How to build a business book that lasts forever

Writing a book for your business is much like building a house.

If you plan it carefully and edit it thoughtfully, you’ll have a beautiful home to live in which will stand strong for many years. But if you knock it up without knowing what you’re doing, it may fall down around your ears.

I know which kind of house I’d rather live in, and I know which kind of book I’d rather write.

Here’s how to build your book so that it lasts.

Lay your book’s foundations

As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.’

Diving into writing your book without thinking it through first is one way that you can create an awful lot of extra work for yourself down the line.

So you can see what I mean, let’s imagine that you do that. What’s likely to happen is that part way through Chapter 3, you realise that some of Chapter 1 would be better off in the chapter you’re writing. But then you wouldn’t have enough content for Chapter 1, so what do you do now? Merge it with another? Add some more in? Delete it and start at Chapter 2? Aargh.

However, when you have an?outline ?to work to from the beginning, you don’t have to worry about any of that. Your foundations will be sound and able to carry the weight of your book right up until it’s finished.

It can be tempting to skip this part, especially if you’re the impatient type. But if your aim is to finish writing your book as quickly as possible, outlining will remove the need for countless re-writes and help you to get to the end with greater speed than flying by the seat of your pants.

Spending some time sharpening your axe is well worth it.

Fill your rooms with words

Just as every house has walls and a roof, so every book has a cover, a spine, and some pages. It’s what’s inside those covers that makes it special, and that’s the content.

Your book’s content is made up of the unique collection of thoughts and ideas that you want to tell your readers about, and the personal way you put them across. In that way, the words that fill your book are a bit like the personal decor of a house.

This is where you’ll be especially glad that you built your foundations first, because you’ll know what words to put in which rooms, without having to knock anything down and start again.

And you’ll also find it easier to make sure that your decor is arranged in a way that appeals to your visitors. When the points in a book don’t flow logically from one to another, it’s the equivalent of chairs being stacked on top of the table, and the sofa facing away from the TV.

Finish with care

There will come a time when your house building project is complete and you’re ready to move in. What an amazing day!

But there’s some tidying up to do beforehand. Just as house builders create a ‘snagging list’ to ensure the end result is perfect, so as a author you need to edit your book.

This is where things can go wrong.

Your overall structure should be sound, as long as you’ve done your outlining first. That’s lucky, because changing the foundations at this stage would be mighty difficult.

But what about the furniture? The curtains? The flooring? The walls? Do they need any changes making to them? Likewise, how do you ensure that the way you’ve expressed yourself in words is just so?

The thing to watch out for here is that if you change the colour of the carpet, will your new sofa clash with it? And if you move your bed from one end of the room to the other, how will that affect where the wardrobe goes?

This is the equivalent of changing one sentence in your book without checking that it doesn’t have a knock-on effect on those before and after. This is surprisingly easy to do.

For instance, if you replace one word with another and you’ve already used the same in the following sentence, your writing will be repetitive. And if you move paragraphs around or cut one out, you need to make sure that your words still flow and make sense.

This is something that I always take care with when implementing the feedback my?ghostwriting ?clients give me. It often involves making more changes than we originally anticipated, but it’s worth it if it ensures a fantastic end result.

So now you know how to build a business book, you can write your own with confidence. And if you’d like to understand more about the process, you can check out my short e-book?The Business Book Outline Builder . It gives you five easy steps for planning and starting your book. Get digging!

This post originally appeared on?Ginny Carter's blog .