Write Your Book In 40 Hours With Dr. Angela Lauria
Today, clients have a lot of tools research about you before they decide to work with you. That’s why as an entrepreneur, it’s important to stand out and have credibility and trust. But how do you do that?
You need to let your potential clients know who you are. You can do this through your website, blog posts, a podcast or social media. But one of the best ways to get attention and build credibility is by writing a book. People want to work with an expert, and writing a book can help you become one.
No one knows this better than Dr. Angela Lauria. Angela worked as a ghost writer for 17 years before she decided to take her services to the next level. She founded The Author Incubator and now helps people write their books in 40 hours.
By writing about all kinds of topics, she found that she herself had become an expert. “That’s why the most important thing when writing a book is that the author of the book remains the one writing it. You can have all the knowledge, but if you’re not already the person who wrote the book before writing it, you will sabotage it,” she says.
From a One Woman-Show to a Team of 45 People
As Angela was about to graduate from university back in 1994, she got her first job working on a book. “As a ghost writer, you generally get paid half of your fee upfront and half when you turn in the manuscript. In order to pay my rent, I had to learn how to write books quickly and efficiently. Over the next 17 years, I wrote 29 books,” Angela remembers. “I was a ghost writer, an editor, a proofreader. I did marketing for books. I got hired by Random House to write the little endorsement blurbs that celebrities write – they don’t write them themselves, people like me do.”
Apart from design, Angela did everything in the world of publishing. In 2010, she attended a writer’s conference. She was ready to write her own book. Many people at the conference were either life coaches or experts in the personal development space wanting to publish their own book. “I thought to myself: This would be so much more interesting than the technology books I’ve been writing for years.”
She started doing marketing for self-help books and business books and in 2013, started The Author Incubator. Today, Angela works with about 400 authors per year who want to get their book written. Her company has grown to a team of 45 people. “We act as agents, get our clients book contracts, do their book marketing and help in all aspects of writing, promoting and publishing their books.”
A 99.6% Success Rate
Before Angela had her team, she used to do all these tasks herself. In her first year, she worked with 40 authors. “I probably pulled 100 all-nighters. I remember being on vacation and not seeing more than the inside of my hotel room because I was just working. That’s when I decided that I needed to hire more me’s.” But thinking that the people she hired could do everything she did was a mistake. She realized that she had to start breaking up the work into different, more specialized roles. “That’s how my team works today. We have specific people doing only very specific things, for example one person is responsible to help authors get over writer’s block.”
The Author Incubator has a success rate of 99.6%. “If you sign up with us, as long as you stay alive for nine weeks, your book will get done.” However, her clients need to trust her process. “We don’t do any special exceptions. We have a very exact process we follow and there’s no flexibility. If someone wants something their way, they should do it themselves.”
The Importance of Becoming the Person Who Wrote the Book
“We take whatever you’re doing and turn it into a framework with you. But it’s important that you’re the one doing the actual writing because that’s where you’re becoming the person who wrote the book instead of us becoming the people who wrote it.” Angela says that this is key in producing your own book. The first 30 authors she worked with got their books done. However, they never coached or sold anything on what their book was about, because they hadn’t become the true author of it. Angela had.
“Even though every book and every author is different, there is a framework that can be applied and a few key points that are the same for every book.” For starters, a book has to solve a problem and it has to have an outcome. Another cornerstone of Angela’s framework is how to manage writer’s block and provide a detailed structure of the book. “The reason it then only takes 40 hours for our authors to write a book is because everything’s set up and what we’re really talking about is typing.”
No Blank Pages
Another step in Angela’s framework is to envision one’s success before the book is even written. “This later often becomes the introduction for the book.” It also helps to establish the book’s length. “We do a writing test where I tell my clients to write down why they want to write a book, without stopping to write for 30 minutes.”
From this exercise, Angela gets a word count. “We want our clients to write a chapter in two to four hours. So if they wrote 500 words in half an hour, they can get 2’000 words in two hours, and that will result in one chapter. A book usually has around 12 chapters, which will be 24’000 words. That’s the average. It might be longer, but most books are going to be between 24’000 and 60’000 words.” In short, if her clients spend two hours per chapter and their book as 12 chapters, they can even finish their book in 24 hours.
“We defeat the blank pages ahead of time by creating an outline with a summary of what goes into each chapter, the purpose statement for each chapter and 10 to 15 writing prompts. So when you sit down, you don’t need the internet, you don’t need to do any research, everything’s laid out in front of you and you just type it out.”
Women Stepping It Up
76% of the authors working with The Author Incubator generate over $100,000 in the first year of having their book out. 20% make $250,000 or more. “And then we always have a couple of superstars who cross the million mark with their book in a year,” says Angela.
Her speciality are brand new people. If a client has no website, no email list and is converting to something new, that’s when she’s at her best. “These authors tend to hit $250,000 or a million in a year.” A lot of her clients are women who took a break from their careers for different reasons and are ready to step it up again. “With releasing their book, they become leaders, they become the person taking decisions and bringing home a living.”
Angela knows that the experiences gained as a ghost writer and the 17 years of writing technical books have brought her to being able to realize The Author Incubator. “All this work made me a genius at creating frameworks. Without this experience, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. There was a purpose to everything I did, the positive and the negative. And I’m glad I did it.”
Episode Bonus
Are you interested in writing your own book? Get help from Angela and download her books for free on theauthorincubator.com/the-library.
Connect with Angela Lauria:
- TheAuthorIncubator.com
- Free Downloads! The Author Incubator Library
- Page Up! Podcast
- Facebook – The Author Incubator
- Twitter – The Author Incubator
- Instagram – The Author Incubator
- LinkedIn – The Author Incubator
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