Hey there and welcome to Nothing but the Words. I’m your author coach, Candice L Davis.

I hope your week and your writing are going well.

My husband and I have been traveling quite a bit lately, most recently to Chicago, where we spent five days hanging out with family and good friends—who are really also family.

There’s something very freeing about traveling again—spending time in new environments has been great for my creativity and ideation. I have more ideas than I can possibly act on right now, and I’m excited about some new elements I’ll be adding to my group coaching program, Short Books: Big Results.

I’ve also been catching up with some of the people I’d usually see around the city at networking meetings, or cross paths with at conferences. Last week, I had the chance to catch up with my friend Nadine, the founder of Nadine Mullings Marketing Agency.

Nadine explained to me that she’s been working with a lot of authors over the last year, which of course, I was glad to hear.

Interestingly, she said many of those authors came to her because they’d written a book, self-published it, and then got stuck. They never really put their books out into the world. They didn’t tell anyone about them.

I can totally see how authors end up in that situation. The fact is that writing a great book can be an all-consuming project.

For authors who are balancing a business and/or a full-time job, and a family, and social obligations, and everything else the average person juggles, it can be easy to get lost in getting the book to the finish line and forget about what happens after that.

It doesn’t matter if you’re self-publishing or you have a traditional book deal.

You need a vision for your book.

Maybe you’re a speaker and you want to use your book to get on bigger stages.

Maybe your book is a passion project—a way to share a message people absolutely need to hear.

It’s up to you to decide what you want your book to do in the world.

Writing your book requires a lot of investment of your time and creativity.

It’s easy to get caught up in that process and forget about the end game.

But what’s your vision for your book?

Without a vision for your book, it can be easier than you might think to find yourself in that position Nadine was talking about.

But you don’t have to. Instead, I suggest you actually write the vision for your book.

A great way to start designing your vision for your book is to start with your purpose.

What’s your purpose? Here, I mean your purpose, not necessarily your book’s purpose.

Purpose is a bigger discussion, but I’ll quickly say this. I don’t believe any of us has just one purpose. I believe we all satisfy our purpose for being simply by being. We’re here to live life. Beyond that, we have a purpose to connect to other people. We have a purpose to make life better for other people in big or small ways, and that can happen in an infinite number of different forms.

Your purpose may be to give people a respite from the difficulties of life by making them laugh. My husband works with a group of comedians on a comedy tour, and they make life better for their audience every time they step on stage and tell jokes that help the audience escape their daily routines and just laugh for a couple of hours.

Your purpose may be to make people laugh, or it may be to give people hope.

Part of your purpose may be to help more women earn the salary they deserve, or to help people with chronic diseases live a healthier and more joyful life. It may be to help people learn how to better manage their finances or prepare meals they can enjoy around the table with their families, to help kids get into college, or to help people grow from their trauma.

No matter what your purpose(s) are, your book can help you fulfill them.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Well my purpose and my book idea don’t really have anything to do with each other.”

Then, if this is the book you’re committed to writing, I would suggest you look at it the other way around.

What purpose can your book help you fulfill? Take the action to write it and let your book lead you to this new purpose.

As you craft your vision for your book, ask yourself: What are your core values?

How can your book help you live these values?

What do you want your book to do in the world?

How many people do you want your book to reach?

A year after it’s published, what positive impact will your book have made?

Five years after it’s published, what impact will your book have had?

Don’t worry about the “how” just yet. Instead, really craft the vision for what you want your book to do.

How will your readers be changed by your book?

How will your life or business be changed because you became an author?

I tell my coaching clients they need two purposes for their book: a purpose for their readers and a purpose for the author.

These two purposes are a part of your vision for your book, but with your vision, I want you to go deeper and project out farther into the future.

Let your vision be as big as it wants to be.

I invite you to really start with the bigger picture of what you want your book to do in the future.

Once you have a vision for your book, you can start creating your strategy for how you’ll bring that vision to life.

Don’t let that overwhelm you. There are plenty of people and resources available to help you craft and implement your strategy—author coaches, like me, PR reps, marketing strategists, mastermind groups, and more. There are great books on the subject. This information is available to you.

You can come up with a plan to make your vision for your book a reality, and you can make it happen.

But it all starts with crafting your vision.

That’s all for this episode, my friends.

For more writing tips and inspiration, follow me on IG @candiceldavis.

Thanks for listening to Nothing but the Words. I’m Your Author Coach, Candice L Davis. And I’ll see you next time.