Good Morning,
Starting your story in the middle is a good practice. Doing that with a project is a recipe for disaster.
But how do you know where to start when you’re just a beginner?
When it comes to writing an e-book, start with Writing E-Books for Fun and Profit. Yes, I wrote it and this is shameless self-promotion. It’s still a good book, and it works with my example.
The e-book lays out a step-by-step process for choosing your topic, getting the book written then marketing the book. That’s great, it’s really useful, but what do you do when there isn’t a book written about how to do what you want to do?
That is my situation when it comes to putting together the E-Book Tele-Workshop Series.
Sure, there are lots of resources about how to do a tele-seminar, conference calls and podcasts. But what about how to approach the experts, making the schedule, putting together lists of questions, booking call times, and blah, blah, blah. What about all that other stuff?
Side note: Can you tell I’m thinking of an information product? Something to help everyone else keep from stepping into the holes and cow patties I stepped in? (And you’ll all know I’ve really been there and done that!)
So here’s part of the answer:
The beginning is deciding what you want to do.
I want to do a series of workshop calls that show everyone how to get their book written, publish it and promote it. So, the first thing I need to do in the planning is decide what material I’m going to cover.
Once I decide what material to cover, then I can look at what order to cover it in. At the same time, I can decide which expert is best for talking about which topic.
You can see how this leads to developing a call schedule. That leads to everything else.
The call schedule determines when each piece of copy is needed, when you have to get the call script to each expert, and when to schedule all the tech stuff like call recording, editing and transcription.
Now, there’s one more important thing to know: The call schedule can be different from the interview schedule. Here’s the difference:
The call schedule is when people get to listen to the interview with each of the experts.
The interview schedule is when you record each the interview with each expert.
Maybe your call schedule is set to run each Wednesday evening at 9:00 pm EST because that’s the best time for your audience. But, when you ask an expert for the interview, they might say they don’t work in the evenings.
That means you record the interview during the day and play it back for everyone during your call schedule. Know what I mean?
Having an interview schedule that’s different from your call schedule also allows you to be uber efficient during the project. Using the Wednesday evening call schedule might mean the calls are spread out over 16 or 20 weeks. But you can set your interview schedule to be convenient for the experts and get some of the calls done early.
That translates into being able to get the audio edited, and the transcription done early, too. You don’t release them until after the scheduled call, of course, but it’s always nice to have things done early.
And that’s my two cents worth on where to start when your planning and setting goals. Let me know what you think.
Conrad