Hello and welcome to your 30 Day Write a Book Challenge. My name is Andrew James Crawford and firstly I’d just like say a big thank you for joining me on this journey, I’ll be walking you through all of the steps required to write your very own business book within 30 days.

I’m sure by now you’re fed up of all the sales waffle and are just raring to go, so without further ado let’s begin!

Now oddly enough, this section isn’t going to require you to start wiring your book at all. Instead, I want you to develop the idea of why you are writing this book. This will help you with both starting to write your book and also complete it whenever you get disheartened or need a little pick-me-up to keep going.

Too many people undertake this challenge without really thinking about why they are doing it – and even when I mention the concept of thinking about your ‘why’ people sometimes start to have a metaphorical glaze appear before their eyes, but I cannot stress how important this aspect is.

So I want you to perform a small exercise for this section, and for this I’ll be taking inspiration from Simon Sinek’s brilliant concept of ‘The Golden Circle’. Originally, Sinek’s idea focuses on a slightly more sales-based approach than I am going to explain here, but the same principals apply.

Just to quickly explain before we get into this, The Golden Circle is the idea of selling ‘inside-out’ to typical convention. For example, most people/brands will sell/explain their product or service in three stages:

1. What they do
2. How they do it
3. (and eventually, if at all!) ‘why’ they do it

Sounds about right, correct? Well Sinek noticed a trend with bigger and more trustworthy people/brands selling their product or service in the complete reverse order, and to great effect.

By opening with your why, you immediately focus your customer or audience on an emotional response. You then explain how you achieve this and then finally explain ‘what’ it is that you’re selling. See how much more powerful that works? You end up focusing your entire explanation on your ‘why’ more than your ‘what’ and in-turn create a powerful way of explaining or selling something.

So bearing this in mind, let’s get onto the task. I want you to think about and write down your why, how and what in that exact order.

Why?

Bottom line here, why (oh why!) are you writing this book? Be really honest here, really wrap your emotions around your response – the more emotional your ‘why’ the better your reason for writing this book and help you and other’s know why you’re writing it.

For me it was all about helping others. My book ‘From a Flicker to a Flame’ all started because I saw so many people out there who had great ideas but not the knowledge or drive to turn them into a reality. My ‘why’? Because I wanted to help those people achieve great things. In all honesty it took me a while to figure this out, but when I did, this simple sentence always reminded me of why I wanted to write this book in the first place, and equally has helped me sell the book now it’s completed – so be sure to keep this in mind throughout this whole process.

How?

So you’ve got your ‘why’, it’s now time to really think about ‘how’ you are going to achieve this within your book.

Don’t stress yet about the structure of the book and so on, instead just think more goal-orientated as to how you can achieve this vision.

Again, for me it was a case of really thinking, ‘I personally want to help these people, so I’m going to make sure the book has a personal approach, speak from first-hand experiences of my business successes and failures, what I learned, how I developed businesses from the ground up and ensure there’s inspirational messages throughout the book that the reader can refer to at any time.’

I also ran a theme throughout the book akin to lighting a fire. You first started with a spark then added some fuel and watched as its flame roared.

What?

Ok so crunch time now, you know why you’re writing this book and how you’re going to achieve this – but what exactly is the book going to be and what are you going to write about?

As mentioned before please don’t stress too much at this point about the actual structure of all the chapters and what the book will look like. Instead just focus more on an overall concept of what this book is and what it’ll contain.

From personal experience I found the best method here was to simply write a list of headings of sections that I knew had to be in the book, then a small paragraph just explaining the sorts of ideas I had for that section. These will of course change as you write your book and you’ll likely add more and maybe even remove some, but the important thing is to get your brain thinking about the content early on.

Once you have written your own Golden Circle I want you to keep it in a safe place that is close-to-hand. Trust me, there will be tough times during these 30 days and life will always get in the way, but whenever you have a ‘why am I doing this!?’ moment, be sure to refer back to this at any time and it’ll give you the re-focus and drive you need to carry on.