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Here’s the extended, unedited extra-juicy edition of today’s Friday Focus, CREATIVE STRATEGIES:

Gretchen Rubin, author of Forty Ways to Look at JFK and the wonderful, popular blog The Happiness Project

Creating a book:
1, 2, and 3 – write on an idea that you find inexhaustibly fascinating! Books take such a long time and so much work – unless you feel that deep commitment to your subject, it’s very hard to sustain your interest. I’ve been lucky – with each of my books, I felt like I could happily work on that subject for the rest of my life.

Marketing a book:

1. Know your audience and ACCEPT your audience. Many authors want to reach an audience different from their natural audience. This sometimes happens, but rarely.

2. Spend a huge amount of thought on the cover and the cover copy, because this is the chief point of connection with reader.

3. Look beyond bookstores for ways to reach readers – a blog, a newsletter, speaking, etc.

Veronica Chambers, author of Kickboxing Geishas, contributor to The Root

1. There are very serious books and very funny books and everything in between, but I think the books that touch a chord are the ones written with joy and with curiosity. Don’t write to settle vendettas, to lecture to people about how they should live, to immortalize yourself on the page. Write because a story you once heard about why an old woman drove a tractor into town every day to buy three potatoes and a carrot from the country store has stayed in your mind and has never gone away. Write to tell her story. Write because you are curious about why it is that we blow out candles and have blow up balloons at birthday parties, write the secret history of modern civilizations. When in doubt and as much as possible, write out, eyes gazed at the world, not at your own navel.

2. I think the best guide to writing a book, hands down, is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I used the three pages of hand-written morning pages to get out a workable draft of my first book, Mama’s Girl.

3. The best advice I ever read about why it is better to write a little every day (2 hours a day is ideal) is from Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. She wrote:
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the doors to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!’”

3 wisdom pointers for marketing a book?

1. If you’re brave enough, the best way to sell your book — once it has been published — is to walk into a bookstore and hand a copy to the manager and say, “I’m a local author, I’d love it if you would sell my book.” Or if you’re not so brave (which is the case with me), you can jot the same information in a note and send it out.

2. A published author needs a website, though I remain adamantly convinced that very few blogs sell books (see aforementioned point about navel gazing).

3. The best thing to do when you’ve got a manuscript ready and you don’t yet have an agent or a publisher is to go to the bookstore, pick up five great, recently published books in your field. Any author worth his salt will acknowledge his agent. Write said agent a very professional, brief note saying a variation of the following:

Dear Savvy, Powerful, Literary Agent,

Yours truly, Barbara Baleen

If you do not have credits in magazines, newspapers, literary magazines, etc — it would behoove you to work on publishing smaller pieces before you go after a book deal. Becoming a writer is not unlike becoming an architect, it’s a building game and you want to make sure your foundation is strong enough to support the massive structure that is your soon to be brilliant career.

Karen Salmansohn, successful author of 29 published books with 11 different printing houses, is offering her consulting services for aspiring authors. Here’s a taste:

Do you dream about publishing a book: fiction, nonfiction, children’s, humor, memoir? If so, youre only ten killer pages away from making your dreams come true. And I am now offering a special one on one program to teach you how to write a powerful ten page proposal!

Because of my success, I keep being asked by folks if I can help them write their book proposal. Or cure them of their writers block. Or cure them of their negativity block. Or cure them of their time management writing conundrum. Basically, I’ve been asked for publishing help so frequently lately that I’ve decided to teach my slamdunk success secrets so all of you can finally live up to your highest potential and become the best-selling author you know you’re capable of becoming!

WHAT I WILL TEACH YOU ONE ON ONE:

• how to create that special edge, unique selling point, or your killer idea
• how to best begin your proposal and maintain its focus
• how to create a magnetic writers voice, and maintain it throughout
• what the publishing industry is looking for right now
• whether it helps to get your work in magazines, newspapers or blog first
• if you are writing non-fiction: how much research is enough
• if you are writing fiction: how to create strong characters and lively dialogue
• whether it helps to use an agent or go directly to editors
• the pros and cons of self-publishing
• how to work smarter writing hours vs. longer writing hours
• how to stick to it and/or when to leave well enough alone and step away from that computer!
• how to think the way published people think, adopt their ingrained blueprint for success

Best of all, many of the same principles you will learn to write those ten killer pages will also simultaneously create more happiness, inner peace and success in other areas of your life!

Are you a candidate? Write to me at karen@notsalmon.com and submit two to three pages of your writing. Once you’re accepted we will talk time frame and fee structures.

You only get one shot in this lifetime to become your most fabulous self and make all your dreams come true. I would love to help you achieve your life goals, and make sure that no matter what the plot or theme of your book, your personal life story will be a super happy one!
www.notsalmon.com