Leaving Work Behind

How to Plan and Create an Information Product

Tom Ewer

I’m nearly done!

Three months and over 25,000 words later, the first draft of my freelance writing guide is nearly complete.

And that is certainly a good thing, what with the official launch being just over a month away (more on that later). My path to date has been long and winding, and my lack of experience has gotten the best of me on multiple occasions. I now know a hell of a lot more about writing a book than I did a few months ago, and I only wish I had known what I know now beforehand!

So, whilst the process is still fresh in my mind, I thought it would be helpful to detail what I have learned, and perhaps give you a roadmap of how to plan and create an information product more efficiently than I did.

Planning

I am generally terrible at planning — I love to sink my teeth into things.

I can generally get away with this when I’m writing 500 – 2,500 word blog posts, but there comes a point at which something becomes too big to do on a wing and a prayer.

A 25,000 word guide is one such thing. And whilst I appreciated that planning would be necessary when setting out to write my guide, I didn’t commit to the concept wholeheartedly. That resulted in it taking a hell of a lot longer to write than it should have.

The question is, how do you plan an information product? What is actually involved? The honest truth is that I had no idea to start with. I simply spent a few minutes writing down all of the topics I could think of that I wanted to cover.

These were the chapter headings I had in my original notes:

To start with, that was essentially the plan I had before I started writing — a bunch of chapter titles. It wasn’t enough.

First of all, because I didn’t put a great deal of thought into planning, I was missing a number of chapters that would eventually make it into the guide. These had to be written and inserted into the guide in a rather haphazard fashion. Whilst I eventually ended up with what I consider to be a great guide, it would have been far easier to write if I had fully understood the complete structure of the guide before I started.

What I should have done is spent far more time considering what I wanted to include within the guide. Not just chapter titles, but sub-headers too — a complete framework, more like this:

I cannot over-stress how much easier it is to write when you have your chapters planned out in this fashion. Because you know what you want to say, you just have to write. You don’t have to think so much — which is what really slows you down.

Exactly how you plan your book isn’t that important. You will probably find a technique that suits you. The most popular methods are:

  1. A chapter/sub-header list (like mine above)
  2. A mind map
The key is to be totally indiscriminate. Write everything and anything down, then sort the mess into a sensible order when your brain is completely empty of ideas. And I mean completely empty — don’t carry out this planning process in twenty minutes. Give yourself a couple of days. Make sure that nothing is left off the plan before proceeding.

Although planning can feel like a lead weight on your progress, time invested upfront will make the actual writing process exponentially quicker. When I was about half way through the guide, I went back and plotted out everything I wanted to include in detail, and my productivity was boosted enormously thereafter.

None of this came to me in an epiphany though. Whilst writing my guide, I have referred to two information products:

Both have been extremely useful in helping me write my guide and plan my launch, but special mention has to go to Publish Your Book on Kindle. Although the course is geared towards Kindle publishing (which is something I will be doing after the initial launch — more on that in a future post), I found it to be an invaluable resource in helping me write and plan my guide.

If you are planning on creating your own information product, I would recommend that you invest in one or both of the above products. Quality branding and marketing can make an enormous difference in the success of your product, so getting my hands on quality advice wasn’t something I was prepared to compromise on.

Writing

If I had just one piece of advice to give to someone planning on creating their first information product, it would be to not plan your launch until you have completed the majority of your first draft.

I have recently discovered that a launch plan is a bloody complicated thing, with a huge number of moving parts. Trying to calculate how quickly you will write a book is almost impossible to do without considerable prior experience (and even then, I’m guessing that it’s pretty damned tough).

The potential downside to not setting a launch date ahead of time is that you simply “float” along, not really committing to getting the book completed. I did this for a period of weeks, before getting my act together.

The solution is to set yourself a simple goal to write a certain number of words every day, and stick to it. If you hold yourself accountable to a word count, you will find that a book begins to take shape before too long. And if you have planned out your book effectively, the actual writing probably won’t be as painful as you had anticipated.

I prefer to set a target based upon words, rather than time, because it is all too easy to sit down for an hour and procrastinate. If you enforce a word count, you will have no choice but to write.

I also found that doing my writing first thing in the morning was a huge help. Client work is difficult to put off — there are clear repercussions if I don’t meet deadlines — but skipping a day of book writing is far easier to do. If writing my guide is the first thing I do in the morning — when I’m in a good frame of mind for working — I’ll always get good work done.

Join the Pre-Launch List!

As I have already mentioned, the launch of my guide is now planned out. I know what I need to do between now and the official launch day — it’s just a case of actually doing it! I have given myself a small timeframe to get a lot done, because I decided that I need to create pressure in order to wrap this project up. The time for procrastination has passed!

So for those of you who are interested, my freelance writing guide will launch officially on 6th November. However, there will be a pre-launch period, in which you will be able to pick up the guide for an exclusive (and hefty) discount. If you are interested in getting your hands on my guide, joining this list is a no-brainer — you’ll get it earlier and save money. Click here to sign up!

Creative Commons image courtesy of Bright Meadow