How many times have you said that over the last year/month/week/day? If your life is like mine, saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else, so you need to budget your time carefully.
I spend my life helping people create books and put out regular content to build their business, knowing all the time that we’re all drowning in an ocean of content.
Bernadette Jiwa, author of Difference, Meaningful, Marketing: A Love Story and most recently Hunch, touched on this in The Extraordinary Business Book Club this week:
All of my books are short, and it’s really intentional. You know what I notice, I go into bookshops all of the time, and I watch people buying books, or actually more browsing books and putting them back. You can see people weighing a book in their hands nowadays… They flick through the first few pages, they look at the cover, and then they think, “I haven’t got time for this.”So I said, “Okay, how can I write books that people will read all the way to the end, they can open at any page and find something interesting or useful or inspiring or actionable, and they’ll come back to it again?”
You can find out how she does it, and her take on writing as an act of generosity, here.
What does this mean for you and your book?
There are lots of books out there. Lots of experts. And nobody, least of all you, has much time going spare. You could spend months of that precious time writing a book, putting your heart and soul into it, only to discover that nobody’s prepared to make the time to read it (because we don’t just ‘find’ time any more, we have to make it, to carve it out purposefully from the to-do list).
Or you could put in the time up front to get really clear on why you’re writing, who you’re writing for, what they need, and how it’s going to work for your business.
Join me on 5 June for my 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge. Carve out around an hour a day for 10 days, and get absolutely clear on your book before you start writing it.
Your time and your attention are the most precious resources you have – and the same goes for your readers. Let’s make your book a great use of both of them for both of you.