Written by: Farhan Musavi
Thou shalt now be pronounced author—ever wanted to hear that about you?
Of course you have.
As a freelance writer you’ve written a
lot for your clients, written a lot for your blog, and you have plans to write
an e-book some day but life keeps getting in.
You have to acquire more clients,
moderate comments, reply to e-mails, look after your family, go to the market,
and hence writing that e-book keeps getting pushed down in your To-do list.
You think you’ll write the book when
you’ll get some time but you never get that time.
Image courtesy of Ryan
McGuire
I know, I know. That has happened to me.
One fine day I sat down to write my book
but didn’t complete the work. I couldn’t.
I was working on a full time job of
content writer which was quite demanding and the weekends were spent resting.
Though I did work whenever I could find
time, it wasn’t enough.
It took me about one and a half year of
intermittent work just to complete the first draft!
And a further three months to refine,
redraft, and re-edit it. You can download the final version of my book Concision for free to see how it looks now.
To cut the long story short, I
understand how long and tedious a book writing process is. And if you don’t
have a strong reason or a good motivation to pursue it, you will lose heart and
won’t complete the book.
In this article I intend to give you
some reasons and motivations to complete that draft which is collecting dust in
your hard drive.
1) It’s the holy grail of publishing
There is something in the title “Author”
which commands respect.
No matter how many articles you have
written, how many guest posts you’ve published on top notch publications, how
many words you’ve ghost written for your clients, nothing beats it when people
know you as an author.
Irrespective
whether you are self-publishing your book or going with a traditional
publisher, if you have completed and published a book then you can attach the
author title in your bio.
2) It’s
about authority
A PhD is not
the only way to demonstrate your expertise on a topic. You can do so by writing
a book too.
And it’s not
only about showing off to other people.
After
writing a book you will find that you know the subject in a better, more
comprehensive way.
You’ll come
across some points you wouldn’t have thought about before requiring you to do research;
you’ll start getting new ideas to present the topic; and you will come away
having more knowledge on the topic than you had before you sat down to write.
3) It’s what
people prefer
If you have
several articles on the same topic, you can bundle all of them into a nice
little PDF, hire a designer to create a cover, and voila! You have just created
a book for yourself.
There are
many bloggers who do this all the time.
Some even
convert hundreds of their old articles into book form and sell them in the
market. And guess what? People actually pay for that information which they can
freely read on their blog.
One good
example of this is the Problogger Book. This book is nothing more than a collection of old blog posts of Darren
Rowse and Chris Garret.
Yet Wiley
published it and people paid to buy it. I know I did.
Why so?
Because people still prefer books. Or at least many people do.
Which leads
me to …
4) It’s
about reaching more people
If you have
a blog you would know how difficult it is to retain people’s attention.
When you
publish a new blog post, when it is displayed above the fold on your home page,
the post will get all the visibility, shares, and comments it can get. But
after a few days have passed, the post will get buried in your other articles
and will be no more than an entry in your archives.
However if
you convert your old articles into an e-book, you can (just count):
1) Put the banner image of the book in
your right side bar and ask people to download it.
2) Ask your readers to share the e-book
with their friends through e-mail. (Ensure the file-size is not big enough if
you are taking this route.)
3) Give that e-book as an incentive to
e-mail subscribers.
4) Self-publish it on Amazon, Barnes and
Noble, Apple, etc.
5) Upload it on a torrent site. (Piracy
is not the enemy of the artist, obscurity is.)
6) You get the idea.
Thus you won’t just increase the
reach of your brand but will also let your old blog posts see the light of the
day again.
5) It’s
about evergreen income
Any
entrepreneur worth his salt will tell you that you should never depend upon a
single source of income. This is the business equivalent of not putting all
your eggs in the same basket.
It’s true
for any business and freelance writing is no exception. Writing, by the way, is a business.
So it’s not
wise to depend on your freelance writing clients only to generate an income.
Writing a
book is one way to diversify your income.
Another good
thing about it is that it allows you to collect the royalties one month, one
year, or even fifty years after the book is published.
Work once,
earn forever.
Are you
writing a book? Facing any problems?
Tell me
about it in the comments below.
Farhan Musavi founded Major
Journal to share with others whatever he learned in his three years of blogging
and writing career. Download his free e-book Concision: A
No-Grammar Guide to Good Writing.
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