The Truth About Book Writing, Being an Author (3 page)

Chapter 3

With Power Comes Responsibility

H
aving a book of your own is a very powerful thing, not only in what it can do for your success, but how it can affect and influence others. Therefore, being an author requires a great amount of responsibility.

Certainly, individuals, as well as entire societies, can be affected by a single book. History has shown this, time, and time again.

Authorship is not something to enter simply because it would be fun to do or solely to make a quick buck without any real interest in supplying anything worthwhile.

Firstly, truth be told, it is a blast to be an author. But to not take the creation of a book seriously only leads to what is happening today with epidemic proportions.

Books are being thrown together haphazardly, without much thought or real planning. Things are being rushed and steps overlooked to the point of creating an embarrassing fiasco.

Then there are those who totally miss the boat with regard to positioning themselves as experts ...

They pay for
³
White Label rights of what is often plagiarized articles taken from the Internet. After all, no one owns anything on the Internet ... right? (This is, of course, false!)

This, for one thing, clutters up the book industry and creates mistrust and disappointment in otherwise eager readers thirsty for something worthwhile, entertaining or valuable to read. This erosion needs to be halted!

Secondly, you can most definitely influence your income and see major opportunities to the point of being explosive! But the point being made here is this ...

The fact is, there is no Quality Control in place for self-publishing (or Indie publishing if you prefer). It is not an automatic part of the process.

So unless you know the right way to get your book written, you’re going to fail before you even get out of the gate. This is a given that has no exceptions: no ifs ands or buts about it.

Which Effect Do You Want to Cause?

When aspiring authors don’t know what to do to ensure that their books are properly polished, they, and unsuspecting readers, are in for a very rude awakening.

Surveys and social network interaction reveals that seven out of ten e-books that people buy are considered to be “complete garbage!”

If this horrifying statistic seems incredulous, just go on to Facebook or Twitter or out on the street and ask ten e-book buyers whether they have any significant trust in e-books or their authors, and you’ll have your own survey of this proof first hand.

It is our responsibility as authors to keep the information we provide clear, understandable, accurate and original, among other requirements as well.

To pretend to have something of value or even lie to others for personal gain would be a serious offense against your brothers and sisters of society.

Non-fiction books are taken to heart by very large readerships. To mislead anyone under the cloak of an authority for personal gain is unacceptable.

As for fiction, it is important to make one’s story the best it can possibly be. Throwing something together so you can call yourself “an author” is not the way to go. It never turns out the way you’d hoped it would.

It creates negative results, like disappointment and mistrust. People might even give up on a genre or reading altogether because their desired experience of enjoyment was not fulfilled.

Don’t take this the wrong way. You would never avoid creating a book because it might disappoint someone. We can never please everyone.

The point of vital importance is that we give it our all! We do what it takes to be accurate with our information, we get our work edited and proofread, and so forth.

Bottom line ...

TREAT YOUR BOOK PROJECT WITH THE ATTENTION AND RESPECT IT REQUIRES AND DESERVES BECAUSE IT WILL INFLUENCE OTHERS.

Just know that the driving force behind anything is
intent
. And as long as your intentions are honest and true, you are good to go, my friend : )

Fiction or non-fiction, we need to give 200 percent of heart, soul and sweat into our books. That means taking the time to accomplish all aspects correctly and professionally.

There are those who go at writing and publishing a book without having gotten any significant coaching or learning. This is not the way to go about succeeding at anything, especially something as involved as becoming a successful author.

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______________________

³
A White Label book is a book that you can pay for the right to publish withyour name and cover added to it. This is like buying a trophy and gluing your own name on it. Such books are simply regurgitating the same information,adding nothing of value.

This system is not only a waste of time for entrepreneurs, it is very bad for their reputation and clouds up the industry’s ability to present books of truevalue that will positively influence society.

Chapter 4

Knowing Your
Strengths & Limitations

W
e all can do things. But the key point is can we do them
up to par
!

I certainly would never walk into a house that I had built! I could definitely erect some semblance of a house. And I could even pay someone to put up a nice facade so it looked great from the street.

But there is no question that I would be the proud owner of a much nicer, safer home if I were to hire an expert who could either show me how to build one right or build it for me.

Going it alone is one of the top mistakes that failing authors make.

Just like it would be extremely foolish to try and take a 747 jetliner off the ground without at least a co-pilot, a flight control team on the ground and flight attendants on board, it is erroneous to think that anyone could, by themselves, do a good enough job at managing their entire book project.

I am positive that you are not one of these individuals. Here you are, taking the time to learn and become prepared to do things the right way with regard to your book and becoming an author.

I respect you greatly for that!

Still, there is something we can lose sight of at times-and I have been guilty of this far too many times myself--is that to get a job done right, we need a team. It’s part of what makes the world go ‘round.

Life is an interaction of individuals who do their jobs to supply a needed service to others. We don’t go to work because we have a job. We work to provide a service to others.

To go to work because we have to work misses the point and would be more like digging ditches and filling them back in for no other reason than to get a paycheck.

And though some of us might not love our jobs, and may be part reason why they’re reading this book, the point is, we’re all working to make life better for others. The paycheck comes as a byproduct of that purpose.

The manager who orders food at your local grocery store, the people who load the trailer truck at the warehouse, the one who drives the truck and delivers the load to the store, those who unload the product, stock the shelves and bag what we buy ... all make for a better experience in our ability to supply our families with the weekly necessities.

Because of such a team, we are able to simply drive to the store and: get in, get our stuff and get out, with everything we need for the week in about an hour.

We have teams all over the place. The water that flows through our pipes, trash removal, repairing our roof, adding a new addition, remodeling the kitchen, and so forth, are involved with our teams.

