How to Write a Book the Gross (144) Method
by Dr. Anthony Hodge
Step #1
Select your title. Readers do judge books by the cover, and more primarily many judge a book by its title before they ever see the cover. Titles should be selected to stimulate readers' interest in your book and its contents.
Step #2
Choose your outline. Any book can be written in twelve chapters with no more than twelve new nouns (people, places and things) revealed, not in reference but in description and detail. Look at your outline and stick to it as you make your first transcription, which will be your first round of editing.
Step #3
Do not write the book, use tapes to be transcribed and typed from. Writing your book in the beginning, your grammar, your verbiage are a distraction. You want your pure thought put on paper. Then once it's in black and white, we pencil in. There may be five or nine or ten rounds of editing, but our first one is to be your transcription. Sometimes you can add to whoever your transcriber is by tape the instructions and notes to be extracted. You can have as many rounds of editing as you feel, it's best with each round to look for different thins. You may edit for verbiage, edit for grammatical errors, you may edit for spelling and different paragraph structure. Then you may do another round o editing looking for historical data that may be out of sequence, until you finally get it together. When you go to a publisher, your publisher may assign an editor for further editing (redaction), a final editor to your work.
Step #4
If twelve chapters seem to be a problem, break your chapters down into sections, A, B, C, D in chapter one, two or three and break it down to, if you have twelve chapters, you may have thirty-six different parts. Each chapter may be divided into three or four parts, A, B, C, or A, B, C, and D. But stick to the twelve and twelve: twelve main ideas or characters with twelve chapters. You don't want to put too much in one chapter. Try to avoid being a quantoid (quantity over quality). If you have thirteen or eleven chapters or ideas within a chapter, it shouldn't make or break the text not to have exactly twelve, but keep it simple.
Step #5
Last but not least, always give credit where credit is due, to your footnotes and your bibliographies. You want to avoid plagiarism, sometimes it can happen and you may not know, there are so many writings about so many different things that your writing is similar to someone else. But try to avoid this with your research, carefully footnoting your research. (We suggest you use The Turabian foot note method).
Step #6
Approach publishers with a finished product, hardback or softback. If you do not get a satisfactory book deal, think twice before choosing a subsidized publishing company (you pay to publish), such as Dorrance or Vantage Press or many of the others. Get busy, market your own book and after some success, go back to the publishers or sell the book yourself, keeping the rights and profits for the rest of your life.
Step #7
Secure your copyright, add to your retirement fund, copyrights are valuable assets.
Step #8
There are also profit and non-profit sponsors to purchase advertising in your book to help with your financing, depending upon your style. This could be a negative. This goes for self-publishing and self-promoting, no book company is going to enter into a publishing deal with billboard advertising inside, so be careful.
Step #9
Fact, fictionalized, or fiction. Find relevant issues, most relevant in history or current event to help promote the need for what you're teaching and promoting in your book. With a book of fact, you must not have any errors in history, time or location, date and characters. For factual non-fiction material one wrong fact can void all your chances of promoting a successful authorship.
Step #10
Statements that can be slanderous or libel, avoid. Either have a written release form signed by those characters or fictionalize your story. Attorneys are expensive.
Step #11
Authors write books to enlighten others from false belief or to give other false beliefs. Most of all, writing a book is for yourself awareness and spiritual growth of the greatest value. To write a book on one's life or activities in life, to look at it and read it is the greatest exercise of reflection for our soul and spiritual being. To look at a book of your life or your life in a book is priceless. Whatever the motive for writing a book let it come from the heart, do not forget the mind.
Step #12
In your teaching from the book, you're giving lessons in learning for others. Always remember, many amateur authors have become known as great authors, if not for their first or most original writings for the authorship that their experience later developed.
Enjoy and thank you.
Your Godbrother,
Dr. Anthony Hodge, Criminologist
