Category: book

Launch date revised, along with the text

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.

100 Days book screenshot

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…

Two months to go…

W100 Days, 100 Grand cover designell, the Chris does Content office (a converted garage in southeast London!) currently makes a beehive in midsummer look more like a convention of lazy bums; with the whole 100-day plan mapped out from June, July’s been about pulling together my thousands of pages of notes and checklists going back over a decade, flipping through with a critical eye and deciding what works.

Chris's workspace. Not bad eh?It’s a lot of effort – especially since my own copywriting business hasn’t let up for the summer, and a guy’s got to eat. But I’m pleased with progress so far. Not with the text overall – I thought the book would run to 60,000 words, and it’s looking like well over 150,000 – but with the way each chapter feeds into the next, building piece-by-piece towards a single goal.

Each chapter’s working out around 1,000 words of instructional text – everything from writing your sales website to building your campaign letter – and a set of tasks, usually between 3 and 8, that take between half a day and a day to complete. Oh, and there are now 10 sections rather than a planned 9 – List-building, while vital, can be learned in one week rather than two, so before it now comes a week devoted to networking the 100 Days way (i.e. not involving cocktails with strangers). I’ve also realised “the numbers” will be different for everyone – that £8,000 a month figure we’re aiming for may be 100 clients for someone selling web subscriptions, just 2 or 3 for a freelance writer like me – so in the second week a whole day goes on building a sales funnel and populating it with figures appropriate for your industry sector.

Of course, big news of the week is that the cover design‘s now done!