Writing a book manuscript can feel like a Herculean task. Luckily, there are a variety of options for getting your wisdom into print. One of these options is working with a ghostwriter.

Maybe you you don’t enjoy writing, you’re not particularly good at it, or it takes you a long time (when you could be focusing on other things you actually are good at). If any of these things are true, you are a good candidate for working with a ghostwriter.

A ghostwriter takes your ideas and puts them into words on a page. The ideas are still yours — you remain the author of the work — but the actual mechanics of writing are outsourced to a professional.

A ghostwriter typically interviews you to collect the things you want to say. As he does so, he’ll be listening for your voice or style of expression so he can reflect this in the writing. If you have a quirky sense of humor or a precise way of speaking, these things can shine through in your book; a good ghostwriter will make sure they do.

A ghostwriter is called a ghost because he’s invisible. Unless specifically negotiated, the ghostwriter will receive no author credit anywhere on the book.

Ghostwriting is an intensive process for both you and the writer. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ll hand off the topic and wake up to a finished manuscript two months later. It usually takes hours and hours of interviews and collaboration to get all of the information that’s in your head into the writer’s hands. Be sure to set aside plenty of time to work with the writer.

Also be sure to have a solid written contract in place before beginning any work with a ghostwriter. A contract will typically include the following:

• detailed description of the scope of services to be provided
• statement of the fees and payment schedule
• timeline for the work to be completed, including any project milestones
• assignment of copyright in the work to you
• statement that you are not required to credit the ghostwriter in the book

A ghostwriter should develop all the major pieces of your book, including the preface, appendices, glossary and so on if these elements are to be included.

At the end of the project, ask the ghostwriter to provide a few possible titles and sub-titles for your book. The writer will be intimately familiar with the work and should be able to provide some good suggestions that reflect the book’s content. You may or may not end up using any of the titles, but at the very least they could spark further brainstorming.

In non-fiction, hiring a ghostwriter isn’t cheating. It’s often a smart strategy that will let you and a professional writer each focus on what you do best. It can get you a completed manuscript faster and more efficiently than what you could do on your own — and that’s one big step closer to getting your ideas out into the world.

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You’ll find more advice on developing a book manuscript inside From Idea to Author, a step-by-step guide to self-publishing your non-fiction book.

On the self-publishing journey, there’s the production of your book and there’s the marketing of your book. Two separate things, right?

Nope!

How you create your book will have an impact on your marketing efforts. If you miss an important registration detail, fail to follow an industry norm or make it difficult for readers to find you, your marketing becomes that much more difficult.

While producing a great book doesn’t automatically guarantee sales success, a book with sloppy production values is hobbled right out of the gate. Here are some tips for building success into your book from the beginning.

Spend time on the title
Coming up with a great title isn’t easy, but it’s worth working on. Too many first-time authors try cramming a 25-word synopsis of their book into the title. They end up with titles that are insufferably long, hard to understand and impossible to remember. Yawn. Titles are usually very short, sometimes just one or two catchy words. The subtitle then picks up the job of describing the book in a bit more detail—but still use only five to eight words or so.

Hire a professional designer
People really do judge a book by its cover, even when it’s just a thumbnail. Whether people are browsing a shelf at their local bookstore or clicking through Amazon.com, whether they spy a copy of your book on a friend’s coffee table or reach your website from a tweet, the first they’ll see of your book is the cover. So much rests on the image your cover conveys that it’s foolish to risk a poor impression. Hire an experienced professional to design it. Can’t afford it? You can’t afford not to.

Register your book
Every book needs an ISBN. (Without one, you can’t even sell through Amazon.) Also register your book with your national library, whether that’s the Library of Congress or the National Library of Canada, and invest in having Cataloguing-in-Publication data created. These registrations ensure your book looks professional and is discoverable.

Remember the formula: If p, then e
Despite what you may read, print books aren’t in danger of disappearing anytime soon. Plus, print books still work best as gifts or client premiums; having something tangible to hand out is crucial to making the right impression. So it makes sense, most of the time, to plan on a print edition. Just don’t overlook e-books altogether. It’s so easy and inexpensive to spin off an electronic edition from print files that it should be an automatic part of every author’s publishing process. The more ways people can access your book, the greater the chance of a sale.

