Where are you going with all this writing? What is the end game? Do you simply love writing with no real outcome required? Is it profit? Or influence? It may be any of these, but first you have to write the book.
These are the longer steps in your exciting writing journey ahead. Step 1: Get clear on your genre, story and tackle all the planning Step 2: Bash out your first draft (anywhere from four months to four years) Step 3: Take a bit of a break (a month minimum). You can start building your Author Brand at this stage. Step 4: Start shifting into the publishing phase. Read through, then rewrite your second (better) draft. Step 5: Craft your book one last time (your 3rd, 4th or 7th draft!) Step 6: Prepare all the documents you need to submit a book to a publisher (take a month). Step 7: Send it out to at least 20 publishers. No reply? Waiting? Want to give up? Step 8: Wait for up to a year, and keep sending while you wait. Practically you are mostly likely shooting for a minimum of 50,000 words (don't worry about pages that is not a measure of length yet). Why 50,000? It is the minimum word count for a book with a spine that can sit on a shelf in a bookstore. Do the maths! If your book is going to be 80,000 words and you have 10 chapters you will need 8,000 words a chapter, right? That’s a lot of information per chapter and perhaps too much. So better to have 21 chapters with around 3,800 words. Writing a book is a calling and if you hear the calling you will walk the entire path to the end. Don’t give up on any of these steps. The danger? You get into a loop of perfecting your first few chapters for years and never get beyond those. Getting your story out of your head and onto paper without self-editing too much is the challenge most writers face. But until you have a first version written down, you have nothing to work with. The story is still in your head, and yours alone. So many of my authors get stuck here. Keep moving on. Most writers end up re-writing around five versions, iterations or drafts of any book before they send it to publishers. This first draft is often called a ‘shitty first draft’ because the truth is that most first versions of any writing project are just a rough assembly. You are most often never going to show THAT version to anyone. You could even hand it over and allow an editor to make it better.
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