Each person within a team becomes trained to do their job correctly. Those who do it best get promoted or start their own businesses. They specialize in the specific thing that they do.

When it comes to accomplishing things that require expertise, we all the more, need those experts because they can do what we need accomplished much better than us. They’ve been trained, educated and have had lots of practice.

Each knows the ins and outs of their trade. They are much more knowledgeable than we are about their professional area of expertise, just like we are better than them at what we specialize in.

With something as specialized as writing a quality book, we most certainly need a team of experts. That team comprises: a writer (whether that’d be you or someone else), a book editor and a book proofreader.

By the sheer fact that we cannot edit or proofread our own work to an acceptable standard demands that we have such a team.

You can read more about this team in the chapter,
How The Book Writing Process Works
. Just be aware that this is no game, and it’s serious business.

There is also another member for your team who can make an enormous difference by avoiding the many pitfalls, share with you valuable experience and a lot more.

This valuable addition to your team will be disclosed in just a second, but first, it is important that you know about a very big pitfall. Then the solution is this additional team member.

Failure By Design

I mentioned earlier that you are going to be able to make clear-cut decisions about your book. And you might have thought to yourself,
Now why didn’t anyone else ever let me decide for myself?
And that would be a fantastic question to ponder.

To give a brief response to this, we need to bring up
The Fringe
.

A cold, hard and dirty little fact about the outer fringes of any field is that when you first try to enter something that is new to you, you initially run into what I call “the fringe.”

It is the outskirts of any industry, not the true, passionate, highly-trained industry itself. It has more of the lazy, the cheaters, the untrained and incompetent. It’s the “good enough to get by” crowd.
The Fringe
is the poorest example of the way to do something.

Even the restaurant industry has one. Just think about how long it takes to find an exceptional restaurant that gives you an amazing dining experience. It can take months or years eating your way through a town to find something extraordinary.

The greasy spoons, average places and dirty dining spaces are all over the place. Why? For one thing, it is because people jump into things without learning an iota of how to do things correctly. And that breeds incompetence.

How often are eating establishments uncovered to having insect and vermin infestations, people getting food poisoning and all-around putrid conditions in their kitchens!

I’ve seem times where the food is not heated enough in a buffet. I recently ordered chicken wings and they were NOT done. Another time, while on vacation, I ordered raw oysters and the waitress placed a plate of oysters that smelled and were decaying.

I would have eaten them if I weren’t from New England and knew what a fresh RAW oyster should look and smell like. The same thing happened at another restaurant with raw oysters. My family has gotten sick from eating at
fringe
restaurants.

Sadly, these types of restaurants are “the norm.”

In the world of creating books,
the fringe
is comprised of beginners, charlatans and even sometimes crooks who are there for one reason, and one reason only ...

To intercept unsuspecting individuals as they delve into an industry and make a quick buck any way they can
.

Again, this is
NOT
the actual book industry. It is the outer skirts of the industry.

With the ease and accessibility of the Internet,
the fringe
has grown exponentially over the past 10 years. This creates more confusion, a greater chance for being led down a dead end, and the grave disappointment in having failed at your venture.

To compound things, even when we talk with individuals who are published authors, they carry with them the false information that they learned from
the fringe
or they guessed at how to make a book and get it published. Or, even still, they simply copied what someone else did.

Ultimately, failure breeds failure. But this can ONLY happen when we’re not
properly
informed.

Certain and Total Failure

It is my sincere hope and desire that this book will slow or put an end to the propagation of false and inadequate information that is setting up aspiring authors for certain and total failure.

I’m not exaggerating or being melodramatic. As mentioned earlier, it is a measurable fact that approximately 92% of all authors fail each and every year. That’s an astronomical figure!

One thing can be realized about this. When something has that high of a percentage, it is without question,
created by design
. In other words, it is being caused. It goes beyond chance, odds or bad luck into a rampant application of false information.

And thus we have, by design, people doing most of what they
SHOULD NOT
do in becoming an author. And they suffer the inevitable consequences.

It’s an incredible phenomenon to watch. One after another, these excited, hopeful souls with big dreams and life-long plans, tread a beaten path that leads right off a cliff. It’s a “dead man walking” scenario.

Avoiding Failure

So how do YOU avoid this slow and painful march to the graveyard of authors and unread books? How can you free yourself from the chain gang and bust away from this normality of a “monkey see, monkey do” dilemma?

By continuing to penetrate deeper into the
actual book industry
where it’s safe and sound and full of good, honest individuals who are willing to have you join in on the fun, creativity, success and excitement!

Author Coach/Mentor

And once you find someone you can trust, who is willing to share their knowledge, experience and success ... embrace such a person!

I bring this up because, from my own experience, I realized a bit late in life, that there are individuals who are willing to coach or mentor you.

And with being shown the right way to do something while avoiding the pitfalls ... it is incredible and seemingly magical.

Again, from my own experience, things that would have taken me ten years to figure out— and I would have figured them out— but ten years? That’s far too long just to learn something that a coach or mentor could serve up to you on a silver platter in just a few hours or weeks!

So if you can find an Author Coach or Author Mentor with a good reputation, invest your time, heart, soul, money and sweat into your future, because it will be a rocket ride to where you want to go!

Making A Difference vs. Making a Mess of Things

Let’s, together, make a difference and turn the tide of the seemingly endless flow of low quality books, and bring the book publishing industry back up to the higher standard it once had, and the whole world wins.

As you continue forward with this book, you will learn what you need to know about making sure that your book becomes all that it needs to be. You will make sure that you do what needs to be done, and you will bring together your co-pilot and team. This is what will win the race on your path to success!

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