Lisa Tener

Book Writing Coach

book writing tips

Top Book Writing and Publishing Posts of 2016

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Book Writing Coach Lisa Tener
Your Book Writing Coach

As a book writing and publishing coach, I’m always looking for posts by colleagues that will help you make sense of the publishing world and share:

  • What publishers are looking for
  • Current trends in publishing
  • The best ways to grow your mailing list and “author platform” so that you have a tribe of eager fans ready to buy your book when it launches
  • Business and marketing advice for authors
  • Writing tips

Below I’ve assembled some of my favorite Book Writing and Publishing Tips from the past year—both from me and from my colleagues.

Book Writing Tips

How to Become a Better Writer: 3 Writing Tips: Looking for something short and sweet you can put into action today? I wrote this short, sweet blog post for you at the start of the year.

How to Write a Book: From Chore to Joy in 21 Minutes: If you’re feeling a bit stuck, this post can help you connect with your creative source, break through resistance, feel passionate about your book and enter a state of book writing flow.

7 Ways to Help You Be Precise in Your Writing: I discovered this excellent guest post by Dawn Field on C.S. Lakin’s blog. I often encourage my clients and students to find quirky details to bring their writing to life. Even if you’re writing a how-to or self-help books, the more “true to life” and “real” you can make your anecdotes, the more you will draw your readers in. This post has some great tips for how to do that.

The Five Rules of Flashback Writing a memoir? This post by fellow Rhode Islander Stuart Horwitz should help you get flashbacks right, so you add interest without confusing your readers.

Publishing Tips

Download these 10 Tips to get started on your proposal–and make it your best!

How to Get Published by a Traditional Publisher: 7 Ways to Look Your Best: Since publishers and agents are obsessed with an author’s platform (how many people you reach in a year), I focus here on ways to grow your following organically, efficiently and sustainably. That last point means that it doesn’t just cost money but brings in income as you grow your following.

5 First Steps to Write a Winning Book Proposal Writing a book proposal can feel overwhelming. Here, we focus on just the first 5 steps. Doable!

Commitment, Productivity and Follow-Through.

In this excerpt from her newest book, Start Right Where You Are, creativity expert Samantha Bennett shares terrific tips for making the time for creative projects, such as your book.

Book Marketing Tips

How to Use Social Media for Your Book Launch? Use These 9 Tips From timing to contests to video, Frances Caballo has you covered when it comes to using social media to launch a book. And her guides to Goodreads, Twitter and social media, in general, are excellent resources.

Marketing and Publishing Checklists for Writers Jane Freidman offers an excellent round-up of checklists for website development, book marketing and self-publishing in this post from November.

Feel free to share a favorite post of the year with our other readers—something you’ve written or read elsewhere. And feel free to ask questions as a comment below as well.

Writing a Compelling Self-Help Book: 3 Tricks You Can Borrow from Bestselling Novels

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book proposal coach lisa tenerYou’re writing a self-help book. Is fiction relevant?

I believe so—and not just in order to justify my recent habit of staying up late reading beach novels. (Good ones, of course. The kind you can’t put down.)

Hear me out.

I’m still thinking about the characters, wondering how the plot will resolve in Beatriz Williams’ A Hundred Summers as I make my morning smoothie. The book stays with me. I want to get back to it and find out what happens next.

My friend, Robin Kall, introduced me to Williams’ novels through the Summer Reading with Robin author event at the Dunes Club last year (and again this year).

a hundred summersOne reason Beatriz’ books are so compelling is her mastery of suspense. Both A Hundred Summers and the Along the Infinite Sea alternate between past and more recent past, two periods in time. As the more recent story unfolds, we get closer and closer to the distant past that has led us to the current situation.

So, how does this all apply to writing a self-help book? Here are 3 tips you can borrow from Beatriz Williams—or another adept novelist.