Edit your book well
Editing is last on the list, not because it’s least important, but because it supports everything else. You can have an outstanding title, a kick-ass cover and multiple available formats, but if people read your book and find the content stinks, you won’t go far.

• Fill your non-fiction book with helpful information, not promotional copy. People don’t want to pay money to read a long brochure.
• Keep it tight. If you can tell readers how to solve a problem in 200 pages instead of 300 pages, do it. If you can explain the topic in 100 pages, consider a shorter format, like a Kindle Single. Avoid padding just to hit a page count.
• Watch your stale date. A book is no small project so it’s best to create a product you can sell for years to come. As much as you can, avoid information that changes frequently. Instead, focus on timeless principles and point people to your website for information that needs regular updating.
• Hire a professional editor. In fact, hire a couple. At Highspot, we employ up to four different editors on each book because we know that fresh eyes at every stage of the process—from developmental editing through copyediting and printer’s proofs—help us catch more mistakes.

When self-publishing, it pays to think about your book like a traditional publisher: how can you get the best return on your investment? In a hypercompetitive market, give your book a fighting chance with top-notch production values, then market it as the great product you know it be.

Consistently producing and sharing content is essential for any Thought Star — yet finding time to create content can be a challenge when you run a full-time business.

I’ve certainly had my own struggles with finding content time. I’d have multiple tasks to complete in a day — for example, writing something for the Highspot website, editing a Highspot special report, and reviewing a client manuscript. If time ran short and I could only do one, guess which one it was? Clients invariably came first.

Talk about the shoemaker’s children. I slowly (embarrassingly slowly) came to realize that if I didn’t make a change, Highspot knowledge products would never get done at the rate they needed to.

From Focus Days to Content Days
My business partner, Ross, is an associate coach at the Strategic Coach, a program for entrepreneurs. He’d told me about Focus Days — time that’s blocked off for productive tasks — but I hadn’t put them into practice because something about the concept didn’t quite fit for me.

Somewhere along the way it occurred to me to shift the idea slightly from Focus Day to Content Day — one day a week where I’d do nothing but internal Highspot work. With that subtle change, the penny dropped, or rather, what felt like a whole sack of pennies.

It felt ridiculously freeing to have one whole, uninterrupted day to dedicate to internal projects. I could take that extra 30 minutes to noodle an argument or that extra hour to finetune a report, and I didn’t have to feel guilty about what I wasn’t doing. Client work would get done — the next day. But for that eight hours, if I was working on an internal piece, I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

Since implementing Content Days, my productivity has soared. Best of all for me, though, have been the emotional benefits. I feel excited and energized at the end of every Content Day. Where before I’d feel guilty for “stealing” time away from client projects, now I feel great about staying on task.

On the flip side, on non-Content Days, I’ve stopped feeling guilty about the internal projects awaiting my attention. I know they’ll get their time. That lets me focus fully on client work, which has boosted my productivity on that side as well.

Make It Your Time
Regular content creation is critical for a thought leader. If you don’t already dedicate time to the task, make it a goal to start.

Can’t spare a whole day? Try half a day. Or two hours twice a week. But be firm with yourself about keeping the appointment. Block if off on your calendar like a meeting, and make sure your assistant and the others around you know you’re not available during those hours.

If Content Time doesn’t feel right for you, experiment with the focus. Maybe for you it’s Book Time, where you allow yourself the freedom to work on anything that will advance your book project. Maybe it’s Writing Time or Blog Time. Adapt the focus until it fits.

Let us know how you make out. If you already have a focus system, what are the factors that make it work for you?

Many knowledge products deal with how-to topics. Readers buy these products to learn the specific steps and elements of successfully completing a particular project. For example, they might want to know how to decorate a small balcony, how to write a press release, or how to buy a life insurance policy.

If readers aren’t successful in completing the task by following the steps you’ve described, then your knowledge product isn’t doing its job. Make sure your instructions are clear, practical, and easy to follow. Below are seven tips that will help you improve your how-to writing.

