As far back as I can remember I’ve been the kind of kid that takes stuff apart and puts it back together again. Usually with about 4 extra screws and a piece that I don’t remember taking out left over at the end. When I got older I began to obsess myself with taking other things apart. I started deconstructing ideas and beliefs that I and the people around me had. I plunged head first into zen study and then continued to dissect as much of society and interaction as I could.

Most of the time I was looking for patterns. Patterns in what made someone more intelligent. Patterns in what made a good writer (still working on that one). Patterns in what made a woman attracted to a man. Basically anything that frustrated me that I couldn’t do on my own I’d deconstruct and make it work FOR me.

I guess I got most famous for my study of what made women attracted to men. I built a huge company and taught everyone in it. I had an empire that I built on top of my skill at modeling what worked in other people. I was quickly one of the best dating coaches in the country (and one of the youngest, which annoyed a lot of people).

But if there’s one thing more frustrating than trying to be a professional dating coach, it’s getting people in the world to listen to you. You might be thinking, “I know I have a lot to offer, it’s just a matter of convincing everyone else to understand that and accept it my advice (this might sound familiar).”

But one sure-fire way to make sure people take you seriously is to write a book. After all, if you are REALLY that knowledgeable, writing about what you know should be easy.

But if you’ve ever tried to do it you find out real quickly that it’s not only not easy.. it’s damn near impossible to finish! I have enough unfinished books to fill a hard drive.

So, being the skill-hacker that I am, I broke down how to write a book and made a system out of it. My system was good at first. I could write an entire book without actually writing a word. I mean, it was my material, I just had someone else write it down.

Sound weird? It was at first. But my system allowed me to create a perfectly unique piece of content (like this blog post for example), without writing anything down myself.

That was mind blowing to me. But it took about a month to complete. After several months of doing this for different books, writing for all different kinds of companies and people, I finally figured out a simple way to shorten that time down to 2 weeks.

Here’s how I do it:

Step 1: Preparation & Hiring

Most people sit down to write a book and they start by thinking “Well, I’ll just start from the beginning,” and they start typing away. DO NOT DO THIS. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re in no hurry to finish your book this can be fine. and if you find it therapeutic to tack at your computer for hours then… well, then you’re awesome and I might hire you at some point. But I’m usually in a hurry to get my books out and I want them to be very very high quality.

So for this first step you’ll be preparing yourself to create your masterpiece. First, know that you’ll need about 3 days of pure comfort and spoiling. If you’re stressed out your quality of work will drop like an iphone call (yeah… I went there). So plan on taking a few days where you can be uninterrupted for your main creating process.

Then begin posting jobs on a hiring website, I use Elance.com but there are others, and you’ll be looking for the following jobs:

1: A Transcription Service – $0.60 to $1.00 per minute- Always send them all a 5 minute sample and have them transcribe it with their proposal. It’s the best way to make sure they’re what you’re looking for.

2: A Ghost Writer or Editor – $300 to $500 -  A Ghost Writer and an editor will do the same job here. But Ghost Writers tend to do better work because they have a hand in the creative aspect of the writing process. Look for someone with a passion about your subject. Even if they lack experience you’ll find that they do a better job than most.

3: A Formatter/Ebook Designer – $200 to $400 – Your Formatter is the person who will design the word document that you have when you’re finished writing and make it into a high value ebook. The monetary value of a word doc is about $0.50 to $7.00. But an Ebook is worth anywhere between $19 and $297, depending on your subject. It’ll be worth the investment to make it look sharp.

4 (OPTIONAL): An Illustrator – $400 to $800 – Not necessary but will help to increase customer satisfaction quite a great deal. It’s worth it in my opinion.

Step 2: Mind Mapping Madness

We were all taught how to mind map in 2nd or 3rd grade. Draw a bubble in the middle of a piece of paper and then expand on it with other bubbles. Well that’s great, for 2nd grade. But now we need something more directing. One program I use the hell out of is called Curio. Download A Free Trial Here. It’s a mind mapping software for the Mac. If you have a PC, no worries. You can get the PC equivalent. It’s called Mind Jet. You Can Buy It Here.

Now what you want to do is type in your major subject for your book in the center of the mind map and then think of the top 7 (at minimum) major parts that you could break that subject into and make them new bubbles attached to that center bubble.

Here’s an example:

Once you’ve done that, break each of those outside bubbles into 4 parts. They are – WHY, WHAT, HOW TO, and EXAMPLES.

Then just answer those questions in order and expand on them as best you can.

I’ll have more on this process later but it’s too long to put in here. If you hate mind mapping or don’t think well  when you look at the intimidating spider web of ideas, then you can do the same process as an outline vertically on a piece of paper or a word document.

