It had to happen: 100 Days isn’t going to happen in 100 Days. The launch date’s now looking like next year. Just to give an idea of how big a project this is, this graphic is how the whole book so far looks in Word, viewed at 10% normal size…. around 500 pages and 70,000 words! With the final wordcount now looking like 200,000 plus.

Why 200,000? Because while the informational content of chapters has stayed roughly as estimated – about a thousand words per – the instructional content is taking up much more space than expected.

There’s a reason. I want the book to be usable in two ways:

a) As an adaptable methodology for those who know some marketing; and

b) As a rigid and precise step-by-step guide for those who don’t.

The first group will use the main information content of the chapters, but will have less use for the daily Tasks; they’ll adapt the methods to whatever desktop applications they use. The second group, however, needs more hand-holding. I’m assuming this group has no more than a basic understanding of office applications and the Internet, so the Tasks are much more important to them. Meaning each Task needs to be as as didactic and precise as I can make it – numbered in sequence to be easy to follow and crossreference. And that’s taking up more space than I thought.

(When you’re writing for people who are expert in their own fields, but not necessarily marketing- or technology-literate, you need to take extreme care with how much knowledge you assume of your audience.)

The good news: all ten Parts are now planned out in some detail, including the actual Tasks the reader needs to complete each day, with all the numbers put in. (Reasonable expectations as to per-day prospecting, conversion percentages applied to your sales funnel, and so on.) My job now is largely writing up remaining chapters (each Day is one short chapter) and making sure the whole book is self-consistent, since sections and checklists refer to and build on each other as you work your way through.

Far from easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing…