re new to writing a book, and you’re thinking of submitting your manuscript to a traditional publisher, consider using a print-on-demand service. I just published my book on Lulu last week. I had nothing but a Microsoft Word document on Friday night. On Sunday night, the layout was complete and stored in Lulu’s system. On Thursday afternoon, a printed and bound copy of my book was sitting on my doorstep.

Another thing I’ve noticed: for some reason, there were a number of typographical errors I didn’t see when I was going through the electronic document. I would have sworn up and down that I’d caught every single one. There were sections that I’d read more than four times. I looked right at the same typo repeatedly without seeing it. But once I had the book in print, the mistakes jumped right off the page at me. I can’t explain why this happens the way it does. But the point is that printing a proof copy is a good thing. Now, I can just fix the errors in my Word document and re-submit the manuscript. A customer who orders my book from the same URL will now receive a corrected version, with no delays. However, if you publish your book at a retailer like Amazon.com, there’s a longer process involved with making changes. I’m just talking about selling my book directly from the Lulu store front.

Print-on-demand is a lot easier than I thought it would be. Give it a try!

Perfectionism is one of the biggest causes of writer’s block. It has to be perfect, or we keep it under our hat. That’s the mentality that causes beginning writers to spend all day writing three paragraphs.

I got past this a long time ago, but I’ve noticed that it tends to show up in other ways. This week, I’ve been finalizing my book and getting it ready for publication. I find myself tempted to go back and rip out entire chapters, re-write sections of the book, and rearrange sequences. I’ve held myself back, and I’ve decided that at this point, I’m not changing anything except spelling and grammar errors, duplicate words, unneeded passive voice, and redundant use of identical words and phrases. Everything else stays as is.

I’ve also decided not to hire a graphic artist to do the cover, and I’ve decided not to hire anyone to do a professional layout. That may happen when I release a second edition, but for now, I’m just making sure that it doesn’t look sloppy and unprofessional. Finally, I’ve run sections of the book past certain people, and I’ve made sure that no one had any major objections to anything I said.

If you’re writing a book, decide on what your “good enough” criteria are. When you hit that point, call an end to editing and move on. I would also recommend that you not begin editing until the first rough draft is complete. Editing is important, but don’t let it become an addiction.

You might also be tempted to start adding more material, thinking that your book is incomplete as it is. Decide what the scope is, and decide what you’re going to include. When you’ve written that much, don’t add any more.

You might find it helpful to give yourself a deadline. If you knew you had to have this book finished, no if’s, and’s or but’s, by a certain date, what are the minimal things you’d have to do before you’d publish it? Start by doing that, and call it Version 1.0.

 At the time of this blog post, I’m about 75% finished creating the content of my book, which I plan to self-publish and release in a few weeks. Anyone who’s been following me on Facebook or Twitter already knows this.

I knew, from the beginning, that I would be much more likely to finish a book that everyone knows I’m working on. I have the added advantage of being a ghost writer, and the entire world needs to know that I can actually finish and deliver a book in a timely manner. This is mandatory for my credibility, which gives me an added incentive to continue working, which most people don’t have. However, the status update is a secret weapon that anyone can use to keep their own book moving forward.

The first thing I did, when I decided to write a book, was to tell everyone about it. I knew that if my friends and family knew I was writing a book, they would keep asking about it. Then, I started to e-mail a few chapters here and there to find out if people were interested in the material I was creating. Mostly green lights with a few yellows and reds. The momentum was difficult to maintain this way, though. I wasn’t going to keep e-mailing my book’s content to everyone in the world, and people didn’t want to keep pestering me by asking the same question (“How’s the book going?”) over and over. I wouldn’t have minded, but I can understand the other point of view.

Status updates, on the other hand, have been an easy way to tell a large number of people what I’m doing. I’ve been regularly posting updates on my book to Facebook and Twitter, and as a result, there are plenty of people who now know that I’m writing a book. The added bonus: these are people that I wouldn’t have called or e-mailed individually. There is a practical limit to the amount of time I can spend telling people one-on-one that I’m writing a book. The number of people following me on Facebook and Twitter, however, doesn’t change the amount of time I spend posting to these networks.

Now, I have a number of people who are already sold on the book, ready to buy an advance copy! Unfortunately, I’m not actually selling advance copies yet, but it’s neat to know that I’ll have this option in four months when I’m releasing my next book.

If you’re writing a book, be sure to let Facebook know how it’s coming from time to time. It will make a world of difference.

I mean, any book you write should be great, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s arguably the biggest hang-up that stops people from putting a book out there in the world. “It has to be perfect, and then I’ll publish it.” Well, in the days of traditional publishing, the standards were a lot higher if you wanted to stand a chance of seeing your book in print, but now that you can go to Lulu.com or other comparable self-publication companies, that’s just not a good excuse any more.

The perfectionist mentality often rears its ugly head during the writing process. I hear people say this over and over: “I can’t stop myself from editing while I write.” If you try to do a book this way, you’ll doom yourself to perpetual refinement mode. I now allow myself to fix spelling errors as I go (it’s just more efficient that way), but I have an unbreakable canon of writing that I stick to: NO editing until at least 24 hours have elapsed.

I also have learned that even when I do get something “perfect” by my own standards, it doesn’t always meet with the enthusiastic response I was anticipating. Over-perfecting a book can actually have the opposite effect; what’s left of your manuscript that’s survived your editing process might have lost the core message that would have interested a reader the most.  There’s no way to predict the effect a book will have on its readers, of course, so the best way to handle this is to start sending out pieces of it and see what people come back with.

