Overwhelm can be paralyzing especially if you are writing a book. But you don’t have to let it stop you. I want to talk to you about a straight line to success that for many of us is achieved through a good mentor or mastermind group.

I still sometimes even to this day find myself in overwhelm mode when I think of all that must be done to keep my publishing and information marketing business moving forward. The feeling of overwhelm doesn’t last very long anymore because I realize that by just focusing on the task at hand along with a little faith will always get me to where I want to go.

As an author you don’t have to know about all the different steps to get your book written, published and marketed, you only have to get started. The universe always has a way of bringing to you what you will need next if you will only get started in the direction toward your goals.

You can’t see the next valley until you have climbed to the top of the first mountain. Once you conquer that first mountain rest assured the view will probably be greater than even imagined but you have to take that first step.

Even today I don’t worry too much about all the things I must learn and prepare for but I do know that I will have the right information and resources come to me when I get to the next step. Although I can most of the times get myself moving consistently along the track I still depend on both a good mentor as well as a mastermind group I meet with weekly.

My mentor and mastermind group have an uncanny way of being able to stand back from my situation and see it for what it really is, and more importantly keep me moving forward. I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it without them and I think many a successful entrepreneur or author would say the same thing.

Don’t let overwhelm defeat you but instead use it as your special sign to get a good mentor or become part of a mastermind group.
 

Overwhelm can be paralyzing especially if you are writing a book. But you don’t have to let it stop you. I want to talk to you about a straight line to success that for many of us is achieved through a good mentor or mastermind group.

I still sometimes even to this day find myself in overwhelm mode when I think of all that must be done to keep my publishing and information marketing business moving forward. The feeling of overwhelm doesn’t last very long anymore because I realize that by just focusing on the task at hand along with a little faith will always get me to where I want to go.

As an author you don’t have to know about all the different steps to get your book written, published and marketed, you only have to get started. The universe always has a way of bringing to you what you will need next if you will only get started in the direction toward your goals.

You can’t see the next valley until you have climbed to the top of the first mountain. Once you conquer that first mountain rest assured the view will probably be greater than even imagined but you have to take that first step.

Even today I don’t worry too much about all the things I must learn and prepare for but I do know that I will have the right information and resources come to me when I get to the next step. Although I can most of the times get myself moving consistently along the track I still depend on both a good mentor as well as a mastermind group I meet with weekly.

My mentor and mastermind group have an uncanny way of being able to stand back from my situation and see it for what it really is, and more importantly keep me moving forward. I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it without them and I think many a successful entrepreneur or author would say the same thing.

Don’t let overwhelm defeat you but instead use it as your special sign to get a good mentor or become part of a mastermind group.
 

I want to talk about how you must not confuse motion with action because one will keep you broke and the other will make you rich.

One of the biggest challenges I have is to keep my clients or students moving in the directions of their dreams. It is always nice when they email me or phone me to let me know they have finished their books and are very excited about the future.

It is a great feeling to know that I have helped in some way. But not all that start their books finish their books and I am constantly trying to increase the percentage of successful authors that take my courses.

One of the things I tell all my students is to check to make sure what they’re doing is not just motion but is actually action.

Motion is usually anything that you do from day to day. For example: If you make coffee every morning before you start to write that is motion. The motion of making coffee. If you turn on your computer and check you email that is usually a motion as well. Organizing your desk and on and on it goes until at the end of the day you have still not taken any action because you are too busy being in motion.
 
So what is action?

Action is a task that you do each day that moves you closer to your goal. In this case we are talking about writing, publishing and marketing your book.

So action would be finding a company to print your book. Then maybe after that it would be to contact a webmaster to make your website. Do you see the difference? Action puts another brick into your overall book business and gets you closer to your goal each day.

Motion is doing things that you do day after day that don’t bring you any closer to your goal. If you don’t take action you will never reach your goal as a successful published author. If you do the same things everyday and expect different results is that not the definition of insanity?

