3 Lessons after writing my first eBook.

When I set out 5 months ago to write an ebook, I had no idea how much commitment it was going to take. Hours upon hours of researching, writing, structuring, editing, and even the publishing part of it took more time than I could've imagined. Now that I am finished, however, I can say that I learned some lessons along the way that will make the process go much smoother next time.

Lesson number 1: Research. This is a critical step and is possibly the longest step in the entire process. It also happened to be my first step and is probably where most people begin when setting out to write a book. After all, you need to know if the topic at hand can be turned into something that people could enjoy reading. A good rule of thumb to go by is that you want twice as much material than you need to work with before the writing process begins. It helps to have multiple sources of information to compile into what most relates to the topic (or topics) you're writing about. Do be careful to not procrastinate and get stuck in the research process, however. This step is important but it's easy to get carried away. Nonetheless, I made the mistake of not gathering enough information from the start and was forced to go back to this step several times. It was frustrating, to say the least. But I believe that was mostly caused by me not doing the next lesson properly.

Lesson number 2: Outlining. If I had paid more attention to this step, the writing process would have gone much smoother. One of the reasons I had to go back to the research step so many times was that I didn't have a great idea of what chapters were going to be in the book. I knew the title and had a few chapter ideas that made it into the finished product, but it didn't go beyond that. It does help to know roughly how many chapters the book will have and what each chapter will be about. In fact, they'll be research involved with this step too but it will better prepare you for the rest of the process. Of course, you don't have to have the exact title and list of chapters that will be in the final draft of the book, but having a rough outline to guide you in your research definitely makes a world of difference.

Lesson Number 3: A Researching/Editing/Writing Schedule. At first, I began the process 2 days a week until I realized that this was going to take more time and effort than I had originally planned. Now, this schedule was fine to start with because if you overwhelm yourself early on it's likely to cause you to quit altogether. But thankfully, by the time I realized it I was already in the habit of working on the book. So I doubled the number of days I chose to work on it and the book really started to take shape after that. I eventually, started working on it 6 days a week, and I stuck to that until it was finished. Having a set schedule to research, write, or edit is crucial to getting a book written in a reasonable amount of time. It can be a daunting task at first but if the passion is there you'll find a way to do it. And hopefully, this article will help you on the journey.

If you are curious about the book that took me every bit of 5 months to write then you can check it out on Amazon. The book is called "How to Quit Sugar".