After you’re done, add a new major bubble (like the blue ones above) called Intro and another called Outro or Conclusion. Expand on them as much as you can. Intro is a brief introduction of every chapter in the book and WHY, WHAT, HOW TO, and EXAMPLES on how to read the book/why they should read it, etc. The Conclusion is a wrap up of the major points (details) in each chapter. and your closing statement.

Step 3: Recording

Now you’re going to want to organize your mind map/outline in order from Intro to Conclusion and make sure the major bubbles that are attached to your main idea (the blue ones above) are in the order you’d like to mention them in the book. Each major bubble like this will be a chapter in your book. Is it starting to make sense?

Then you’re going to record yourself talking about each major bubble IN ORDER. When you’re finished with each chapter recording, you’re going to stop the recording and start a completely new and fresh one. Talk about each point from the center of the mind map outward and stay on course. Don’t get distracted.

It’s important to note that as you record you’ll need to edit as you go. I generally don’t condone editing as you go. But in this case it serves a great purpose. Make sure there are no disruptions to your recording and no noises in the background. After you’re done with this recording you’ll have your audio book already completed. Of course, it’ll be a loose version of it. So you might have to call it your “Unabridged Audio Book with Author’s Commentary” just to be honest or you might get people who think they can listen to it as they read your book. And if they try they’ll have a hell of a time.

Step 4: Transcribing, Expanding, & Proofing

After you’ve finished recording all of the audio, you’ll need to send it to the Transcription Service that you hired  on Elance.com or from where ever you decided to hire them. I usually upload my audio to my Amazon S3 Account. If you don’t have one, get one through EZS3. It’s a service that supports you and manages your large files online. After they’ve gotten it they should be able to turn it around into a document in less than 3 days. Make sure your audio files go out to them number 1 through 9 etc. so they get transcribed and returned in the proper order.

For the three days that your audio is getting transcribed you’ll be able to do whatever you need to. I suggest preparing your sales pages and promotional material. I’ll go into that more in depth with a product I’ve created that goes into depth on all of this process and holds your hand through it. But for now you have a choice to relax or continue with your preparation to release your book.

When you get the transcriptions back immediately send them AND the audio to your ghost writer. Have the ghost writer listen to the audio along with the text to capture “your voice” so the book doesn’t sound like it was written by a completely different person. After all, it IS your material and your followers are going to know the difference in your writing style if it’s too far off.

They’ll have that for the good part of a week. Finally you’ll get it back and you’ll have to read it (really the hardest part). I can’t speed read so when I was writing 2 to 3 books a month I had to come up with a way to ‘cheat’ so I could read all of the details of my book but do it super fast without using too much of my brain-power. More on that technique in another post.

Site down and spend an entire day reading it and making notes on where changes should be or just making the edits yourself (I usually make the edits myself to keep my hands in the creative process). Anything that doesn’t sound liek something you’d say or is just not what you meant you’ll have to clean up.

Step 5: Formatting & Product Shots

Finally, after you’re done you’ll have a blissfully painless word document finished. But it’s not an Ebook yet until it’s packaged like one! At the end of the day, you’re trying to reach as many people as you can with your message. So you’ll have to add the bells and whistles to get their attention. It’s just how we are. We like shiny things!

So send it straight to the Formatter. This will be a relatively simple process. You give them a copy of another ebook that you’d like to model and they’ll match it with style (if they’re good and the example isn’t too complex or expensive to model).

In about 3 days or less you’ll have a shiny new Ebook with your name written on it!

I usually have the Formatter also create a cover and what’s called a “Product Shot.” It’s a picture of what your book might look like if it were an actual book. You’ll need one for your audio book and one for your Ebook. Make sure you note that the book is a PDF (digital) and not a hard copy or people will feel mislead. Here’s a picture of my new book on attracting women from my sales page:

After this, post a page with a quick video explaining your product and why people should buy it and you’re basically ready to go!

This process can take forever if you don’t really buckle down and make it happen. But following my full system (which I’ve outlined fully in a product), you should be able to get one knocked out with very little mental drain about every 2 weeks! That means that you can release a new product to your list every 2 weeks and make a higher profit while serving a higher purpose, as they say.

This is here for you to use and it’s really changed my life completely when I look at creating books for others and for myself. I’ve written dozens of books since I figured this out (less than a year ago) and each one has been very easy and fun!

As you use this system, post your questions or  comments and journal your progress for the rest of us in the comment section so we can see what you’re doing and help you out.

All the best and Happy Writing!

Joshua Pellicer

PS. If you want to see an example of a book that I created with this system, pick up a copy of my book HERE.

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