Hey, what's good YouTube? This is the second installment in my How to Become an Award-Widding Author series. And in this video, I'll be providing you with eight tips to help you get started with writing and publishing your very first book. But before I get into the tips, I just want to offer you some tangible inspiration and let you know that like everybody has a story to tell. You have a story to tell and the only thing holding you back is your mindset and your discipline. So just remember that the reason why your book and or story is not being shared with the world is the person that you see reflected in the mirror. So without further ado, let's get into the first tip that's going to help you to write and publish your very own first book. Tip number one is to first know yourself and to know your writing style. This is imperative because before you even start to write your book, you need to figure out what do I like to write, what books do I like to read, and how could I best apply myself to write something that will capture the audience's attention and create value for other people. When I first wrote my book, burdens of a dream, I knew that I was going to be writing a self-help memoir. Furthermore, I know that I'm a very soft spoken individual and I don't like to write a lot of filler words or write a lot of content that's not going to grab people's attention. So by doing this analysis on myself, knowing that I like to write straight no chaser, devotional type materials, I found myself writing a book that was more of like a business devotional. So when I understood my writing style and I knew how I wanted to show up in the world, that allowed me to write a book that of high value for the audience that I was writing to. Now tip number two is to define your audience. This builds on top of tip number one, which was about defining your voice in your writing style. You need to define your audience because your audience is going to let you know how they want you to write your material for them. Certain people like to read certain things in certain ways. And so for me in my audience, the business self-help audience, people want straight no chaser information. So I was able to tailor my writing style to best suit the audience I was writing for. So tip number two is to define your audience and to write for them. Tip number three is to create an outline for your book. This is essentially your brainstorming process or what I like to call the vomitating process where you're literally vomiting all your ideas onto paper. Some people also like to call this mind mapping. But when you're able to create an outline, this is essentially like a rough framework that's going to allow you to create this path that's going to allow you to tell your story. And it's going to basically create the journey that you're going to bring your readers along while you're explaining your story or in your book. So this outline is really key because you want to put all your ideas on paper. And then after you get all these ideas on paper, you can eliminate the ideas or eliminate the stuff that doesn't make sense. So this is really your ideation in brainstorming phase, which is really, really important to writing a book and telling a story that's going to grab attention and add value to your readers. Tip number four is to set your goal or to set your outcome for your readers. See, one of the major problems with people who are writing the first books is that they don't have an in outcome or a resolution or a value point for the readers. Like when people are reading your book, they need to be led to a specific conclusion or ending. And when you have that goal in mind, you're able to reverse engineer your story and your path and the journey that you're going to take people on. So when I wrote my book, I knew that I wanted to help people to develop a proactive business mindset. I wanted them to understand that the journey of entrepreneurship is not final. It's something that never ends, but it's less about creating a product process or service, but it's more about creating a life that you don't want to have to run a rake phone. And by having that in goal in mind, I was able to create a story that led people to that in goal. So this shortcut is major, but always start out with your in goal or your in value proposition or your in outcome for your book before you even write it. Tip number five is self-explanatory, but most overlooked. And that is to be sure to set deadlines for yourself. When you're first writing your book, you need to put constraints on your writing. You need to be able to tell yourself that, Hey, this week or this morning, I'm going to spend two hours writing my book. And one month, I'm going to have the outline done. And two months, I'm going to have the first chapters written, whatever it is, but you need to have these strict deadlines because boundaries ultimately set you free. And when you have a deadline to meet or to match, it's going to inspire you and stimulate you and motivate you to actually complete this task. People fail at writing because they just do this on a whim. No, you need to be very disciplined and you need to set timelines and set goals and targets for you to meet with your writing so you can get your book out to the world. Moving forward, tip number six is to find your creative hour. And so what do I mean by this? This means that as a writer, you need to find the most opportune time in the day to sit down and focus your writing without any distractions. For example, with me, I loved the wake of early. And I knew between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. nobody was ever going to call me or to interrupt me with my writing. So for three months, I woke up at 5 a.m. and wrote for two hours every day. And so at my peak creative hour, I was able to increase, if not double or triple my output because this was the best time for me to write. So for you, you need to figure out whenever your creative hour is and take advantage of that and block out that exclusive time for you to write without any distractions. I will really help you. Now tip number seven pairs like peanut butter and jelly with tip number two to write for your audience. But tip number seven is to write for the reader. I mean tip number two is to define your audience. Tip number seven is to write for the reader. So after you define your audience, you have to understand psychologically who this person is and what they like, what they dislike, what are their pains and what are their gains when reading your book. Approach your book like a business. They have a problem you're offering a solution. That's what your book is. And so in order to really grasp your reader, you need to write in their language. Like I said with my book, it's a business self-help book. People are looking for immediate actionable nuggets of wisdom. That's why my subtitle is 33 actionable nuggets of wisdom. And so I write my book in clean, straightforward language that delivers immediate value from my reader who's just looking to get immediate value and apply it to their business process, service, or life. So by understanding who my reader was, I was able to write in their language. And for you in your book, you must do the same. And last but not least is tip number eight. And that is to avoid too much critique or feedback in the early stages of writing your book. Now this is very difficult because we all want people to coastline what we're writing. But in actuality, you're not writing for other people, you're writing for yourself. And so in the beginning, you just want to write everything you can write. You want to get your manuscript done. You don't want to interject other people's opinions or feedback in that process because that's going to detract and retard you from actually accomplishing your goal, which is actually writing your ideas and a complete manuscript. Like that's really hard. So in the beginning, just make sure to accomplish all your goals and to get everything you can on paper. And only after you have this quote unquote complete manuscript, then you push it out to other people to get their feedback and to critique it. This is when you deal with editors. And there's five types of editors and I'll be going in depth on that in another video. But in the beginning, avoid critique, avoid feedback right in the vacuum and just get your story on paper. Thanks for watching this video. I really sincerely hope that these eight tips help you to expedite your process of becoming an award-winning author. But without further ado, I'm really curious to offer you this question of the day. And my question to you is, is like, what holds so many people back from writing and publishing the first book? I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. So please be sure to drop your comments below. Furthermore, if you want to become the entrepreneur of your life, you can begin this process today by subscribing to this channel. Additionally, please be sure to click the notification bell to be alerted for never new content drops. Until next time.