About a year ago, I was celebrating 2 years of doing daily ambidextrous Morning Pages when a universal message appeared in them one day saying, “it’s time to share your story.” What, me write a book? How to start? What to do? Well, setting goals worked well for every other aspect of my life so I came up with my book’s (Thinking With My Heart: A Journaler’s Journey of Self-Compassion, Harmony and Healing) goals:
1. To share my self-healing journaling expertise and experience
2. To show how my self-healing journaling tool/mentor/therapist helped me become my own primary healthcare provider
3. To inspire people to use their own self-healing journaling practice for creating the life that they want to live
4. To expand CreateWriteNow’s platform
5. To learn how to write a book.
And I set a daily writing schedule and started. This year, I felt comfortable that I had what Anne LaMott calls “a shitty first draft” but had no clue where to go next. I didn’t feel doing a rewrite was warranted just yet and then:
Enter WOW-WomenOnWriting.com who asked me to review The Nonfiction Book Proposal Demystified: An Easy-Schmeasy Guide to Writing a Business Plan for Your Book by Nina Amir. And as a business person at heart and by experience, this is book provided exactly what my muses (yes, in my book writing I found I really had lots of them) needed: a business plan otherwise known as a book proposal.
A nonfiction book proposal convinces agents and all types of publishers my book idea is marketable and that I’ll make a good business partner. If business and business plans are not your forté, but still don’t know where to start, this eBook provides you with a quick, easy-schmeasy guide to writing your plan.
Each section of a nonfiction book proposal is briefly described so you understand what content to include and how to write it effectively. In just a page or two, you will discover all the information necessary to research and compose the material for each of the 12 primary sections in a nonfiction book proposal
The information in this eBook can also be used as a template for a fiction proposal, since today more and more fiction publishers require proposals quite similar to nonfiction proposals, or as a simple business plan for making a self-published book like mine a success.
My next step? Why rereading The Nonfiction Book Proposal Demystified and starting a new Journal for creating my book proposal/business plan. The first thing I must write is The Overview, a 2-3 page sales document that, as Nina says, “must point to the fact that your idea is unique and necessary and has a market.” I’m off to sell my agent and publisher
Thank you, Nina Amir for this brief and bountiful guide to helping me become a practical, published, profitable author.
About
Nina Amir, Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results. She motivates writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products and careers as authors as well as to achieve their goals, fulfill their purpose and live inspired lives.
The author of How to Blog a Book: How to Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer's Digest Books), Amir is a nonfiction editor, book proposal and blogging consultant, blog-to-book coach, and book and author coach with more than 33 years of experience in the publishing field. She also is the founder of Write Nonfiction in November, a blog and challenge. She writes five blogs, including Write Nonfiction NOW!, How to Blog a Book and As the Spirit Moves Me, and two national Examiner.com columns. Additionally, she is the regular writing and publishing expert on the popular radio show, Dresser After Dark (www.dresserafterdark.com), hosted by Michael Ray Dresser, which has approximately 80,000 listeners per month.
Amir holds a BA in magazine journalism with a concentration in psychology, has edited or written for more than 50 publications producing hundreds of articles and had her work published in five anthologies. She has self-published 10 short books, including the popular workbook How to Evaluate Your Book for Success and 10 Days and 10 Ways to Return to Your Best Self.
As a book editor, Amir also has a proven track record. One of her clients' books (Enlightened Leadership) was self-published and then purchased and re-released verbatim by Simon & Schuster (Fireside); the book has sold over 230,000 to date. Another (Radical Forgiveness) won the 1998 Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Award (Inspirational category), went on to sell over 115,000 copies, and recently was purchased by Sounds True. Her clients' proposals regularly get them contracts with agents as well.
Amir also speaks and writes about self-improvement, human potential, practical spirituality, and Judaism. She is the former regular holiday and spirituality expert on Conversations with Mrs. Claus, a weekly podcast heard in more than 90 countries and downloaded by 130,000 listeners per month. She is a certified rebirther, a trained Voice Dialogue facilitator and currently is working on her life coaching certificate. Although she often speaks and writes from a Jewish perspective, her work spans religious lines and is pertinent to people of all faiths and spiritual traditions.
In all she does, Amir focuses on helping people live their lives fully and manifest their desires -- whether those desires look like written products or something entirely different. She sees herself as an "Everywoman" whose struggles and successes are not unlike anyone else's. Therefore, she writes, speaks and teaches from a place of knowing that what has worked for her will at least provide others with a starting place from which to find what works best for them.
Amir lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos, CA.
Find out more about the author by visiting her online:
Author Website: http://www.ninaamir.com/
Blogs: http://www.writenonfictionnow.com/ andhttp://www.howtoblogabook.com/
Twitter: @ninaamir
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/InspirationToCreationand http://www.facebook.com/ninaamir
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ninaamir
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/ninaamir
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NinaAmir/
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