Take action and put at least one more new brick into your business each day and you will be amazed at how fast your life will change.

When you consider the cost of advertising and how many competitors you’re competing against in any niche you soon realize that writing your own book and positioning yourself as the expert is an absolute no brainer. It is the best way to totally set you apart from the competition and stand out in an ever increasingly noisy advertising market.

Want instant credibility, celebrity and expert status? Write a book and you will never have to cold call or waste your hard earned money on fruitless ads again. Our society in North America gives published authors a certain prestige not enjoyed by others. Use this prestige to explode your income and make your life easier.

People buy from people they know and trust and there is no quicker way of building trust and being the known go to expert as writing a book. Your book works for you 24 hours per day, 7 days per week 365 days per year building your good name all on autopilot.

You do the work once and the book keeps working for you day in and day out. Never taking time off for illness and never asking for more money like all the advertising sales people.

Is it hard to write a book? If you can have a conversation you can write a book. From do it yourself, to ghost writers to many of the outsourcing that is available to us all today there is no reason why anyone can’t write and publish a book and fast.

You never know what is on the other side of that door until you just go through it. Writing a book is a go through door that will change your life forever.

With 81% of the population in North America saying at one time or
another that they would like to write a book why are so few doing it?

Anyone that has taken my course ‘How to Write & Publish Your Own Book
in 40 Days’ knows I talk a lot about mindset at the beginning of the
class. I talk about mindset because it is the key to whether you
realize your goal to writing and publishing your own book.

I cover this all important topic of mindset because the fact of the
matter is anyone I teach my strategies to can become a published
author and even a best selling one. The only thing that can stop
them is their own mindset.

You see we all have the same 24 hours per day and we all have the
same information available to us for success but it is only
ourselves who can stop us. We are stopped by our ‘ANTs’ Automatic
Negative Thoughts.

You know the ones:

Where will I get the time?
I can’t write a book!
I don’t have any money to publish a book!!!
My spouse will not support me!

and on and on go the army of ANTs

So how come some of us succeed and some of us get stopped in the
starting gate? Some students leave my classes and have their books
finished in a very short time and some never take the first step.
Of course it is my passion that they all finish their books because
I know what a difference it can make in their lives.

You see when we ask questions of ourselves like; Where will I find
the time to write my book? That question is not intended to stop
us, but rather it is a good question that needs an answer so we can
move on with our book projects.

The answer might be to wake up a half an hour earlier or go to
sleep a half an hour later. There are many answers to that
question, the students who find the answer to that question and
many others are the ones that have Focus, Persistence and Passion.

You must have the Focus to stay on task and also to see the final
result of your completed and published book.

You must have the Persistence to keep moving forward on your book
each and every day to know you are heading toward completion.

Lastly you must have the Passion that will keep you motivated no
matter how many obstacles real or imagined try to take you off
course from you realizing your dream of becoming a published author.

It may help to know that with writing and publishing your own book
you will put in the work once but it is a process that can pay dividends
for the rest of your life.

It’s that time of year again when you will soon be pondering a new year’s resolution. What is it going to be? Will it be to loose some weight, quit smoking or maybe to just treat your fellow man with more kindness and respect.

What about being a published author by writing your own book in 2008? Almost 81% of our North American population say they would like to write a book. That means that over 4 out of every 5 people who will read this blog post have expressed an interest in writing their own book.

So with so many people wanting to write their own book how come only a small percentage of people actually achieve published author status? Well it is no secret that the mighty excuse is the reason for stopping so many would be authors in their tracks.

The two biggest excuses I hear are I don’t know how to write and the second one is that they suffer from perfectionism. Their book is just never quite good enough to put it out into the world of readers.

Well here’s my professional opinion on these two excuses.

# 1 I don’t know how to write.

If you can hold a conversation you can write a book. Write your book in a simple conversational style and you will do just fine. It is a myth that you need to be a literary giant to make it as an author. If you need proof just read my book. It is doing just fine and I am making a very substantial secondary income from being an author.

