Behind the Cover

A Ghostwriter's Guide to Authoring Your Own Business Book

Karen Rowe

• Publisher: Front Rowe Seat
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780986763878
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Writing a book is a game changer for your business. It can increase your credibility, get you more clients, allow for strategic partnerships and let you charge higher rates. You already know you are long overdue to finish and publish your bestseller. But the biggest problem with writing a book is… writing the damn book! It’s time-consuming and a chore. You are already so busy and successful that finding the focused time required to sit down and write on a regular basis is a near impossibility.

In Behind the Cover: A Ghostwriter’s Guide to Authoring Your Own Business book, Karen Rowe solves that problem by taking you step-by-step through her proven system. Receive practical, expert advice on topics like:

• Targeting your audience
• Organizing your ideas
• Mastering the craft of storytelling
• Overcoming resistance and blocks
• Avoiding common pitfalls that keep you from finishing your book.

This book is for you if you are a high performer who is time poor, has the patience of a gnat, and is always talking about writing your book but never doing anything about it. Finally get that book out of your head and into the target reader’s hands where it belongs. No one can read the book that never got written.

Chapter 1:

THE SENSORY DEPRIVATION TANK

My journey as an author began with absolutely no plan in place. I left a secure, tenured teaching position with one goal in mind: I’m going to be a writer. I immediately accepted an unpaid position blogging for my local newspaper’s website. Within six months, an editor I’d been working with for the blog called with an offer from a publishing company. They were looking for a writer to write a book on chocolate. Was I interested?

Am I interested?!

Do I want to win the lottery and move to Paris? Heck yes, I’m interested! It paid $4,000. I felt like I had hit the jackpot.

But all the romantic visions I ever had of writing were blown out of the water the first time I sat down to actually write a book. After the first few weeks of elation had worn off—the satisfaction of having left teaching, the triumph of quitting my day job to write full time, the exhilaration of cashing my first check, the euphoria from having a real, live publisher reach out to little ole’ me?—there was work to do.

I had to deliver a 45,000-word manuscript and had only eight weeks in which to do it. That meant I had to write roughly a thousand words a day. Sounds easy, right? And it would have been, had I gotten started straight away. But I didn’t.

First, I took a vacation for two weeks. I was arrogant and naïve—foolish enough to believe that the hardest part of writing a book (getting the book deal and being picked up by a publisher) was behind me. Ha! I gallivanted off to Belize as if the book were a foregone conclusion.

It wasn’t, of course.

I returned from my trip and spent two weeks “doing research,” which, in my case, meant surfing the Internet, copying and pasting things that I thought were “neat,” and plowing my way through some peanut butter cups. Yup. I was a writer.

So now, I was down to four weeks left, and not one real word had been written. It was then that I realized something serious had to be done. I was completely unprepared for how hard the writing process would be—and not even the writing part. The rest of it. The resistance, the self-sabotage, the insecurity, the paralyzing fear—of success, of failure, of performance, and of my ability to deliver.

I had to acknowledge how scared I was. I had to take action. Something drastic. I had to leave town. I had to physically remove myself from the comforts of my home and disappear to a cabin in the middle of nowhere for six days. I mean, how cliché can you get?

There was no Internet, no TV, and no cell phone reception. No Facebook, no friends to talk to, there wasn’t even any running water. This place was completely devoid of any and all distractions. Perfect. It was exactly what I needed. I called it my Sensory Deprivation Tank. It was so remote that it didn’t even have a mailing address; the owners had to send me a hand-drawn map and a picture of the front of the house so I could find it. That was when the rubber hit the road.

One of the things no one ever tells you about writing a book is how lonely and isolating it is. I went down a rabbit hole without fully knowing what I was in for. As an extrovert, those were six of the longest, darkest, loneliest, scariest, crazy-making days of my life. It felt like I was starring in my own personal Blair Witch Project. It was intensely painful. These were the front lines. I sat in front of my computer for twelve to fourteen hours a day, sometimes longer. I was doing battle.

