How to Write Your First Book
A step-by-step guide
3 min readApr 5, 2024
- Setup a Medium account.
- Write and publish your first article.
- Start your own blog.
- Write (almost) every day for three years.
- Setup a newsletter using MailChimp.
- Include an email capture form at the end of each post using Upscribe.
- Create a book outline using posts from your blog.
- Send your outline to a group of potential readers (and your email list)
- Update it based on their feedback.
- Spend at least one hour each day writing your first draft.
- Finish your first draft and take a week off.
- Print your first copy out on actual paper ($14 at FedEx).
- Read through it once to get the feel for the overall flow.
- Read through it again, making any edits with a red pen.
- Transfer these edits to a new draft in Google Docs.
- Decide that this idea wasn’t as valuable or marketable as you thought.
- Shelf this manuscript and repeat steps 7–15.
- OK, now that you’re back on track, share this second book concept with a diverse group of early readers.
