How To Make Super Affiliate Commissions

Creative writing can be such a difficult activity to estimate. Some would say that plan creativity, and time restricting creative writing, goes against its principals. Strict planning of other artistic and creative processes (films, music, etc) does occur and helps focus the participants in on the value of their time.

One approach to take is to treat your writing like creating a physical product such as a plane. Thinking like this involves prototyping in the early stages to create an abundance of ideas and fleshing out those ideas that interest you into prototypes. Ebooks are no different. Prototyping ebook ideas can be done using whiteboards, mind-maps or story boards (to define the arc of a story line or simply the chapters you intend writing).

Prototyping leads into the execution phase – writing ebooks. It is this phase that can benefit from planning to ensure your book adheres to the goals and ideas that you wish to put across.

Spell out the book’s goal.

Set the goal or goals for your book. Don’t try to muddy the waters with a multitude of goals. Think of any of your favourite books and they probably have a small amount of objectives and one central goal.

Specify all the tasks involved in writing the book.

This can be as simple as taking your rough listing of chapters, add any formatting/presentation that will be required and not forgetting research that you (or others) will need to do. You’ll have your own list of add-on tasks specific to your eBooks subject. Give each task a rough level of effort (e.g. 2 days to complete chapter 1).

Analyze the list for external dependencies (third parties) and arrange this work early on.

Planning to use a personal assist to do some research for your book? Intending interview some industry leaders to add some real world insight? Well, then you’ll need to front load booking their time and add this to your list of jobs/schedule.

Put in a margin of error

Knowing this margin of error as a percentage only really comes to you with some experience of knowing how many days over your writing will go. As a starter, add 10 to 15% contingency.

By this stage you now have a list of all the work to be done. You could use project management software to plan this out and establish the duration of all your work. Alternately, use a whiteboard with the days of the week and add post-it notes for each action to be completed. Or just keep it simple by adding the actions to your diary along with any planned holidays you wish to take (so you know to work around them).

Keep on top of things as you implement your plan so that you always know if you are on track.

As the saying goes “create a plan, and then work the plan”. As you start implementing your planned tasks you can tick them off of your list as completed. Keep track of tasks running over. Use your contingency/margin of error for these. This should not suppress the creative writing process. Instead, this is focusing your mind on the value of your time.

Report milestones.

A milestone report is intended ‘for your eyes-only’. It is a motivational technique to show you how much progress you have made. When looking at the work ahead focus on the upcoming milestones. Consider it like climbing a mountain and aim for the next base camp. Focusing on the summit from the foothills is too daunting.

Pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Last thing to do is a post-mortem.

Congratulations on getting to the end. One last thing to do is a post-mortem on your plan to highlight delays, unforeseen task/issues, inaccuracies in defined level of effort and how much contingency was used. These can feed into plans for future books and help you grow your fledgling eBook business to greater heights.

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