#2 The book isn’t quite good enough yet to be published.

There are a lot of people that suffer from perfectionism and I was in its spell for too many years as well. First of all there is no such thing as a perfect book so thinking that your book has to be perfect before being published is an illusion. The bottom line is a mediocre published book will always do better than an author waiting for their book to be perfect.

Use a simple template to help you write your book and spend about an hour per day writing. Within one month you will have a book that will be about 200 pages in length and you will be ready to publish a book that will completely change your life for the better.

Think about it this way! For about 20 or 30 hours of writing you can start attracting all sorts of life changing opportunities by becoming the author of a book. I know of no other opportunity that is available to so many people like you and I. Take advantage of it and make 2008 the start of the best year ever.

The fall season night school classes have started and I am busy teaching lots of eager new authors how to write and publish their own books. I get so pumped about letting my students know the opportunities they have in their lives by becoming a published author. Many have already been working on their books and some for several years.

When I ask why they have been working so long on their books and haven’t gotten them out yet it always comes down to the same answer. Although it’s usually a convoluted answer the answer is they just don’t think their book is good enough to publish. It is not perfect yet so they just keep stalling and tell themselves as long as they’re still writing the dream is still on the way.

But you see here is the big point for all us would be authors to ponder. Your book will never be perfect because there is no such thing as a perfect book. A mediocre published book will always outsell a book that never gets published because the author is waiting for perfection.

Of course we want a well written book with good content but it is not the most important thing you need to be a published author. You need to finish it and get over yourself. Just say enough is enough and get the book published and out into the world. Nothing is going to happen to you as an author until your book is published because until it’s published you are just another wanna be author.

If writing the perfect book was the criteria for being a published author we would all have nothing to read. Noting bad is going to happen to you if your book is not perfect. I will tell you this. If I can write a best selling book then anyone can.

You are going to get good and bad comments whether or not your book is the best written book in history so you may as well get used to it. As a matter of fact, the very few derogatory comments you may get are usually from a people who has never written a book and the nice ones are from most of the rest of the population and often from authors.

So I say as a teacher and author to all my students to just get your book out there and watch your world change.

Hooray for the internet and all of the tools and resources that come along with it.  Writing and publishing a book has never been simpler.  Here are 10 great tools and resources that make writing and publishing easier than ever.

5 Top Writing and Publishing Tools:

Free Writing Software.
Did you know that you don’t need to purchase expensive word processing software to write a book?  It’s true.  There are now an abundance of really well developed open source software products, that means they’re free, available to writers.  My favorite two are Google Documents, available for free with any Google or gmail account.  It works very similarly to MS Word and you can save your document in any variety of forms including word doc. 

The other product that I really like is Open Office.  Like MS Office it offers spreadsheet, word processing, database software and much more.  So there you go, not having the right software is no longer an excuse to not write a book.

Meta Search Engines.
Each search engine has its strengths and benefits.  However there are now search engines available that combine the power of the big four, Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and MSN.  Now, with a quick keyword or two, you can have four times the results when you’re researching and your results will be more accurate.  Research time will be cut in half, assuming that you don’t get sidetracked with all of the cool information available online. 

My research trick, make notes when you write about what needs to be researched and research only the specific information that you need.  That way if you need to know how many minutes it takes the average stoplight to turn green, you can look up that specific information and not spend hours researching stoplights.

One Stop Shopping Sites.
Due to the number of people that have realized how lucrative information marketing can be, a wonderful number of services have popped up that make owning and operating an information marketing website easy.  These sites generally offer the following feature:
 Shopping cart software solutions
 Merchant accounts
 Website hosting
 Website design templates
 Autoresponders
 Newsletter subscription tools
 Affiliate marketing management tools
 Search Engine Optimization tools
 Fulfillment and distribution options.

