Writing that first textbook can be a really time-consuming and exhausting experience, but knowing the ropes beforehand can make it less daunting.
Easy money. A screenplay. Fame and glory. If you’re thinking about writing a textbook, put these out of your mind. But if you’ve got a lot of knowledge to share in return for the satisfaction of just doing it, there’s some advice out there for writing your first textbook.
Many people live exciting lives, have great vision or imagination and are compelled to seek the long road of writing a book. Writing your first book is an especially daunting task. Where to start? How do you proceed? What if writer’s block hits? And will I ever find a publisher? These are just a few of the myriad of questions that keep would-be authors away from the keyboard and awake at night as they wrestle with conquering the page.
Let’s begin from the rejection pile as it were: Things Not To Do. If you can eliminate some lethal, bad habits, maybe you can free your fingers so they can dance joyfully over the keyboard once again. Are you game? Here are five myths you will need to overcome when writing your first book:
While you can’t actually manage time – because it operates independently of you — you can manage your goals, said Susan Robison, a psychologist and faculty development consultant with Professor DeStressor, during her 2009 TAA Conference session, “Time Management: Why You Don’t Need It, Can’t Do It Anyway – And What To Do Instead.”
“One of the things that the research on time management workshops show, is that they don’t work,” she said. “What happens to people emotionally is they come out of the workshops feeling absolutely overwhelmed by a thousand techniques they’re not going to do, and so they’re not going to manage their time any better.”
