How to write and publish your book in 30 days: Part 1 - The Foundation of a Successful Writing Life

0:00Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

0:30And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small, medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you so much for listening to this how to write and publish your first book in the next 30 days. I will tell you that writing books has created so many wonderful benefits for me, including joining the community of other writers, many of whom became great friends eventually.

1:20Also, so many business opportunities and even personal benefits. It's like, I'll tell you this story later, but how I met my wife because I was a book writer. So before we get into the meat and specifics of writing and publishing and writing your first book, I wanna tell you a little bit more about the many reasons are why you should write a book right now in today's day and age.

1:49This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

2:23book or they hadn't written a truly viral article or blog post or whatever. So I wanted to make this to, again, help people write and publish their first book and hopefully begin a successful writing career. I've written 25 books. Some of them were very successful bestsellers. Some of them not so good, but we'll ignore those for now. I've written nonfiction, fiction. Have you ever written a comic book and I've written, for better or for worse, many viral articles that have created a lot of opinion and controversy. I'm embarrassed to admit about what my initial reasons were for wanting to write a book.

3:02It was many years ago, I was 20, 21 years old, and I was very insecure. I honestly thought nobody would like me unless I was already successful. I thought nobody would want to be my friend. I thought I wouldn't have a job. So I wanted to write a book so the book would almost precede me before anyone met me. But there are many actual important reasons to write a book. One is people are more likely to learn who you are if you've written a book. I don't remember who's written my favorite blog posts, but I always remember who my favorite authors are. Another thing is if you're in business and you're trying to get a consulting gig or a speaking engagement, the person who's written a book is more likely to get the gig than the person who hasn't written a book.

3:46Also, books have a longer lifespan than blog posts. I keep books on my bookshelf. I don't keep blog posts on my bookshelf. And in a digital world, it's good sometimes to be able to say, here, I've made this. This is something physical. You can see, oh, it's by James Aldrich. It's a physical book that makes me feel proud. We can't ignore the fact that you You might make money writing books. That's an important reason. Also, sometimes when I write a book, I think my great, great, great, great grandchildren might one day read this book. Now, of course, they can read a blog post or your emails or whatever, but these are my curated thoughts about who I am and what I stand for.

4:29A book is really like the new business card. Doesn't have just your email or phone number, but like, again, this is me. This is what I'm about and what I know about and what I feel I'm an expert in. And let's be honest, it's fun to entertain people with stories. And we're gonna talk a lot about this, but a book is a way to entertain. You're an entertainer once you're a writer. And perhaps most importantly, your first book might lead to your second book, your third book, and a whole career in writing. Before you even touch the keyboard and begin that writing, there's a couple of things we need to talk about and think about so you can even begin the process of writing a book.

5:08The first is asking the questions, who are you? Why are you? Why now? And I'll cover that in the very next chapter in this module. The second is, what are myths that are common about writing that will actually hurt you in the process of writing your book? And then finally, time management is incredibly important for writing. And we'll talk about that very briefly, but it's important to be able to think about that before you start writing your first book. Many of you might have read the book, Start With Why by Simon Sinek. And the concept in his book is, for everything you do, whether it's starting a business, writing a book, even beginning a relationship, why are you doing this?

5:53Why is this important to you? And another book that is worth reading on this topic is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. So Viktor Frankl was a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. And in order to survive every day, he needed to find meaning in his life. Like maybe the meaning in his life that kept him going was one day he would see his wife again. Or maybe another day, the meaning that kept him going was one day he would write about this and let people know what was happening. So whether it's your search for why or your search for meaning, it's very important to have a kind of fundamental basis for why it is you're writing something.

6:37Now, I like that start with why, and I like the book Man's Search for Meaning. I highly recommend these books, but I've expanded this a little further. This is what I ask myself when I'm starting any project. And again, it could be a book, it could be a business, it could be a meeting I need to go to, anything, no matter how big or small. And here's the three questions I ask. Who are you? Why are you? Why now? So for instance, when I wrote the book Choose Yourself, which was about how a time when I went completely broke and I was really depressed and even suicidal and how I overcame these feelings in order to try to succeed again and eventually to succeed again.

7:20At that time, let's say if I were to ask myself, who are you, why are you, why now? I would say, who am I? Well, I'm someone who went broke, who lost millions of dollars after being an entrepreneur and selling a business. And that happened to me more than once. And I also was a writer. I'd written several books by that point. Why are you? Well, I'm someone who likes to explain things and teach and coach and help people. And then I had to answer the question, why now? Well, this was a few years after the great recession of 2008, 2009. And many people had gone broke. Many people had gone through similar things to me, but they were afraid to talk about them.

