12 takeaways from James Clear on what it takes to write and launch a bestselling book

Recently, I had the pleasure of watching James Clear, bestselling author of Atomic Habits (on track to sell a million copies this year), present at the Thought Leaders Business School.

While I’m not a participant of the program I had the opportunity, thanks to Peter Cook, to access the presentation and interview with him through the live stream.

Like many, I’m a bit of a fan of Clear. I devoured Atomic Habits and I use it with clients as an example of how you balance engaging storytelling with depth of thinking and factual evidence that backs up your opinions. (The structure he uses in his writing, particularly his chapters, mimics the 5-Step Structure to Write Anything that I show participants in my online book publishing program.)

Also, it turns out, Clear is a really lovely, generous guy. What he shared about his personal writing process, as well as the growth of his business, was both candid and revealing.

Here’s my learnings compiled into 12 key takeaways.

(NOTE: there is a longer version of this article on my blog.)

1.  Identify who you want to become

One of the central ideas in Atomic Habits is that you need to build identity-based goals, not outcome-based ones. That means understanding the type of person you want to become, rather than the goal you are hoping to achieve – i.e. set out to become an author, not to write a book. 

To do this, you need to start with the end in mind – which is what Clear did when he wrote his own book. ‘The question to start with is who is the type of person that can achieve this?’ he says.

‘Who is the type of person that could write a bestselling book?’

‘I came up with all my answers by Googling and reading as much as I could,’ he explains. ‘Then I interviewed people, other authors, to see what they say about it, and ask what their strategies were. Once you have those two things, you've got a pretty good idea of what the profile of that person might look like, and then you can figure out what habits you need to form to become that person.’

2. Be persistent and consistent

It’s easy to forget how hard someone is working towards something when you don’t see all of the effort going into it at the other end. I think we make this mistake a lot when we assess the size of someone’s email list. So, while Clear now has thousands of subscribers, it didn’t just happen overnight.

‘You can't just flip a switch, and suddenly have a bigger audience,' he says.

‘The building of my email list took five or six years…’

Yet it’s easy to feel disheartened when you’ve been putting what you feel is a lot of effort into something and you’re not seeing any results in return. Clear calls this ‘the valley of disappointment’.

‘That's when people often quit, because they think what they are doing is not working. It’s like, ‘I've been running for a month. Why don't I see a change in my body?’

Hence, he explains, if you really want to grow your email list then don’t miss a blog post for two years! James Clear pretty much didn’t.

‘I wrote two articles a week for three years … it's very rare for somebody to stick to something with that level of consistency, and it was also not something that I just did in passing. It was basically my full-time job.’

3. Get signals of progress

To survive the valley of disappointment, Clear stopped writing his blog to focus on his book. However, this meant he wasn’t getting any feedback, which led to feeling like he was writing in what he called ‘the cave.’

‘I don't need 1000 people to read my work,' he explained, ‘but I need somebody to tell me, am I on the right track here? Am I making progress?’

He adds, ‘If you have a signal that shows that you're progressing then you have every reason in the world to continue, because it's like ‘look, this is going well. I should keep doing this.’ If you don't have any signal of progress, you’re just throwing ideas out into a vacuum, and it's hard to feel motivated, because you have no indication of whether it's working or not.’

4. Create a community of people with uncommon commonalities

Talking to the right people, other bestselling authors, helped Clear come up with the identity profile he was aiming for. It also saved time, especially when it came to the book launch, because he found out, ‘What worked well and what didn’t?’

He rented a house and organised a retreat (something he does every year according to his business focus) so he could hang out with people who had the same ‘uncommon commonalities’ as himself.

He explains, ‘Everybody that was at this last retreat either has a bestselling book, or a blog with over 100,000 subscribers.'

'That's actually a very weird thing in normal life. You would never walk into a restaurant, and find all those people eating there, but to create that space was really powerful for everybody.'  

5. Develop a keystone habit

‘I don't know that I would still be in business, if I didn't exercise consistently,’ said Clear when asked if he has a keystone habit – something he sticks to that creates a ripple effect on other areas in his life (introduced by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habits).

‘Creatives often talk about a daily walk outside as being a keystone habit,’ he adds. ‘If they walk for 10 minutes outside, then they have more creative ideas, they generate more ideas. Managers and CEOs will often talk about meditation as a keystone habit, meditate for 10 minutes in the morning every day, they can handle the demands, and stresses of the day better.’

