Can You Write A Book A Month For 12 Months?
You bet you can, here's how
You can make a name for yourself by publishing a lot of books.
And I don’t mean low-content books. I am sick of everyone talking about making six figures on Amazon KDP by publishing low-content books.
When I talk about writing and publishing 12 books in 12 months, I talk about medium to high-content books.
But, these books are short, to the point, and solve a problem. They could also provide a ton of helpful information curated in one place instead of being found all over the internet.
To sell a lot of books, gain traction, and make money, you need to have a catalog of books available for people to purchase.
And the best way to put that together is to create many books fast.
Why Not Write More 24 Hour Books?
In the past, I have suggested that you write a book in 24 hours. If you want to learn more before continuing, check out this post.
In that post, I shared what to do in a brief format and a book I had written and published in 24 hours.
A 24-hour Book is a Google replacement.
24 Hour Books are generally short. They could easily be used to send out as free resources in your email list.
They are good, helpful books when done right, but they are not what you want when trying to capture readers for good.
You want to create a book of significant length but enough depth to give your readers the information they need without them thinking, “I could have Googled this today and got all this info for free.”
A One Month Book is a curated resource.
A One Month Book is a curated resource so others don’t have to do it. Books created in one month are generally better quality and a little longer, but they don’t have to be. And they should fit into a series of books.
This is why I think it’s a great idea to publish one book a month for twelve months.
It gives you enough time to put together a quality book of curated content that solves a problem, edit, design, and prepare to launch it.
So, let’s dive into it.
How to Write and Publish a Book a Month
For this exercise, I will break things down into weekly increments to help you set appropriate timelines for writing and publishing a book. This is exactly what I am doing in order of how I am doing this over the next twelve months (well, I’m in month three of twelve right now).
Zero Week: Before You Start
Before starting this drive, you need to do some pre-work to publish 12 books in 12 months. Otherwise, this could be a failed experiment that frustrates you and makes you quit at worst.
Here are the five things you need to do ahead of time:
Create a list of 20 topics revolving around one to two niches.
Order these topics into at least one series, if you have two niches, then you need to order them into two.
Outline each topic to have at least seven chapters/main points.
With each topic outline, describe a personal story that fits the content in two to three sentences.
Write a contract with yourself to agree to make this happen.
This will be your key to working on your books over the next twelve months. And if you do this right, you can create a lot of helpful content that will draw people in for the long haul.
Week One: Write Your Book
Yes, you can write a book in a week. No, it isn’t going to be a long book. However, it doesn’t have to be a long book. Most people aren’t finishing long books anyway, so why not create something they will finish?
Now that we got that out of the way, here are the steps you need to take to write your book:
Write your book introduction. This should include a story about the topic from your life or someone else’s life, a clearly described problem that your book aims to solve, and an invitation to solve the problem with you.
Write your chapters. They don’t have to be long, but a minimum of 1,000 words would work well for this type of book. These chapters can be steps to solving the problem, tools that help, or concepts that create breakthroughs for people.
Write your conclusion. Your conclusion should finalize the solution to the problem you are solving. It should also be a call to action to encourage the reader to use the information you provided.
All of this can be done in the first week of the month. Here are a few things you should consider: Write without editing. Make sure you have focused time to create. Share your progress online and capture emails.
Week Two: Editing
Once you have written your book in the first week of the month, the next step is to prepare to launch. This takes the shape of three specific steps.
RGR Method to Editing: Read your book aloud, use Grammarly, and read your book aloud again. This is a great initial way to edit your book.
Phone-a-Friend: Email a friend willing to help you edit your books over the next twelve months. They will help you confirm that your book solves the problem and point out places that are hard to read.
The Final Read-Through: Once your friend has helped you ensure the book works, go through a final read-through to polish it up.
Editing will probably take two weeks if it’s done right. Sometimes, it takes longer, but I would be prepared to do editing over weeks two and three, starting with the majority of it over week two.
Week Three: Prepare to Launch
This is where you prepare to launch by completing the design pieces of your book. This focuses on the book cover, finalizing the edits, and formatting your book.
Book Cover. You can create your book cover in Canva. I call this Budget Cover Design. Take a book cover template, and then change it significantly. Adjust the fonts, graphics, and colors. This way, you won’t see your book covered in another book in the future.
Finalize Edits. This is where you do that final read-through and prepare to format your book. This is the final work to prepare the manuscript and move to the launch phase.
Formatting. I would highly suggest you invest in Vellum. It's $250 for the full version, but over 12 books, that is $22 a book, which is a way better price to format a book than hiring someone for each book.
Once you have designed your cover, finalized your edits, and formatted the manuscript for publishing, you are ready to move on to the next week and publish your book.
Week Four: Hitting Publish
Now, there are a few more activities you will need to complete before you hit publish, but these are the final steps to hitting publish.
Keywords & Categories. I use Publisher Rocket for all of my keyword and category research, which has helped me have nine #1 bestselling books. This is one of the best tools and well worth the purchase.
Upload to Amazon KDP. Walk through the three main screens to upload your book to Amazon KDP. I would suggest focusing on Kindle books only to start. You can add print ones later, but start with Kindle.
Hit Publish. Once you have uploaded your file and decided on your price (I suggest $0.99 for an opening price if you are starting out), you are ready to hit publish.
There are a few things to consider during this time: first, keep your price low if you don’t have a following or email list yet. Also, I suggest enrolling in KDP Select so you can make money on pages read through the Kindle Unlimited Program.
The Following Month
Now, you will start the process by creating your next book. However, during this time, you must promote the book you just published. Here is how I would do it:
Run a free book promotion with The Fussy Librarian. This will help you move books, get followers on Amazon, and get reviews and ratings that will help your book continue to be purchased.
After three weeks, update your price on your Kindle Book to $2.99. This is a good place to continue getting sales and better royalties, and when you publish your next book, you can do a Kindle Countdown deal back to $0.99, which will encourage more sales on the previous book.
Make sure your Amazon Author Page is set up. This way, you can capture all your books there, get followers, and create a home base for people to refer back to when launching more books.
These are the essential tasks for the first month after you launch your first book. Continue to promote your books as you write more. This way, you will continue to grow and keep momentum along the way.
Are You Ready to Start Your 12-Month Journey?
Now, you have a complete framework for writing 12 books in 12 months. It will help you create these books, promote them, and grow a following that will be eager for each book to come out.
Most of all, it will create a base for the rest of your author career, where you can expand on other topics within your niche and grow an even larger catalog of work to sell to the world.
What do you think? Could you do this? If so, I’d love to hear your niche and whether you will jump in and start your book publishing journey.
J.R. Heimbigner is a #1 Bestselling Author on Amazon who writes about faith and writing books. He has self-published 10 books and has some great resources. Check his book on using Substack to write books:
P.S. There may be sales or affiliate links in this post. So, I might get a little kick back if you purchase anything. Thank you in advance!
I think having them in series helps a ton. At least that’s my plan for it anyway.
Ok, Brother! I'm taking the challenge…. I’ll be happy with a book every 2 months, following the process as close as I can, but at this point gonna back up and cover a few steps I missed!