8:02There was shame associated with going broke and failing in a business and so on. So I felt it was important right then and there to tell my story and help people. And because I was able to answer very clearly those questions, who are you? Why are you? Why now? That really drove the success of that book. And again, these questions apply to anything you do. Let's talk about me making this writing course. Who am I? Someone who's written 25 books and written for many publications and so on. Why are you? Again, I'm someone who likes to explain and teach, particularly where I think there are gaps. There's nobody else doing a writing course specifically like this that's getting to be very specific advice and showing you how to write and publish your first books.

8:52That's the why are you? And why now? Hopefully we won't, but we might be entering a recession and we've been having some economic hard times. More people than ever are writing books. And I want you to write the best possible first book and perhaps launch a writing career or get other benefits for writing a book. And we talked about those benefits in the last section. So that's my who are you, why are you, why now for making this course. Think for a moment about your answers to these questions. Who are you? Why are you? Why now? Maybe you're retired and you have had a lot of interesting life experiences.

9:32And maybe the why are you is you want your great-great-grandchildren or your friends or people who don't know you, maybe your ex-co-workers or readers in general, to know about your experiences. And the why now, maybe you feel at this point in your life, You're switching from ambition to mentorship, and it's really important for you to get these messages out. So that could be the answers to your questions. But always think about this. Again, who are you? Why are you? Why now? Next, we're going to talk about a lot of the myths about writing, myths that I want to talk to you about so that they don't add to your worries and they don't rent up real estate in your brain while you're writing your book.

10:16There's a lot of myths about writing that could hurt your writing if you pay too much attention to them. First one, and it's going to sound unusual, the first one is to think too much about quality. Now, I'm not saying write a bad book. I'm saying there are two important things about quality you should avoid. One is you're only writing right now a first draft. The important thing of a first draft is to type. That's literally the main skill you need. It's typing and storytelling. I'm going to show you how to edit a first draft and make a second draft, third draft and make it as perfect as you possibly can.

10:50But quality is the last thing on your mind when you're writing that first draft. First, you're getting all the ideas on the page. You're getting all the stories on the page. Then you'll figure it out. Length. A lot of people, this is a big myth. A lot of people think, oh, I've got to write 60 ,000 words. I've got to write 250 pages. I don't know why that became the common size of a book with traditional publishing, but I'll give you an example. I have one friend, Kamal Ravikant. He wrote a bestselling book that sold millions of copies. It's called Love Yourself as If Your Life Depended on It. And I think it was like 20 or 30 pages, maybe even less.

11:26He sold millions of copies. When you publish a book now, if you're not using traditional publishing, and we're going to talk about that eventually, self-publishing versus traditional publishing. But if you're self-publishing a paperback, hardcover, audiobook, Kindle, you do not have to worry about the length. So do not think about that. put it out of your head. Another myth, intros. When you're starting a chapter, start in the middle. You don't have to start with the intro. You could figure out the introduction later. That concludes the intro of the book and the intro of each chapter. And I will teach you how to write a great intro, the best intro possible.

12:01But let's say you're writing a chapter on the 10 ways to be happy. Okay. Just make your list, right? The 10 ways to be happy. Oh, you've got a story about one of them, write your story. Later on, we'll figure out the intro. So start in the middle is the advice there. Chapter order. The last book I wrote, skip the line, which is right here. I wrote the book and submitted it to the publisher. And she was like, well, does this chapter belong here? Does this chapter belong here? And she was right. So I completely rearranged the chapters of the book. Again, your goal in the first draft is just to get as much material.

12:35You're just vomiting words onto the manuscript. So get the words out there. We'll figure out chapter order later. Expertise. This is a huge myth that you have to concern yourself. A lot of people say, well, I can't write about flowers. I don't know anything about botany. I don't have a PhD in botany. Your job as a writer is to tell stories and to tell stories that are impactful and are unique and are able to express an idea in a unique way. Your job is not to be a botanist or a PhD in anything. If you read academic papers, guess what? They're unreadable. Sometimes the smarter people are, the more degrees they have, the worse of a writer they are.

13:15Your job is to tell stories simply and uniquely and in an understandable way. Not to be an expert because you can research the expertise. Huge myth, grammar. I have the worst grammar of anyone. and I never think about grammar. If something sounds good to my ears, then I put it in regardless of grammar. And particularly in the first draft, again, don't look backwards. Just keep typing forwards. Your job is to get as many ideas onto the page as possible. Do not even once think about grammar on the first draft. So that's the miss. Next, we're going to talk about something incredibly important for writing that many writers don't even consider, which is time management.