And if you’ve got more than one keystone habit?

‘Focus on one for a couple of months, and see what that does, and if that's not the one, then you can try the next one,’ Clear says.

6. Create ideas that stand on their own

If I asked you to describe what James Clear looked like could you do it (before you saw the photo posted here)?

His website is pretty simple, and you’ll find only one image of him on it. Why?

‘I want my ideas to stand on their own,’ he explains. ‘If the ideas aren't good enough to hold your interest I need to write something better.’ 

Hence, when he’s writing a blog, he thinks of the content first, and limits all distractions like pop-ups so that the reader, can well, read. He adds: ‘I just want them to fall in love with the work.’

7. Learn to edit your own work – a lot

‘I don't consider myself a good writer; I think I'm a much better editor,’ Clear says. (FYI: I LOVE this).‘The first draught is just your ideas on paper. It's actually the rewriting that is the real writing.’ (100% agree, here.)

After he’s written a 4000-word draft, Clear will spend time revising it at least 25 times.

‘I know this,’ he says, ‘because WordPress will show you how many times you've updated the post, and once it was 262 times …but that's how it gets good.’

He adds, ‘On average, my typical article takes me about 20 hours. That's the longest ones have been about 60. The shortest ones are 8 to 10. Word count, usually, when I write the first draught, it's about 4,000 words. When I publish that article, it's usually down to about 1,500, to 2,000, so you usually read about half of what I write.’

8. Start earlier than you think

Clear started marketing 18 months ahead of the book’s release date. Yet still, he says he waited too long to sell the book! Other authors, he said, told him to:

'start marketing way earlier than you think you need to.’

However, waiting a long time actually ended up serving Clear well. He explains, ‘The fact that I dragged my feet for two years, before I sold the book, meant that my audience was actually larger when it came out, and that helped it to launch better.’

9. Consider the counter argument

‘Businessman Charlie Munger has this quote, where he says you shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion on something, unless you know the other side better than your competitor would,’ Clear says. ‘You should know their arguments better than they know them because that's the only way to stress test your ideas.’

In Clear’s case, a common criticism of tiny habits or small changes is that sometimes you have to make a big leap to have an impact. He argued that, although true,

'you also can't make a big leap, unless you have a running start.'

So what you find is that everywhere in life, big, huge events are almost always preceded by a long series of small things that come beforehand.

Boom. (If you've ever written a book then you'll understand this to be true.)

10. Choose what to write the night before

Yep, even global bestselling authors have bad habits they have to work on. When asked about his, Clear revealed he often finds it hard to ‘power down’ for the night, so could be up answering emails at 10pm.

He also admitted to suffering from procrastination (yes, he is human!), especially when it comes to picking what he will write an article about.

Hence, his secret to overcoming this indecision is to choose what he will write the night before writing it. (Obama was also famous for picking his suits the night before for the same reason.)

11. Praise the good; ignore the bad

A lot of the time, unconsciously, we criticise the very behaviour we are hoping people will perform. Clear’s example of this is when an ‘introverted kid comes down to dinner, and shares what goes on with their day, and somebody says look who showed up. It's like this is the very thing you were hoping they would do, and now they feel like they're criticised for it.’

There is one strategy that Clear has found really helpful to encourage others to perform better habits and that is described as: praise the good, ignore the bad.

So if you’ve written a blog, a paragraph, a sentence, or a word for your article today, well done. Recognising this (instead of berating yourself for the 364 other days you might not have done that) is the key to long-lasting success.

12. Write when you have something valuable to say

Clear previously wrote a small business marketing blog (which no longer exists). He admits this wasn’t ‘his passion’. It was when he switched to writing about something he genuinely cared about, that he began getting more traction.

‘The topic matters a lot,’ he says. ‘I want to write about more scientific ideas, and habits is one of those rare topics, plus basically, everyone in the world can benefit from reading about it. That’s a huge win in choosing a topic that has a big upside like that.’

But that doesn’t mean you’ll see another book out by him soon, which is often the case if an author does well on their first.

‘I want to write another book because I feel like I have something really important to say,’ he says, ‘and because I feel like I have something to contribute to, a topic that's really valuable.’

Kelly Irving is an author mentor and editor with a love for deep-diving into brains and businesses. Her work consistently makes the top 100 business books in Australia every year. To discover more come along to this free online workshop