Are You Ready to Write Your Book in the Next Month?
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Byob, Writing, Creativity, Productivity, Blogging

We’re three days away from starting the writing part of the Blog-Your-Own-Book Challenge.

Three days from a goal of writing 31 blog posts in 31 days, all on the same topic, that come together into a book.

Are you ready?

Just in case, came up with tips for you. I hope they help.

Make sure you’ve chosen the right topic.

I’ve talked to a ton of writers in the last month about their BYOB projects. One thing comes up over and over that I want to talk about for a minute.

Your topic should not be your entire empire.

Your empire = the business you want to build around your writing. AKA, your niche. My empire is ‘teaching people how to become writers.’

That’s way too big a topic for my BYOB project. Like I said, it’s my entire empire. I had to find a little slice of my niche to focus on for 31 days. For me, that’s ‘how to create a writing habit.’

In 31 days, I could skim along the surface of my whole niche. But the point of the BYOB Challenge is to go deep on one little part of it.

Think about your empire, the whole of your niche, and then choose one thing you can teach your audience about that thing. If you’re a fiction writer, that might be telling a series of connected short stories set in the world of your novel. If you’re an essayist, it might be delving into one specific thought or idea. If you’re a teacher-writer, maybe you’ll do what I’m doing and teach something on a deeper level than you could with a single blog post.

Make sure you’ve got your posts pre-planned.

Once you have your topic narrowed down, try this exercise. Think about five or six themes within the topic. What are a few topics that your main topic can break down into?

My BYOB project, creating a daily writing habit, breaks down to these themes:

Tiny goals

Goal stacking

Ramping up to a daily goal

Objectives and Key Results

Writing as a job

and resources

Once you have your topic’s themes decided, you’ll just have to come up with five or six blog posts you can write about that theme.

My best advice, in the next few days, is to use the PSST framework on each of those post ideas, if you haven’t already. That’s what I’ll be doing today and tomorrow. Having those posts planned out will make writing them so much easier.

And more likely.

Make sure you know how you’ll capture your audience.

One of the reasons we’re writing our books as blog posts is so that we can start to build an audience for the finished project. In order to do that, you need to make sure you’re set up for capturing your readers so you can reach out to them.

Yep. That means building an email list. And that means having an opt-in on your blog posts.

I wrote a pretty exhaustive post, with about a million screenshots, about how exactly to do that. Be sure to read that and choose your opt-in, then get your email server set up to receive those new subscribers.

Make sure you’re ready to meet this goal.

The last thing I want you to do in the next three days is be sure that you’re ready to actually achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself.

That means having time set aside to write your blog post. And a space for doing the work. It means getting your mind wrapped around the idea that for the month of August, writing a blog post everyday is part of your job as writer. It’s not a hobby. At least not for this month.

Set aside perfectionism. Set aside fear. You’ve got this. You’re going to rock it.

Ninja Writers is hosting daily write-ins — quiet writing time on Zoom — and we’ve got nearly daily workshop calls in August. We’d love to have you join us for the month. It’s free.