13:58But let me ask you a question. When are you going to write this book? When during the day are you going to write this book? Just think about it. What time during the day? And the reason I'm asking this is because your day is already full. Yesterday, for instance, you spent 24 hours doing things. You're going to have to change something in what you do every day to have the time to write. Whether you need an hour a day, a half hour a day, two hours a day. I don't know. That's up to you. But where does that hour come from? I have one friend. He would commute an hour every day to work and an hour back.

14:34He said to me, I saw everybody reading the New York Post or sleeping, taking a nap. And I felt like this is when I should be writing my first novel. So he did. He wrote a page on the way to work and he wrote a page on the way back. And within a few months, he had finished his first of four murder mysteries. And so think to yourself, maybe even audit your time. What do you do every step of the day? Audit your time for the past week or for the next week and ask yourself, what can I, do I wake up a little early? Do I not go to lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays with my colleagues? Think of the time where you could spend at least 45 minutes to an hour every day writing.

15:15Hopefully a little bit more, but don't worry so much about that. The important thing is to be consistent. You don't have to write the same time each day, but I would recommend that. again, think about what time of each day can you change in your schedule so that you write. And if you can't think of that, go back to the questions, who are you? Why are you? Why now? And make sure that now is really the time for you to be writing a book. So, because if you can't answer these questions, you have probably have better things to do with your life than writing a book. But if you can't answer those questions, then I'm sure you can find the time to start writing.

15:51Now, next are all about the craft and art of writing and storytelling. Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

16:31And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature. That's linkedin.com slash Altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. The core of every story is something called the arc of the hero. Every great story ever written, whether it's the Bible or Star Wars or the story of Spider-Man or the Matrix or even the story of your own life, Every great story has the arc of the hero.

17:19And I'm going to describe the different components of the arc of the hero, what makes a great arc, what makes a great story. And I want you to think about your own life and how the arc of the hero might apply. And then in the section after this, I'm going to give more examples. But the first part of the arc of the hero and the beginning of a story is the call to action. So I'll give an example from my own life. At one point, I went broke. I owned a house. I had kids. I had a family. I had just sold a business. And I just went completely broke. And I was depressed and suicidal. But I had to make money because I didn't know how to live.

17:58I had already sold my company. That's the only thing I had worked on. And I lost all my money. So the call to action was losing all of my money. Then the second part of the arc of the hero is the reluctant hero. I thought I was retired already. I didn't want to have to make more money or build another business. I was a reluctant hero. The second part of every story of the arc of the hero is the reluctant hero. And I will give, again, more examples in the next section. The third component is the inciting incident. There's something happens that forces one to go on the journey. So for instance, in the story of Spider-Man, if you remember it, his uncle Ben dies and And Spider-Man decides to go from just using his powers for money to being a superhero.

18:45That's the inciting incident. For me, it was losing my home. I literally had to make money or I'd be homeless. That was an inciting incident. The fourth component of the arc of the hero is the journey where you make friends and enemies and start to encounter problems. So for me, I had to move to another part of the world. I had to meet people who would make new friends, who would help me make money and survive. And I had enemies, because whenever you try to start a business or build a business or build a fortune, there are gonna be people who are trying to stop you. The next component is that your problems get bigger and bigger and bigger.

19:27And along the way, you meet more friends and more enemies until you meet the greatest enemies of all. And sometimes those enemies are yourself. Sometimes you're filled with self-doubt or self-loathing or depression. And sometimes the enemies are other people who are trying to stop you. And of course, in every movie and the Bible and every story you could think of, the enemies get greater and greater until finally the next part of the arc of the hero is the greatest problem of all. Whether it's destroying the Death Star or Moses leading the Jews to Israel or, you know, Spider-Man fighting Thanos in the Avengers or whatever.

20:06The next component is this great problem that basically is the climax of the movie. And then finally, it's being able to solve a problem and then you come back to tell the tale. So for instance, for me, I overcame my depression. I was able to build another business. I was able to start writing and really satisfy many of my life's dreams. And I wrote a book summarizing the tale. So again, to summarize the arc of the hero, there's the call to action, but there's a reluctant hero. But then there's an inciting incident that pushes that hero along. Then you go on a journey and you meet friends and enemies and they get greater and greater.

20:45The problems you encounter get greater and greater until finally you have the greatest problem of it all. And then you solve it and then you return to tell the tale. So remember that formula. And we're going to look at some specific examples. Think of the movie Star Wars. Even if you haven't seen Star Wars, and many people, of course, have seen Star Wars, you'll be able to follow along. So in the beginning of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is a young farmhand on some weird planet. And he runs into this strange old guy, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who says, you need to go out there and save the universe. So that was the call to action when Obi-Wan Kenobi told him to save the universe or save the galaxy.