Don’t worry about getting it perfect. Just get it done and get it out there.

If you’re writing a book, think about it. They say “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but what else do we have to go on? Do you go to the bookstore and open each individual book? Of course you don’t. The reality: if the spine doesn’t impress me, I’m not even going to look at the cover. The title is the single most critical aspect of designing the entire book.

I made the mistake, when I started writing my current book, of picking a bad working title. I figured I’d nail the title later, and just get the book written in the meantime. The result: I finally figured out what the real title would be, and the final title rendered 60% of my content unusable. While it’s true that you probably won’t think up the perfect title right out of the gate, it’s important to hold a working title to some key quality standards.

1. Does your working title clearly identify the audience for the book?

2. Does your working title clearly define the scope of the book?

3. Does your working title come across clearly to other people? (Hint: you’ll need to ask)

If you think you’ll figure out the title later, ask yourself if you’ve got something that fits these 3 criteria. If you don’t, you’re not ready to start writing the content yet. If you’re stuck, start writing some chapter titles and bouncing them off of people. This should get you on the right track. You’ll know you have a good working title when you can use it as a litmus test. In other words, when you’re debating whether or not to include something, you can justask yourself if it makes sense with your working title.

If you do this, the final title will fall into place later in the writing process, and nothing will need to change about your book.

“Small is the New Big,” by Seth Godin, started out as a collection of blog articles. “Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte started out as a collection of articles that he wrote for Wired magazine over a few years. Did they know that these articles were going to become books one day? I’m not sure. But it hardly matters.

Books are hard for one person to write, as I’ve discovered over the past several months. As I have advised every budding author I’ve met, you can’t write a book in a vacuum. It will never get done. It’s nearly impossible to maintain the degree of motivation and discipline necessary to finish the whole thing. And even if you do, you’ll most likely end up with something you can’t sell. You’re just putting too many eggs into one basket with this approach. Thomas Edison learned this lesson the hard way when he invented his automatic vote-counting machine. (He found out that politicians didn’t want accurate vote counting. Isn’t that a shock?)

They say you can eat an elephant if you do it one small bite at a time. Writing is no exception to this. But here’s the advantage to writing articles first: you can find out what the response is to each article. You can put each article out there, and see what people come back with. But more importantly, each article you complete is a finished product.

You’re not putting a whole lot of skin in the game by publishing an article. You may think that your idea is the best thing since sliced bread, and you may be surprised to discover that the rest of the world doesn’t agree. This is an easy lesson to learn with an article. Writing a book, on the other hand, only to discover that you’ve written something no one wants to read, makes for a difficult pill to swallow.

Finally, articles are easy to organize. Books are complicated. Writing one article at a time takes the sweat out of compiling materials. It gives you a higher degree of freedom, since you don’t have to worry about how the puzzle pieces will fit together. When you’ve finally generated enough quantity of material to compile into a book, you can just throw away the unwanted pieces.

The moral of the story: if you’re thinking of writing a book, but don’t know where to start, start by writing some articles.

This has become one of my “commandments” as a writer. Not that I particularly believe in playing by the rules, but if I did, I think this would be one of them. I’ve noticed that one of the quickest things that gets me stuck in writers’ block is the notion that I have to continue doing things the way I was doing them before.

The problem boils down to this: an idea will never inspire you more than it does in the moment you conceive it. It occurs for me that when I think up a new idea, I have to stay on it. As soon as I let the inspiration cool off, the momentum dies down and the idea doesn’t sound as good the next day. I’ll find myself struggling to think of more to write on a given subject, when only days before, I couldn’t stop the ideas from flowing. This isn’t necessarily a problem in itself; the problem happens when we keep trying to teach a dead dog new tricks. The solution is to move on to a new dog. Hence, a blank sheet of paper and a new seedling idea each day.

I’ve applied this approach to the book I’m currently writing; I found that the outline I originally came up with constricted the flow of my ideas. So, every day, I start a new manuscript, as if I were going to throw away the old one. I find that this gives me a new freedom, and every day I get new insights into the book. Once I have plenty of material written, all there is to do is cut and paste. This has greatly improved my writing efficiency; when I was trying to fill out sections of an old outline, I was trying to write about stale ideas that no longer inspired me and I’d get stuck.

So, if you’re finding yourself in writer’s block, trying starting over.

I’ve decided that it’s time to publish an e-book online. I keep talking the talk about this educational marketing stuff, but there’s a big piece of it that no one sees me doing. This is one of my biggest new years’ resolutions: to make a habit of asking myself, “Where am I not walking my talk?”

I haven’t completely nailed down the subject matter and audience for the book yet, but it will definitely be geared toward the entrepreneurial crowd. My up-front agenda: to attract clients to my ghost writing business.

Another thing I’m looking at: the words “educational marketing” are boring and stale. There’s no sizzle or sex appeal to them. The words “attraction marketing” have been poisoned by network marketing morons who think that they can “attract” prospects by spraying spam all over the internet. I need to come up with a new term, one that actually sticks.

How can I invent terminology that’s immune to buzzword syndrome? How can I invent a term that the wrong people wouldn’t want to use? That’s one of the challenges I’m up against in my book.

More to come as things develop.