Rough Draft Finished! Phase II Starting

I've finally finished the rough draft of my Kindle Ebook! Yay! I started writing it on the 7th of September and finished it on the 9th of October, so just a couple days longer than a month. I'm actually pretty proud of myself, even though this is just the rough first draft, I started and completed a project. My weakness continues to be my own habit of procrastination, but there were a few times I made myself work anyways (and a few times I didn't). Of course finishing up the rough draft means that I'm now enterig what I'm calling Phase II of writing this ebook. So we'll go over some rough numbers from the rough draft, and then a quick recap of what Phase II will look like.

First things first, lets go over some numbers from the rough draft.

• It took me a little over a month to complete it
• However, I actually only wrote for 11 of those days
• The average time to write was 2 hours, with the longest being 3 hours and the shortest only 1 hour
• Total Hours Spent Writing - aprox. 16 hours
• Average amount of words typed - 2,000 words
• Final Word Count - 24,405

To be fair I can type pretty quickly, so that does account for the fact that I could average 2,000 words each time. Once I hit around 4,000 words written in one session. The fact is that looking at the above stats there really isn't reason, except my wacky schedule, that the rough draft couldn't be completed in 10 - 14 days. Next book I think I'm going to shoot for a complete rough draft in 14 days. Again, this is a rough draft, which means that I did not stop to edit, add photos, do any formatting or anything like that. The point was to get the words out of my head and onto "paper". Which leads us to Phase II, which I think is going to take a lot more of my time than Phase I.

For a quick recap Phase II is:

• First editing of rough draft
• Formatting the book for Kindle
• Starting the creation of a Email Newsletter
• Creating a Squeeze Page for readers to sign up for my Newsletter

The first thing is pretty self explanatory. Now is when I'll start going through what I wrote and cleaning it up. Check spelling, and punctuation, and grammar and make sure what I wrote makes sense and flows well. I fully expect my final word count to drop after this initial edit as I suspect I repeated myself often. I also changed the layout of my book, so I need to go in and edit my table of contents and double check that chapter titles match what's written in the ToC. There are also a few photos that I need to create, edit and insert into the book. 

Either once I'm through with editing, or while I'm doing it I'll begin to format the book so that it is compatible with the Amazon Kindle publishing platform. Luckily for us Kindle Direct Publishing has published a small and FREE ebook called: Building Your Book for Kindle that tells you how to format your word document for Kindle Publishing. I started to read it just to see if it seemed overly complicated and what little I read seems fairly straight forward and they gave clear directions on completing it. It's also not a very large ebook, so hopefully that means that there's not a whole lot of formatting to be done :)

As you can see not everything in this phase is directly related to publishing a book on Amazon through Kindle. However, it's just as important to do correctly as it is to write a content filled ebook. In my last post I go into more detail about what I'll be doing in this phase and more about my email newsletter strategy. You can go here to read it if you'd like. Since then I have done a small bit of research into this, and squeeze pages, and what email service to use, and I found this great little article that explains (and labels) what I want to do much better than I did.

He calls is EMAIL BLOGGING and just click on those words if you want to read his post. If what I'm trying to do is intriguing to you he does do a great job of explaining it and how it's different from regular email marketing. Heck, it even helped clarify a few things in my mind about it all after reading it.

As I mentioned in my previous post I will write out the first 2 or 3 months worth of emails to have ready. I also read Steve Scott's ebooks on Amazon and he also has a great website called stevescottsite.com , again I highly recommend you read his website if you plan on trying to write for Kindle and if you want to have an email list to go with your books. He had some interesting articles on frequency of emails and such, so I think I'll try out his method, which will require me to write a few more than I had initially planned. However, we're talking an email here, so while the content must be quality it shouldn't be long winded. Short, sweet and to the point. Easier said than done for me. 

Lastly, I've decided that I will not be going with Mailchimp for my email service for one simple reason. They don't allow affiliate links in their email. Bummer. Considering that, other than promoting my own books and sales, my main monetization strategy will be the occasional affiliate recommendation. So, while Mailchimp is free, it's not going to work. So I'll be going with Aweber, which is highly recommended, and really isn't that badly priced, but I was trying to avoid spending anything out of pocket on this book. The good news is that they offer their first month for $1, and really what's $1 investment in a future business. After that it'll be $19.95 per month, of course they have special rates if you buy 3 months or 12 months, but for now monthly it'll have to be.

 I'm not going to sign up until right before I publish though. I'll write up my emails in Word and save them. That way I'll be starting that $1 trial as close as possible to when I may start to actually make money. I would sincerely hope I would at least make $20 in a month to at least pay for the email service. Of course there is a 60 day delay in payment for Kindle royalties, so I'm going to pay for that second month anyways. 

So there you go, finally made enough progress to move into Phase II. It seems like such a small list, this phase. Truthfully though it's slightly overwhelming to think of everything that has to go into this part. Still, if it's done correctly this time around much of this work I won't need to redo for every book. The email marketing is a one time thing, once it's all set u and ready to go then all I have to do is include the links to my squeezepage and let it go. So that's some good news. 

Honestly though I fully expect this phase to take a lot more work than the rough draft did! I will need to really push myself past my laziness and try to consistently work on this. It's the only hope I have to get it done before the month is over. It would be nice if the book was published early enough that I actually received payment for it this year. We'll see. Meanwhile I'll continue to take yo along with me as I stumble along and hopefully if you decide to ever do the same it'll help you out a little.