A.Well, that depends on the length of the book, which in itself depends on the type size, format, research and breadth of the book. All that said, a dollar a word is a reasonable guideline but if the book is full of custom art, the pricing dynamic changes accordingly.

A.We try to keep them between 30,000-50,000 words. The rate of readership is much higher for shorter books.

A.Between 150 and 200.

A.Give us three months after our final interview. Depending on when you are ready to begin we can deliver the book six months after signing.

A.That’s up to you. The printing costs are a little harder for a hardcover.

A.Yes and you can use it right now.
Every great business book is built on three components.

A.Tim Ferriss' The 4 Hour Workweek spent five years on the New York Times Best Sellers list and was translated into 40 languages. For readers, the concept of working one afternoon a week sounded too good to resist.
Here is The Proposition penned by Ferriss.
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‍The 4-Hour Workweek is the step-by-step blueprint to free yourself from the shackles of a corporate job, create a business to fund the lifestyle of your dreams, and live life like a millionaire, without actually having to be one.
‍Ferriss advocated digital remote work long before it became the norm, challenged the concept of 80-hour work weeks by advocating experiences over consumer goods and gave a recipe for entrepreneurial life outside the traditional work box. It made for a great Proposition: work less, do more, live better.

Dale Carnegie's landmark How to Win Friends And Influence People is just a secular reimagining of The Golden Rule. The Proposition: Once you understand that you can’t change people’s mind, appealing to their self-interest will win you admiration and affection.

Sheryl Sandberg leveraged her leadership position at Facebook to write Lean In, Women Work and The Will To Lead. The book sold 4 million copies with a proposition urging women to try a little harder to hurdle over gender barriers, seek work-life balance and network.

A.No one likes paying taxes and the idea of an inheritance tax seems particularly onerous. Estate planners are accustomed to sorting out ill-advised moves, larger bequeaths to lower-earning relatives, inexplicable deed shifts and bizarre choices as executors. It happens all the time.

What doesn’t happen all the time is inheritance tax. In fact, it almost never happens. The IRS pegs the number at 0.05 for every 100 deaths. The people who do pay the tax are generally extremely wealthy.

That means people risk destroying their families to avoid a tax they were never going to pay.  

The Proposition: the inheritance tax is a boogeyman. Don’t wreck your family because of a tax you were never going to pay.

A.Ask yourself these questions:

• 1. What is the single, most important thing you know about your business, the thing that would surprise and challenge what most people believe?
• 2. What is the single best piece of advice related to your business, your version of buy low, sell high?
• 3. What is the one most telling story about your business, a tale that can act as an allegory for your advantage?

A.Don’t worry, lots of people write books that are composites of other people’s best ideas. The fact that you, the writer, value these qualities links them to you in the mind of the reader.

For example, if you were to write a book on the power of attitude in business, you might tell the following story.

‍At the turn of the 20th century, English shoemakers turned their attention to the potentially lucrative markets of India and Africa.

A shoemaker sent two sales people to investigate. Neither knew of the other's existence.

"No prospects here," the first sales person wrote. "Nobody wears shoes."
"Unlimited prospects here," wrote the other salesperson. “Nobody wears shoes.”

A.In literature, the Backstory is often called the hero's journey.
Readers want to know that a writer put in the miles to reach their conclusion, that there were false starts and impediments, that the truth of the proposition won out over everything.

Would you trust someone who knew about horse racing (but little about mechanical elements) to tinker with your household plumbing? No, you would want to know the plumber went to school, met standards, studied, struggled with clogged toilets and had faced every possible hurdle before arriving at your door, plunger in hand, ready for battle.

That's the power of Backstory: it's a confidence builder in the eyes of the reader.
The Backstory has only one purpose: to qualify the book's conclusion or proposition by qualifying the author's version to that conclusion.

• What is the greatest single learning experience that led to your proposition?
• What is the wisest thing anyone told you that led you to your conclusion/proposition?
• What elements of your early life influenced your journey toward that conclusion? For example, thanks to encouragement from his forward-thinking parents, billionaire Warren Buffett bought his first stock at 11 years old. He became a devoted reader of the Wall Street Journal when he hit his teens. Those elements make Buffett's prominence in the world of investment feel pre-ordained.

A.Now that you have enticed the reader with an exciting Proposition and validated the writer's journey with telling details, don't stop.

The reader craves instructions. She wants to test-drive the proposition. It’s time to put all your hard-earned experience to work. Shower the reader with tips, experiences, ideas, strategies, both long and short term, as well as case studies and timelines. The reader will thank you for it.

A.No. Ideas aren’t like a secret formula or proprietary information. Everyone has and uses ideas, other people and their own, every day. By writing a book, you link yourself to a particular combination of ideas and values that are as unique as your fingerprint.

A.Happens all the time.
If you wanted to illustrate the importance of unimpeded play in the creative process, you could point to the well-worn story of Chuck Jones, the father of Looney Tunes cartoons. One of Jones' tenets stipulated the more laborious cartoons, the Road Runner for example, that required mostly uninteresting work, were to be done from Monday to Thursday.

Friday was reserved for pet projects. Not surprisingly, the most lasting cartoons were the product of the fun, imaginative, challenging work reserved for the last day of the work week.

A.Lists are a great way to engage the listener or reader. Because a list is, well, a list, the reader always knows where they stand in the process and how much longer this section will take.

A list comes with built in suspense, people want to know how it turns out and measure for themselves whether the writer’s ranking mirrors theirs.
Finally, it's easy to use individual items in a list for social media or blogs.

A.Sometimes a pie chart or picture can make a complicated element seem simple. You can use Canva, Piktochart to do the work yourself or Freelancer or Fiverr to have the work done for you.

Writers often want to include personal pictures to give the book a more personal feel.