1. Know your readers and their level of subject matter expertise. Tailor the detail of your instructions accordingly. “Defrag your hard drive” may bewilder a computer beginner but might be all the explanation a technology specialist needs.
2. Limit the number of steps to nine or fewer. Research shows that the human mind can effectively process and remember no more than nine things at a time. If you have more than nine items, try breaking them into two or more sets of instructions. For example, let’s say your instructions on creating a press release have 16 steps. You might put 9 steps under the heading Writing Your Press Release and 7 steps under Sending Out Your Press Release.
3. Start each step with a verb. Use the active voice and keep sentences short to make each step easy to read and understand.
4. Keep the focus clearly on the task you’re describing. If detailed definitions, examples or background explanations need to be included, consider placing them in a sidebar where they won’t interrupt the flow of the task.
5. Help readers avoid what you know are common mistakes.
   Example: Make sure to dry the pieces for at least 24 hours or they will warp.
   
6. Provide readers with opportunities to assess their successful progress through the steps, if possible.
   Example: If formatted correctly, your page should now show a series of grid lines.
   
7. Test the clarity of your instructions by having someone else (with the same level of expertise as your readers) follow the steps exactly as you’ve written them. Did the project turn out as expected? Did they run into problems or have questions as they went along? Use the feedback to fine-tune your writing.

Nothing is more frustrating than instructions that are confusing or hard to follow. Take the time to think through each step of the process you’re explaining and use the tips above to describe them effectively. Your readers will thank you.

We editors are a picky lot, it’s true. But in our defence, we’re paid to be picky. An anal-retentive editor is a good editor.

OK, OK, I’ll admit many of us are picky about writing when we’re off the clock, too. Editors and grammarians tend to revel in pointing out errors wherever and whenever they are found — all the better if the errors create amusing misunderstandings.

With that in mind, wordslingers and redactors alike may enjoy the editorial pickiness to be found at these punctuation-related websites:

• Comma Clout explores the wiley ways of that punctuation workhorse, the comma
• Apostrophe Abuse documents the many ways the poor little apostrophe is kicked around
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotes — well, the name really tells the story, doesn’t it?

If, instead of making you giggle, these websites leave you scratching your head over what exactly is so wrong about CD’s and “hot” breakfast sandwiches, then a trip over to the Grammar Girl website might be in order. Mignon Fogarty’s podcasts and blog posts give you just what the site says — quick and dirty tips for better writing.

Your readers are smart people. That doesn’t mean you should strive to use big words and complex constructions in your writing. Smart writing is clear writing, and that means simple writing.

Most newspapers and magazines are written for a 9th or 10th grade reading level. Why? Because these publications want their writing to be quickly and easily understood, with a minimum of confusion.

Simple writing is not about “dumbing down” your ideas. It’s about making them easily accessible to as many people as possible. Simple writing won’t make you look like a neophyte; it will give your ideas power, helping them spread faster to more places. If you want people to talk about your book, they have to understand your content and be able to describe it to their friends in a few sentences.

Avoid industry jargon and business buzzwords. Nothing locks people out of a conversation or makes their eyes glaze over faster than a paragraph crammed with acronyms, insider terms, and words larded up with extra syllables in an effort to sound lofty. Businesspeople, I’m looking at you. Cut wastage, drop utilize, and forget orientate when waste, use, and orient will do the trick.

Write like a human being. If you’re struggling to convey a big idea in plain words, ask yourself what you would say if you were having coffee with a friend. This friend knows you — there’s no need to puff yourself up to impress her. But she doesn’t know your area of expertise — so skip the industry shorthand. Your imagined conversation should help you with phrasing, flow, and word choice.

What Does Complexity Cost You?
This blog post started out as an entirely different article. I wanted to write about a new technology I’d heard about called SharedBook. I first read about SharedBook on Mike Shatzkin’s blog. The capabilities of the technology, as described by Mike, sounded really interesting:

This is a wikipedia-type capability with a spin that publishers and authors will really like. With wikipedia, the edits and annotations from “the crowd”…actually change and revise the content itself. With SharedBook’s annotation technology, the original published content remains locked, and the changes are appended as footnotes! The footnotes can be associated to a chunk, a paragraph, a word, a symbol, a diagram, a picture. Whatever you like. And using the capability to manipulate content into a one-off book that SharedBook is known for, a reader can order up a printed book with whichever of the footnotes the reader wants in their own copy of the book.