21:27Luke Skywalker was reluctant. And he said, oh, I need to help my uncle on the farm. And Obi-Wan Kenobi shrugs his shoulders. But then there's an inciting incident. Luke's uncle and aunt are killed by Imperial stormtroopers. So that's the inciting incident. And Luke's like, let's go. And then they meet friends, Han Solo and Chewbacca, because those friends are going to help him get off the planet. Now notice, even their friends have problems. Han Solo is running from the debt he owes Jabba the Hutt. And he has to kill someone who's a bounty hunter in the bar who's after him. So every part of a story has the arc of the hero.

22:09Even small stories within a story also contain the arc of the hero. So the overall story of Star Wars is about Luke Skywalker, but Han Solo has his own arc. Obi-Wan Kenobi has his own arc. Princess Leia has her own arc. But okay, we have Luke now meeting friends and meeting enemies. Like, oh, the people in the bar were harassing him. The stormtroopers are starting to chase him. But now the problems get greater. He's got to go to the Death Star and rescue Princess Leia with his new friends. And along the way, there's more problems. The planet Alderaan is blown up. Another problem, he has to figure out how to use the Force.

22:47They get to the Death Star. They rescue Princess Leia. You would think, oh, that's all these great problems solved. No, now there's more problems and he meets more friends. He goes to where the revolution is and he meets all of those people. And now they have a big problem. They have to destroy the Death Star. So that's the biggest problem of all. And it's where he first encounters Darth Vader and he solves that problem. Darth Vader goes spinning off into space at the end of Star Wars. And what happens? Luke, Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca come back to get their awards, and we watch the tale. And then, of course, the arc of the hero continues into the other movies, but Star Wars, the movie itself, was a complete arc of the hero.

23:31It was beautifully done. Every part of the arc was in there. Let's think of another very, very classic example of the Ark of the Hero. So classic, in fact, that this has been literally a best-selling story for 2 ,500 years. So I'm talking about the story of Moses. So Moses was born Jewish at a time when Jews were the slaves of the Egyptians. Moses' mother, for whatever reason, she couldn't handle him. She put him in a basket, put him in the Nile River, and by magic, the daughter of the Pharaoh found him. And Moses, not realizing his Jewish background, grew up as a prince in the royal family. So that's the beginning.

24:13That's our hero. But what's the call to action? He starts to feel sorry for the Jewish people. They're slaves. They're being beaten and so on. But, you know, he's a prince. He doesn't want to ruffle any feathers. He wants to eventually be the pharaoh. until one day he is so appalled by the way a slave master is treating the Jews. He beats up the slave master, kills him mostly by accident, I guess. And because of this, he has to flee Egypt. So he doesn't want to, he wanted to be a prince. He was reluctant. He flees Egypt to some other country and he runs into, guess what? A burning bush. The bush, who's God obviously, tells him, Moses, you need to go back to Egypt and save the Jews.

25:01And Moses is once again reluctant. He says, I have a stutter. I can't do it. So God says, work with your brother Aaron. He'll speak for you. And you need to go and be the leader of the Jews and get them out of Egypt and take them to Israel. So Moses does this. He goes back to Egypt. He says to the Pharaoh, Pharaoh, you've got to release the Jews. So now he's got new friends, Aaron and the Jewish people, and he's got enemies. His previous stepfather, the Pharaoh, is now his enemy. And the Pharaoh says, no way, we're not releasing the Jewish people from slavery. God goes to Moses and Moses says, do this, this, this, this.

25:43Ultimately, Moses goes back to Pharaoh 10 times with 10 different plagues and each one is a greater and greater and more deadly plague. And each time, Pharaoh still says, no way, I am not releasing the Jewish people from slavery. Finally, after the 10th plague, the killing of the firstborn children, Pharaoh says, you win, I'm releasing the Jewish people from slavery. Oh, we think the problems are solved. No, they are not. As Moses is leading the Jews away from Egypt, Pharaoh changed his mind. We have a much greater problem. The entire Egyptian army is chasing them. And in front of them is the Red Sea.

26:25They can't run anymore. So God says, don't worry, I'm going to help you out. And Moses splits the Red Sea in half and they walk through it. The Egyptian army tries to follow and the Red Sea collapses in and destroys the whole army. So you think this is the greatest problem, but no, there are still greater and greater problems. They go into the desert for 40 years on their trip to Israel. And along the way, Moses gets the Ten Commandments. When he comes down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the Jewish people have all rebelled. They're worshiping idols. Moses is really upset. God is upset.