Table Of Contents
Everyone sets New Year’s resolutions in January that 23 percent of the population throw out after a week, according to research from The Ohio State University. Forty-three percent of people give up before they even make it to February.
The good news is that you can still accomplish many of the items on your list of resolutions or goals by the end of 2024.
The key is reverse engineering.
You have a little less than one-quarter of the year left, or about 75 days. Although we should take into account some holiday festivities during this period, you can still do what you set out to do in January, especially if one of your goals is to make progress on that book you’ve been meaning to write.
So, how do you get started? It begins with goal-setting, similar to what you outlined back in January.
What do you want to get done by year-end?
Way back in January, what did you most want to complete this year? If writing a book was on your to-do list, I can help with that.
I’m not guaranteeing you can get it done in 75 days, but you can sure get started and gain some momentum.
Using a book as the example here, let’s start working backward from the December 31 due date to see how you could make real progress during the last few months of 2024.
Reverse engineering goal achievement
If you want your book done by December 31st, you’ll need to set interim goals tied to the different aspects of writing your book. Based on my standard approach, these include:
- Zeroing in on your book’s story/settling on the scope of the topic
- Finalizing your outline, which becomes your table of contents
- Drafting each chapter
- Editing the manuscript, once all chapters are finalized
Assuming you have 12 weeks until year-end, you might set the following interim progress deadlines:
- Zeroing in on your book’s story: October 18
- Finalizing your outline: October 25
- Drafting all of your chapters: December 13
- Finish editing: December 31
You can break your writing goal down even further when you determine how many chapters you need. Divide the number of days until your completion target date and calculate how many days you can allow to draft each individual chapter.
Granted, that pace may be too fast to realistically make a December 31 deadline, so you might consider recalibrating and setting deadlines that are attainable, even if they go beyond the end of the year.
Once you’ve set your interim deadlines, it’s time to start working on each part of the process.
What is your book about?
The first thing you need to do is finalize your concept for your book. That means taking it beyond the subject and zeroing in on the story, as AARP’s executive editor George Mannes recently advised. For example, personal finance is a subject, and buying a property for your college student is a story. Likewise, your life is a subject, and the five years you spent starting a company that would become a pioneer in, say, solar panels, would be a story.
Find your story.
Plot your information
After you’ve zeroed in on what you’re going to write, the next step is organizing all of your material. When I use the word organizing, I’m not talking about making neat piles, however. I mean considering in what order the information should be presented to have the greatest impact or make the most sense.
For memoirs, it’s very common to tell a person’s story chronologically. Granted, you might set the scene with a modern-day event and then flash back, or start in the past and flash forward, but there is always a sense of time.
For business books, there may be a chronological element behind the scenes but the information being shared may not have to be organized according to time. For example, if your book is about the secrets of SEO in 2024, you could think about each secret as its own content bucket. Those buckets could be your chapters. Time may not be a factor here.
For self-help books the same is true: there might be an element of timing in the background, meaning that there are some steps that may need to be taken before others in order for the guidance to be effective – a sequence.
Since most business books are typically 10-15 chapters long, think about what your main 10-15 pieces of advice are, or what 10-15 observations are.
After you’ve identified your chapter list, then you can think about what order makes the most sense. It’s like telling a story. What information should be shared early on and what details should be part of the wrap-up?
Those decisions help you finalize your outline.
Begin writing
When you’ve decided how many chapters are needed to tell your story, make your point, share your message, or teach a new approach, it’s time to start drafting each one.
The most interesting books have stories woven through each chapter, whether of personal experiences, relevant case studies, or other useful anecdotes, so you’ll want to think about what types of stories will be most useful for each of your chapters.
Depending on how long you want your book to be, you should also reverse engineer the average chapter length. Presenting chapters that are approximately the same length helps develop a rhythm for how your information is shared. It’s jarring to the reader to have chapters that are of varied lengths.
So, if you want your book to be 60,000 words, which is a good length for a business book, and you’ve structured your material into 10 chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue for a total of 12 chapters, each chapter should average 5,000 words. That’s useful information to have as you start so that you don’t go too in-depth and write a 10,000-word chapter or try to be concise and only write 2,500.
Calculating your target chapter word count helps you develop a cadence – to pace yourself.
Using your individual chapter deadlines, work to craft rough drafts of each.
Reviewing and editing
When you’ve completed drafting all of your chapters, it’s always a good idea to set your manuscript –- which is what you now have –- aside for a couple of days. That way, when you pick it up again to read through it, you will be doing so with fresh eyes.
You’ll find recognizing missing words, or thoughts that need more explanation, will be much easier to spot this way.
Editing your draft is the last step in writing your book, before handing your manuscript off to a publisher for production. As part of producing your book, most publishers will have their own editor and proofreader also go through your manuscript, to uncover any problems such as missing words or typos, as well as larger issues, such as missing explanations or a disjointed timeline.
Recalibrating as needed
If you want to finish writing your book by December 31, you can if you have time available every day to commit to thinking, strategizing, researching, and writing.
However, if you have a day job, don’t enjoy writing, or are unsure of what you want to say, it may be a good idea to have a conversation with a ghostwriter or two.
Ghostwriters work alongside you as a writing partner to help you make decisions about your book’s topic, how to organize all of the information you want to share, and then help gather it through interviews with you, your inner circle, or outside research. They can also explain all of your publishing options and advise you on which might be best for you given your goals.
You may be a strong writer interested in writing your own book, but if you’re committed to getting your book written and you don’t have enough hours in a day, a ghostwriter could be your answer.
Whatever your year-end writing goal, use reverse engineering to outline all of the steps required to complete it and to set interim deadlines for yourself.
And if you want to explore how a ghostwriter could help you, feel free to email me at marcia@marcialaytonturner.com.