This wasn’t how I thought it was going to be. Visions of quiet tables in quaint cafés in Paris à la Hemingway were annihilated. Where were the shenanigans? The love affairs? The chocolate croissants? I was not surrounded by Gertrude Stein or Picasso or the Eiffel fucking Tower. I was surrounded by nothing and nobody but my own thoughts. It was less “sexy café à Paris,” more “punishing penitentiary.” I was in a town of 140 people in the Badlands of Alberta. Where was my Moveable Feast?

All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. I would stare longingly at my car and think, All I have to do is get in and drive away. Back to civilization and back to my life. But I had a deadline, and not having any distractions was exactly what I needed. It was awful . . . and it worked.

I can’t describe the experience as anything other than traumatic. I woke up, I ate breakfast, I wrote. I ate lunch, I wrote. I ate dinner. I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, I went to bed. I wrote from fear and panic; I wrote, uncertain if I could do it; I wrote, not knowing at all if I was making a horrible mistake. I wrote, worried that I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough to pull it off. I wrote, mostly, so I could get the hell out of there and go back home. I typed so much over the course of those six days that my knuckles got sore.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. With the most dire case of cabin fever, I came back two days earlier than planned, fleeing that small ghost town like it was the scene of a crime. In fact, it was. It was stark and lonely and harrowing. (At least, it felt that way to me at the time.) I had been my own slave driver. It was just me and the material. I was so desperate for human contact, but I closed my eyes, held my breath, and barreled on through to the finish line. It was a cage match to the death.

Years later, I found out this was a completely normal part of the process. This is, in fact, what it means to be a writer. It is the creative process. It is what Steven Pressfield calls “The Muse,” but I didn’t know that at the time. I just felt like a lunatic. That being said, it also felt more like me than anything I’d ever done in the past. Yes, I was out in the middle of nowhere . . . an alien, in a place I didn’t belong; yet strangely, I belonged there more than I ever had in the classroom.

Without ever realizing it, I had spent six years of my life as a teacher feeling like a fraud. This first book was about me stepping into my own and feeling, deep in my bones, that, Yes! This is what I’m meant to be doing. I had never felt more complete, more like myself, or more centered, calm, or focused—amid the stark-raving panic, I mean. But for the most part, I felt grateful for having discovered this truth about myself relatively early on in my life. I was thirty-four at the time. Thank God I hadn’t wasted twenty more years of my life wasting away in a middle school classroom, watching the life slowly leak out of me. But that didn’t make the actual writing—the sitting down and coming face-to-face with every fear I had ever had in my entire life—any less excruciating.

Those six days took years off my life, but I wrote more than ten thousand words and laid a solid foundation for my book. I had messed around for so long that, in the end, I had left myself only eight days to complete twenty-five thousand words. I was averaging about ten thousand words per week. I’m not good at math, but I was pretty sure that meant I was running out of time.

I called my publisher to renegotiate a later deadline. Much to my astonishment, she said no.

This sucker had to be pounded out in time for Valentine’s Day, which meant my October 1 deadline was firm and final. What I also didn’t know was that there was an entire team of people waiting for me to finish. Delaying by a few weeks or even a few days would throw off the entire production schedule.

Oh.

This was real.

There was no getting out of this.

It mattered if I finished.

People were counting on me.

Up until that point, I had been treating the deadline like a suggestion. Now, I had created a crisis. I had to write twenty-five thousand words in eight days. It seemed impossible. But this non-negotiable, external deadline that I had left to the very last minute left me with no other choice. So, I did the only thing there was left to do:

I wrote like my life depended on it.

I wrote like there was a gun to my head.

It was a race to the finish. It took everything I had in me. On more than one occasion, I thought, There is no way. But here is the great thing about a deadline that’s so tight: There is no time for your own bullshit. All there’s time for is more typing, eating with one hand, and maybe some low-grade mouth-breathing.

I created a new mantra: There is always a way. In those eight days, I learned more about writing and more about myself than ever before. There is always a way. I grew up in those eight days. There is always a way. I became a writer in those eight days.