  1. Get your readers to care. A novelist gets us to care by creating characters we relate to, characters who are both believable and vulnerable. You can get your readers to care by sharing stories of real life characters. Their stories take the information you share and bring it to life. The more of a picture you develop of the people in your anecdotes, the more your readers will connect and care. Another way to get readers to care, when you’re writing a self-help book, is to invite your readers to reflect on their pain or passion. Perhaps offer an exercise or journaling prompt where readers can explore why they want and need this self-help book—and what results they hope to achieve.
  2.  Be intimate. An academic tone keeps your readers at bay. Invite your readers in with a conversational tone and warmth. Imagine you are writing to one specific person (rather than a roomful of people) and your tone will naturally be more intimate.
  3.  Create suspense. You may wonder, “How do I create suspense with a self-help book?” Don’t give your readers everything at once. Teach step by step. Hint at what readers will discover later in the book. Lead up to the gifts of the final chapter. Not only will you create some suspense but your book will be better organized and more accessible. After all, readers can only digest so much information at once.

What are some of your favorite devices of a good novel? How might you employ them in writing a self-help book? I know I’ve only touched the tip of the trilogy. I invite you to think about additional secrets of novelists that you can engage to make your self-help book compelling—and share them here on the blog as a comment!

Book Writing: How to Get the Writing Done

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book writing coach Lisa Tener
Your Book Writing Coach

On a call with my mastermind partners today, I suggested we use the 5-question format I use with my book writing students for accountability (courtesy of my mentor and friend Mitch Feigenberg):

  • What did I say I’d do?
  • What did I actually do?
  • What worked?
  • What didn’t?
  • What’s next?

Here’s how my check in went:

Out of my 3 commitments, I’d completed 2. I’d already scheduled commitment 3 in my calendar, so just scheduling again for this week wasn’t going to work. Instead, I decided first to be realistic. 8-10 hours just wasn’t happening–too much to do to support my Bring Your Book to Life participants. I scheduled a more realistic 4 hours and I also remembered a trick I’d shared with clients in the past: Call an accountability partner before the writing and after.

So, I’m calling my mastermind partner Richard before I start writing my articles and again when I complete each work period. Will it work? I’ll let you know. What tips do you have for staying accountable and getting past procrastination?

Can You Start Your Book in the Middle?

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In my book writing classes (and with private clients), I have authors start with several clarifying exercises followed by developing an an outline.

It can be tempting to just start writing, but you are likely to end up with lots of interesting stuff that doesn’t quite work as a book. I’ve seen many people do this (and then they come to me to see if I can salvage it) and I’ve done it myself. More than once.

But, okay, let’s say you get clear on your goals and vision, your audience and their needs and desires, your tone and features. Let’s say you have a rough outline. But you don’t feel like writing chapter 1.

Now, let’ say this is a how-to book. I have a very clear system for writing chapter 1 and I think it’s valuable to start here, because in chapter 1, you put yourself in your readers’ shoes and answer the questions they’re asking themselves so they can decide whether to buy (or read) your book.

If you can’t put yourself in your readers’ shoes, you shouldn’t be writing the book.

But let’s say you feel stuck in the beginning and you feel super excited about chapter 7—the chapter that reveals the most amazing secret for inner peace that no one has ever discovered—except you. Yes, permission granted to start in the middle.

Go where your passion is. Just remember, write an outline first, even if it’s rough. That way, you can know how the chapter relates to the rest of the book—and know that the chapter will likely have a home in the book, and know that, in fact, there is a book here.

In fact, sometimes, you can’t write chapter 1 because you just don’t have that opening story. Stacy Corrigan shared in book writing class that she just didn’t know how to start, so she started in the middle. Even well into class, she didn’t have a beginning. Then, the story happened. And she said, “This is how I start the book.”

Maybe you’re just waiting for your opening story to happen—and it hasn’t, yet. Trust that instinct to wait. But maybe you can put a placeholder for “Opening anecdote that illustrates x, y, z” and write the rest of that first chapter, intending to be open to the story’s unfolding.

Can You Start Your Book in the Middle?

The answer: It depends on whether you have a well outlined plan for the book.  If you have a solid idea of how to organize the book and just want to start with a different chapter, I’d say, “Go for it.”  But don’t start writing without a plan or you could end up with a series of disjointed essays that don’t serve your reader—or make a book.

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