A.You really can judge a book by its cover. An amateurish cover discredits the writer. A poor cover fritters away the one chance the writer has to win over a convert.
If you can afford the expense, use a professional designer, not just for the cover but to flow the copy into  templates. You can find freelancers, inspect their portfolios and rates through websites such as Freelancer and Fiverr. 

You can take a great cover image with your smartphone. Shoot for the maximum resolution so the image looks great when converted into a cover.

A.We encourage our clients to put their face on the cover. The purpose of the book is to introduce the writer not to an idea but to the purveyor of the idea. That said, clients are often resistant. We usually push back: get your face out there.

A.Page counts can be manipulated by so many things: layout, margins, type size and style, space between sentences, photos and sidebars. That's why the real question is how many words, not how many pages.

That said, our books usually come in at between 140-160 pages. With the growing popularity of ebooks, a heavy longer book weighs as much as a shorter one. The heft of a book, once a determining factor, no longer matters. What stands out, instead, is the quality of the idea.

A.The principal benefit of a book isn’t the book itself so much as the fact you wrote one. That’s what distinguishes you from your peers. You will benefit from the book whether it's a long book or a short one. In that case, why write a long one?

Second, people read business books to gain knowledge. A great, entertaining business book, and that's the kind we deal in, is a delivery system for a powerful truth that benefits the reader. The reader wants you to get to the point. That's why a great business book can deliver a powerful message in 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 words.

A.We recommend ten.
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The great thing about a ten chapter book is that it assures the reader throughout that it will soon be time to bridge from one chapter to the next one. Everyone can count to ten. A ten chapter book builds suspense, the reader always knows where she stands and can decide for herself whether she wants to jump or stick it out.

A.Because you are the expert. You have spent years understanding your craft, learning new policies and procedures, experimenting and testing...all to the benefit of your customers and now your readers.

Experience allows a skilled person to zoom in on the issues and elements a client or prospect wants most to understand. Conclusions, in other words. A great book has great conclusions, the culmination of a career's worth of wisdom. That's what the reader wants: direction based on the writer's conclusions.

A.The Pros of Using AI.
‍AI or artificial intelligence is a great research tool and, if deployed correctly, can make writing your book easier. It's great for pulling data and can allow for a far more exacting search than search engines.  It can offer feedback and even create graphics. Writers working in a language of which they are not native can benefit from the vocabulary and sentence structure provided by AI.

The Cons of Using AI.
‍Your book is only as credible as the sources within it. It's easy to take an AI conclusion as gospel and AI is as liable, some say more liable, to err as Google. Imprecise wording, not just for the opening query but for all follow up questions, can lead to inaccuracies. AI can't replace the rhythm of someone's writing or use a vocabulary specific to the writer. Most importantly, using AI to create text instead of to research and analyze information presents plenty of ethical questions.That's why AI holds great promise...but only as a tool to improve writing.

A. People often think writing a book is too hard or that they don’t have enough time but most people know how to write a sentence and then keep on going. Time is malleable. Writing a book means rearranging priorities to get something done. People do that all the time when they start going to a gym or dedicate a weekend to their taxes.

We find most people don’t write a book because they don’t feel confident their story, conclusions and advice aren’t worth sharing. Every person has experience, advice and a story worth sharing because what they consider unimportant can have profound value to someone else.

A. Everyone would love to walk by an airport kiosk and see their book prominently displayed. While it does happen occasionally, the likelihood of a publisher wanting to pick up your book is very, very small.

That’s not an indictment of anyone’s work. There are fewer and fewer traditional publishing houses with ever shrinking lists.The great news is that legacy publishers are no longer the gatekeepers for people wanting to turn their thoughts into books.

A. KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s Amazon’s book division.

A. Amazon can be a great choice.

• It’s the world’s biggest bookstore.
• Your book will look great.
• It will be easily found.
• Amazon can handle all the printing and distribution.

A. There are plenty of alternatives to Amazon including Apple Books for i-books, Kobo Writing Life, Barnes and Noble Press.

Lulu and IngramSpark are popular with writers looking for professional results. IS boasts a global distribution network and Lulu, like Amazon, offers both print on demand and e-book publishing. Lulu’s uploading and customization options make it a great choice as well.

A. First, what is your goal? Are you approaching publishing with an eye toward making money from book sales? If that’s the case, you need to consider up-front charges and royalties.

What’s your budget?
Maybe you want a book strictly for presentations. In that case, the best bet may be a local printer but that option will be determined by how many books you want printed. How important is global distribution? What print house offers the best opportunity for prominent reviews? The choice is as individual as the author.

A. Absolutely. An editor is a frenemy. A good one will be encouraging but honest about where the book falls short. A talented copy editor will bring an anal retentive eye to typographical errors and misplaced modifiers. 

‍What are some of the errors an editor will pick up.

• Spelling mistakes that slip by spell check.
• Misspelled names.
• Misspellings of the word misspellings.
• Incorrect uses of quotation marks.
• Death by comma and other maladies.
• Superfluous material that bogs down the reader.

Why can’t I be my own editor?
‍An editor sees what the writer cannot. The art of writing is really the art of rewriting, writers reconfigure their work as they go and sometimes they get bogged down in the mire of the words.

An editor cares about the use of the comma and knows the capital of North Dakota is Bismark, not, as you wrote, Pierre. They check what you think you know (but really may not) and bring an impartiality that is critical to the project.

Where can I hire a good editor and how much will it cost?
‍We have looked at Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr. All of them offer a comprehensive list of professionals who are well reviewed. Work samples are easy to obtain as are reviews. 
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Editors often list their preferences, some like fantasy fiction, others history. It’s a bit like a dating app for your book.

Depending on the quality of your writing you should be able to obtain a capable editor willing to take on a 20,000 word book for under $1,000 (US).