Business is about influence, or “leverage.” Your book that you will author is a tool to leverage your credibility. And the first step in preparing your mind for success is to see yourself as an expert. Another way of looking at this is that you must sell yourself first to your dream of the possibility of becoming a best selling author.

So there are really two sales that must take place: the first sale is the one you make to yourself. The second sale is the one that actually produces money for you when members of your target audience complete the transaction with you.

To master the sale to yourself it is imperative that you write your own book. No ghost writer. You want your voice to come out strong and clear. One of the concepts we will discuss is your UPP which stands for your Unique Personal Proposition—which means your unique story. There is nobody better to get your message out then you! No one else has your story. Remember that the main reason people come to the Internet is to solve problems.

The purchasers of your book want your guidance. So you are paid to provide solutions to the problems that keep people up at night.

Creating Ideas

Here is how you create ideas: Complete a five minute exercise where you put your core concept in the center of a piece of paper and list as many ideas that are related to what you want to do. The key is to write everything down and do not pre-judge anything. This is the creative phase. You want to write as quickly as you can. Do not reflect at all on your ideas. The personal reflection comes in the next phase.

The key to brainstorming is recording all your ideas. This allows your subconscious to find relationships among them. There are three relationships that your mind will look at when analyzing your ideas. The great philosopher Socrates first espoused this concept 300 years before the time of Christ.

This process involves analyzing a) the similarity of your ideas (What is this concept like?); and b) The contiguity of your ideas (How are the ideas related to each other); and then c) the contrast of your ideas (How the ideas are different).

The ideas you create should all be involved in solving your target market’s problems. To bring this home on how this should guide the writing of your book, the late and great G.K. Chesterton summarized the importance of analyzing problems first when he stated that the focus should not be on your book, but on understanding and magnifying your target market’s problems first.

Your focus is not on you or what you think people need, but on the people—your target audience—and what they tell you they need.

This begins with understanding the difference between empathy versus sympathy. As an author, you must empathize with your target market. Empathy goes one step further than sympathy. Though the difference is essentially one of focus. Sympathy is the ability of showing how sorry you are that one person is going thru a painful situation. Empathy focuses on providing solutions for your target market. And the solutions that you provide should communicate the desired attitudes (what should I think) and the specific skills that are required to move to the desired end point (How do I get what I want and why should I do it a certain way and how do I implement an overall strategy in my life to make it happen).

Implementation is a key reason why information is the enemy to ultimate success. Information alone is passive as it fails to contextualize content. There is no implementation or ACTION if all you have is information. It is all content and no context.

The Author's Mindset

The first principle is preparation. Authoring your best seller is no different than preparing to participate in an athletic event. You don’t just show up on game day without putting your body through immense preparations. The key to authoring a best selling book is to prepare before you start writing.

Here are the steps in preparation as we see it: there must be order in your life. Order begins in your mind, and then it must be channeled with a concrete game plan. Your success must acknowledge the need for patience, endurance and the ability to act in the face of fear and failure. Success does not come easily. You pay the price every step of the way.

The first step in preparation is to acknowledge your dream.