My experience of myself was completely transformed.

That deadline was the best thing that ever happened to me.

The Lesson

Writing a book—I imagine—is a little like giving birth; you forget all about the pain when this beautiful thing comes rushing into the world. The struggle seems completely worth it. Once you get that book in your hands, once people get to read the words you wrote and get impacted by you sharing your story . . . well, you forget about doing all the work while crying.

And after my first book deal, I got a second book deal. I did it all over again. My return to the Sensory Deprivation Tank for my second book was reluctant, inevitable . . . and surprisingly lovely. Mostly, I felt free—unencumbered from the crushing responsibility of my day-to-day life.

By then, I was all-in with my freelance writing career. Translation: I was broke. Going out to the Sensory Deprivation Tank became a reprieve from the stress of supporting myself through my art. All I have to do is write. I didn’t have to talk to anybody, explain myself, say no, say thank you, say sorry, shower, brush my teeth, or worry about income, which was a major preoccupation for me by then.

All I had to do was write.

The first time, it had felt like a prison; the second time, it felt like a warm cocoon. Just another reminder that situations are what you make of them.

My eternal lesson: Suffering is optional.

I didn’t want to leave that second time. I wanted to stay in that false reality longer. But the real world would not wait. The real world was impatient and needed to be paid. The real world had a return call to make and emails to answer. I returned home after a week, once again with a solid foundation, a habit created, and a fresh perspective.

My Proven System

When I first started coaching people on how to finish and publish their own books, my clients’ book projects would inevitably get stalled; months and months and months would pass with no progress. I was stumped. Why don’t they just sit down and write?!

Well. That’s like asking someone who wants to lose weight why they don’t just get on a treadmill and go for a run. They want the end result, but they don’t necessarily want to do the hard work required to get them there. Or they are letting their fear run the show.

Not everyone is willing or able to go into sensory deprivation mode. I admit, it can be a horrible place. It’s the least sexy thing ever. The reason my clients hired me in the first place was specifically so they didn’t have to deal with any pain. Like everyone, they wanted a bypass. A quick fix. A magic bullet. And I didn’t have one.

Not yet, anyway.

I was focusing on how to write a book when what I should have been doing was focusing on how to bypass the part everyone hates—the hideous, dreadful book-writing process. Can we get to the end without having to enter the mouth of the lion, slay the dragon, kill the beast?

Turns out, you totally can.

The remainder of this book will lay out the steps and strategies that make it possible for me—and my clients—to successfully complete a book in record time, without all the suffering. You will be led through the same guidelines I use with my clients—how to determine your book’s niche, develop an Ideal Reader Profile, follow a Rapid Results Outline, and use a blueprint to create your initial draft. You will learn how to uncover your unique voice, use storytelling as a tool to connect with your target audience, and how to use mind tricks to get your book done even faster. Once you’ve knocked out your first draft, I offer unique self-editing strategies for you to conduct before I teach you how to hire a stellar team of professional editors, designers, and maybe even a ghostwriter (in case your first draft didn’t quite go as planned). Finally, I clarify the process for publishing your book, and I offer a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Dan Bradbury
• Thank You
• Preface: When It Can’t Wait until Monday
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Sensory Deprivation Tank
• Chapter 2: Shit or Get off the Pot
• Chapter 3: It Hardly Ever Goes as Planned (But You Still Need a Plan)
• Chapter 4: Define Your Ideal Reader
• Chapter 5: What Am I Going to Write About?
• Chapter 6: Write Your Shitty First Draft
• Chapter 7: Why Stories Are Good for Business
• Chapter 8: Writing Hacks
• Chapter 9: Don’t Embarrass Yourself—Tips for Self-Editing
• Chapter 10: Bring in the Troops (Hiring Professionals)
• Chapter 11: Secrets to a Great Book Title
• Chapter 12: Book Covers That Convert
• Chapter 13: The Finish Line—Printing and Publishing
• Bonus Chapter: Writing A Great Foreword
• Conclusion: Version Done is Better Than Version None
• About the Author
• Notes