Beating The Best Seller
By CJ McDaniel
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About this ebook
Imagine someone buying their first pair of boxing gloves, and the very next day stepping in the ring for the heavyweight championship with the entire world watching. This seems ridiculous; it would be no contest, and after their embarrassing defeat and eventual return from the hospital they would never work up the nerve to box again.
Now, imagine deciding that you want to write a book yourself. Once it’s done, you throw everything together, slap it on book sites and then wait for the hoards of raving fans to knock your door down. The turnout and subsequent embarrassment is sure to prevent even the most adamant optimist from writing a second book.
This is a book about boxing. Actually, this is a story about authors—their nicks, bruises and their surprising similarity to athletes competing in one of the most rigorous and dangerous sports in existence today. This easy to read book highlights the key components to creating a book that competes with the most popular books in your genre.
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Book preview
Beating The Best Seller - CJ McDaniel
Imagine
Someone buying their first pair of boxing gloves, and the very next day stepping in the ring for the heavyweight championship with the entire world watching. This seems ridiculous; it would be no contest, and after their embarrassing defeat and eventual return from the hospital they would never work up the nerve to box again.
This is a book about boxing. Actually, this is a story about authors—their nicks, bruises and their surprising similarity to athletes competing in one of the most rigorous and dangerous sports in existence today. If you think this is a stretch, I hope that the pages of this book will help you understand why I compare the two, and how seeing your book in this light can change the way you think about self-publishing.
Now, imagine deciding that you want to write a book yourself. Once it’s done, you just throw everything together, slap it up on Amazon and then wait for the hoards of raving fans to knock your door down. The turnout and subsequent embarrassment is sure to prevent even the most adamant optimist from writing a second book.
I can’t promise to make you a best seller, but I can train you to step into the ring and go toe to toe with the publishing champions. Blow for blow, you can be everything they are and better. That way when a potential reader sees your book, they will evaluate it on its strengths instead of a laundry list of small but impactful errors.
I have seen the steps in this book work more times than I can count, and if you stick with the regimen I outline then I can guarantee you will have a book you can truly be proud of.
If you don’t enjoy boxing but are an author, I would encourage you to still give this book a try. It’s short and the concepts are simple, and I am simply using the example of boxing to better illustrate the importance of the process. The goal of this book is to give your masterpiece its absolute best chance of knocking out the competition!
The price of being outmatched
In boxing, opponents are selected and matched by their records and qualities as fighters. Uneven matches can lead to disappointment for the fans, so for championship bouts the challenger works his hardest to match the level of the current champion.
The president of a large publishing company explained to me how this works in the publishing world. He told me that they don’t consider self-published authors for publication because only 1 out of 1,000 have what it takes to succeed against the current books on the market.
From my experience of looking through the finished books of self-published authors this is sadly the truth, but not for the reason you would think. It’s not because an author can’t rise to the standard, it’s not even that they are subpar writers, it is simply because they didn’t put in the work that a giant publisher would before the book goes public.
This is the epidemic in independent publishing that is leaving