If you want to write a book that has a massive positive impact, you may have to adjust your life to align writing with your lifestyle, your capacity, your calendar, and more.

Welcome to Nothing But the Words.

I'm your book coach and peak performance coach to creatives, Candace L. Davis.

In this episode, I wanna give you three areas you need to get into alignment if you want to become a successful author.

As you'll see by the end of this episode, successful authors are almost always also aligned authors.

That's why I named my writer's workshop the Aligned Authors Writer's Workshop and Mastermind.

I recognize how important this is.

Almost two decades of experience have taught me how that alignment will define your ability to succeed as an author.

I've learned the hard way and I've learned through my clients' experience. So to be clear, I'm defining success as meeting your own goals.

Those could be whatever you decide they are.

Now, some of my coaching clients have sold tens of thousands of copies of their books.

In fact, they've sold tens of thousands of copies year after year after year.

Others, like Rachel Luna, Miriam Schulman, Antonio Lafaso, Patrice Washington, have landed traditional book deals which they leverage to secure media spots to promote their brand or their business.

Some have written books to lead their readers directly to their other products and services, which has also allowed them to grow their business.

You're the only one who can decide what success looks like for you as an author, and it's crucial that you have that vision early on in this process.

It's one of the things that will pull you through when things get hard, and they will get hard at some points in the writing process.

These clients are able to create these results in large part because they have aligned their ideas for their book with the life or the business or the career they want to create.

So this is the first of three areas you need to align.

I talk about this kind of alignment all the time.

It's the A in my SPARK Writing Method.

You need to align the aspirations you have for your readers with the aspirations you have for yourself.

And to do this, you need to know your one perfect reader really well.

If you're not sure who that is or how to get to know that person, go back and listen to the early episodes of this podcast.

Episode number three covers that in detail.

For now, the point is to know that person well, the person who's looking for your book, to know them well so you can meet their needs and their wants, so you can use stories and examples that will resonate with them that they can relate to, and so you can connect with them in a deeper way so that they want more from you in the future.

You need to have a specific outcome your book will give to your one perfect reader.

And you need to write to that end.

But that's not enough.

Everything you want your book to do for your reader needs to align with what you want your book to do for you.

So that might not make a lot of sense to you if you're hearing that for the first time.

Let me give you an example.

If you're writing a memoir, a story of your life or some part of your life to give people hope that they can heal from broken relationships, for example, but you're hoping your book will lead people to sign up for your weight loss coaching, something is misaligned here, right?

Broken relationships, weight loss coaching, they're probably not going to be in direct alignment.

You wanna have a book that does what you want it to do for your readers and for you.

Becoming an author should also align with the larger vision you have for your life, your career, your business, your legacy, the impact that you really want to create.

If it doesn't, you may find you spend months writing the wrong book, and I've seen that happen.

Someone dedicates their time to writing a book pr- usually because someone else told them that they should, and it's not the book they should have been writing.

Get that alignment on lock before you start writing your book.

Okay, let's move on to the second area of alignment that successful authors already understand.

They align their lifestyle, their time management, their routine, and their habits with writing so they can have the time, and energy, and creativity to write.

Now, some time ago, a coaching client reached out to share how packed her schedule had become since we started working together.

She was already busy, but along the way she received a media opportunity that she had prayed for and worked for.

She took that opportunity, but it now means less discretionary time in her calendar every week.

So she's looking at her calendar.

She sees her job.

She sees her business.

She sees her family.

She sees her ministry work at her church.

She sees new media opportunities.

She sees extended family obligations.

Where is her book on her daily, weekly, or monthly agenda?

Something had to give, friend.

Her book is both a part of her greater ministry and a building block for her business.

It's a part of her legacy.

When it's finished and published, her book will both serve her community and help provide for her family.

Her book will get her the media interviews that she's seeking, and it will connect her to a larger network of influential people in her field.

I can see this for her already, and she can see it for herself.

She's writing a personal development book, and it will absolutely change her readers' lives for the better.

But until she gets her time and energetic capacity in alignment with her goal of becoming a successful author, none of that can happen.

If you want to write a book that has a massively positive impact, you will almost certainly have to adjust your life in some way.

You'll have to adjust your life to align writing with your lifestyle, your capacity, your calendar, and more.

That brings us to our third and final, at least for this episode, area of alignment that will allow you to become a truly successful author, and it's a big one.

Successful authors align their effort with their goals for their book.

They align the thought and the work and the creativity that they're willing to pour into their book with what they hope to get out of it.

Now, I know AI promises all things should be fast and easy, but my grandparents taught me that anything that seems too good to be true probably is, and nothing worth having is free.

Writing a truly impactful book requires effort.

This is where comparison, believe it or not, can actually be quite valuable.

If you want your book to have the kind of impact your favorite authors of books have, you need to look at those books.

Are they a hundred pages long?

Two hundred pages long?

Three hundred?

How deep do those authors go into their topic?

What kinds of research do they reference?

How much time did the author commit to writing the book?

How much time did they spend capturing their story and extracting the wisdom from it?

How much work have they done over the years to acquire the knowledge that they are sharing on those pages?

Now, listen, don't freak out. I am not saying you need to study a few more decades or go out and get a degree before you write your book.

Not at all.

You have the knowledge that you need.

You may need to do some research depending on the kind of book you're writing, but you have plenty of knowledge and wisdom at your big age.

Working with what you know right now, how much effort are you willing to put into crafting a book that will make a real difference for you and for your readers?

There are different levels of books, levels in quotation marks for those who are not watching video.

There are different levels of books.

We all know this.

Some books are kind of slapdash put together.

Most of us don't spend much time reading those because they don't provide much value.

But short books can provide value.

You don't have to have write a three-hundred-page book to provide value.

If you're writing a pretty direct how-to book that's filled with information you already know very well, it might take you less effort than writing a broader, bigger, deeper book.

It may also have a smaller impact.

There's nothing wrong with that at all but if you wanna have a bigger impact, honestly, you need to be willing to put in bigger effort.

One of my coaching clients put the draft of her first book together in just a few months.

She's one of the people who sold tens of thousands of copies of her books.

But she had already spent years writing blog posts and articles about the topic.

So she had done so much of that work that when it came time to write, the effort was already largely behind her.

Years of effort distilled into months of writing she built a multi-six figure speaking career from that book.

If you want to write a book worth reading, a book that makes a difference, you need to be willing to put in the required effort.

Most successful authors know this, and intuitively you probably do too, because it's all similar to the other goals you've accomplished in your life.

Now, there are three areas of alignment we've covered in this episode.

Number one, you need to align your goals for your reader with your goals for yourself and your bigger vision for your life, your business, your career.

Number two, you need to align your lifestyle, energetic and creative capacity, and calendar to allow for the time to write a truly impactful book.

And number three, you need to align the effort you're willing to pour into your book with the results you desire to achieve with your book.

When you create alignment in these three areas, you give yourself the best possible chance to become a truly successful author, and every bit of that is possible for you.

If this episode has resonated with you and you wanna go deeper into the writing process, sign up for my free private podcast, From Best Kept Secret to Center Stage.

It's all about how you can get your most important message out in a book that spotlights both you and that message find it at www.candiceldavis.com/secret or at the link in the show notes in your podcast player.

Thanks for listening to Nothing But the Words. I'm book coach and peak performance coach to creatives, Candice L. Davis, and I'll see you next time