So off I went to the SharedBook website to learn more. After five minutes of poking around, I was no wiser than when I had arrived. This is a sample of what I found:

One of the unique aspects of this data integration involves mapping the data into a rich data model that allows flexibility for clients, partners and users to collaboratively manipulate the data in a client-supplied environment.

Huh? Tell me what you mean, man. I think the above sentence is trying to say the same thing that Mike said. But which one do you understand?

Whether writing a website or a book, have a human conversation with your readers. Cut the jargon and the fancy words. It’s all about the simple.

Robert Kiyosaki is the latest business author to take the collaborative approach to writing a book. His newest effort, Conspiracy of the Rich, is being released chapter by chapter on the book’s website. Readers must register to view the full text of each chapter, and are then encouraged to share their thoughts on each topic.

From the website:

Conspiracy of the Rich: The 8 New Rules of Money will be an interactive project in which Kiyosaki will not only offer his written ‘draft’ chapters online, but invite feedback, commentary and questions from readers across the globe via website forums and blogs. Reader feedback will then be incorporated into the book as it is written and released, chapter by chapter, on the Internet.

This Confident Writing Challenge asks everyone to define their best posts of 2008. Most useful, most fun, and most original are easy. The best, though? Always the latest one.

Tomorrow is I Love To Write Day. Yay for people who love to write! But guess what? Some very successful authors don’t like writing. Or find writing difficult. Or write veeeery, veeeery slowly.

But whether you love writing or find it painful, soon or later you will face that accursed foe: writer’s block. You have things to write. You know you should write. But somehow you can’t make it happen.

Many successful writers will tell you that the key to unblocking is discipline. Force yourself to write for a certain amount of time each day, whether you feel like it or not. Write junk or write a masterpiece, just write.

Cue Write or Die from the Dr. Wicked Writing Lab.

Wrote or Die is a simple (dare I say wickedly simple?) online application that helps you set a goal and get it written. You choose either the number of words you want to complete or a time limit. Set your grace period to Forgiving, Strict or Evil, and then set your punishment mode: Gentle, Normal, or Kamikaze. With Gentle, you get a nice little pop-up window if you stop for too long. On the Kamikaze setting, your words start to erase themselves. Talk about incentive!

The tool is a great boost for just letting loose with ideas, getting words on the screen, and gaining momentum. Later you can go back to edit and refine.

I used the tool myself to write this post, and the idea that I’d be buzzed if I didn’t keep going provided just enough push to keep my fingers flying. It was kind of fun, actually.

The tool has a secondary benefit as well: it helps you identify the habits that might be slowing you down. I couldn’t believe how much I was trying to erase and re-write things I had started, and how often I stopped to re-read what I’d just written. Fighting those urges will help me be more a productive writer.

I can see Write or Die becoming a tremendous tool for authors. Set yourself a goal of a page or a chapter and see how far you can get with just letting the ideas flow. It’s always easier to edit than to create, and a session with Dr. Wicked gives you the raw material you need for getting started.

When you’re done, you get a gratifying note that tells you how many words you wrote in what amount of time. I was a bit surprised to learn that I had written this whole post in 8 minutes. And surprisingly, it took less editing than I thought to make it ready for publishing.

Today is National Punctuation Day. In honor of editors everywhere, let’s take a look at the proper use of ellipses, those humble sets of three dots so often misused and abused in a manuscript.

An ellipsis takes the place of words that have been removed from a sentence. For example, here is a full sentence:

His artwork is so striking and so beautiful that it belongs in a museum.

This is the same sentence with some of the words taken out and an ellipsis inserted:

His artwork is so striking … that it belongs in a museum.

Notice that there is a space on either side of the dots.

An ellipsis can also be used to indicate a thought that has trailed off, most commonly when writing dialogue.

Adam scratched his head and said, “I wonder …”

When in doubt about how and where to use an ellipsis (or any of 12 other punctuation marks), Jeff Rubin, the brain behind National Punctuation Day, has an excellent primer on his website.