Online Bookstores!
While it’s great to sell your book on your own website, the advantage of online bookstores like Amazon is that they’re commonly acceptable purchasing places for the general public.  Joe from down the street may not feel comfortable giving you his credit card number but he’ll gladly give it to the folks at Amazon.  You make a sale and cautious Joe gets his book.  Online bookstores are also a great tool to build a community of followers.  Amazon enables authors to create a community by posting information about the author, reviews, and even forums and chat rooms.

Expert Knowledge.
Information marketing is not without its experts and many of these experts have made themselves available to people that are interested in marketing and publishing their own books.  This means that expert knowledge is available to you in just about any form you prefer.  If you like one on one coaching, it’s out there.  If you prefer online classes, well those are available too.  Prefer an ebook or video tutorial on writing or publishing, it’s all available online.  The internet has opened up a whole new kind of classroom where you can learn about anything including how to write and publish a book.

Writing, publishing and making money with your own book is just like any other business. You will find 5% of businesses, are making money and the other 95% are struggling financially. Being an author is no different than being in business for yourself and most authors don’t want to except this so they remain broke.

Poor authors think it is all about the writing and Rich authors know its all about the marketing. You could have written the best book ever but if you don’t know how to market it you will probably stay fairly broke. On the other hand a mediocre book that is properly marketed could make you a very rich person.

So lesson one as an author is to accept the fact that you are first a marketer and then an author if you truly want to make a lot of money by writing and publishing your own book. That’s good news for authors because marketing your own book is easy to do if you just take the time to learn how.

Writing and self publishing today can be a financial bonanza and there is much help to encourage would be authors how to make a lot of money writing their books. If you are like 81% of the population who say they want to write their own book there has never been a better time in history to prosper as an author.

There are many books available on the internet as well as book stores that will show you how to write your book in as little as a month or even less and I am talking about only an hour a days work. Self publishing your book has also been made much easier as well because of technology.

Not too many years back you had to pay a large some of money to get 2000 books printed by a printer just so you could get a decent per book price. Now with desk top publishing and new technology you can print one book at a time.

One book I highly recommend that is full of good information is ‘From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur’ by Stephanie Chandler
http://tinyurl.com/2ozkwq  

One of the greatest benefits of writing a book is that you position yourself as the expert. Most people I talk to have no idea about how to become the expert because most have never really thought about it.

When I ask people how they could become an expert in their field of work most are left without an answer. When I press them a little more for a response most think that it might be through training and a certifying board that regulates experts in any given field,

When I tell them that they can be an expert by first declaring themselves as one and second reinforcing their expert hood by writing a book some will just not believe that it is that easy.

You see in most industries you can position yourself quite quickly as the expert if you do a few very simple things. There is in most cases no certifying board of experts or a God that sanction you as the one for expert hood.

Why is this so important to you? Because once you position yourself as the expert your world will explode with new opportunities. You see most people will seek out and pay more money to people who they perceive as being the expert.

So rather than you having to chase down customers the table will be turned and the customers will seek you out for your expertise. The nice thing about the customers who seek you out for your expertise is that they will pay you more money and be a better customer in general because they know the value of good advice.

I remember years ago in my industry of fire and flood restoration a new fellow came out of the woodwork and declared himself the expert. Well about 50 % of the people in my industry took the stand of who is this guy to declare himself the expert? The other 50% took him at face value and believed he was the expert.

Well to make a long story short here it is 12 years later and he is making about 4 million dollars a year as the expert in my industry. He declared himself the expert and was positioned to attract the high paying clients that wanted his expertise. The miracle of stories like this is that it is easier than almost anyone thinks.

I will be writing about all the different tips and strategies you can use to position yourself as the expert over the next few emails. I will also be talking about eliminating any excuses you may have that rear there ugly head in your own mind. I am sincere when I say if I can do it you can to and I‘m going to show you how.

If you have friends or business associates that would like to substantially explode their income please forward on this article and have them opt-in to my mailing list.

Committed To Your Expert Success