Authority Site with Book Template: One More Thing!

Authority Site with Book Template: One More Thing!

The past two days I’ve been talking about how to get your affairs in order before you start a new book project. Yesterday I posted a list of all the things that I think about before starting that I hadn’t posted about on Monday. Today, I’m going to talk about one last thing (maybe.)

I don’t know about most writers, but I prefer not to do something more than once if I don’t have to. This includes setting up these projects. For instance, I’ll have a folder of things that I simply copy and paste whenever I start a new project. This includes an Excel file, Word files and Scrivener files (depending on the need for those.)

These writing templates mean that there’s as little time as possible between me having my next genius idea and actually getting to work on it. The book templates also mean that I can “see” the shape my books will take with every word I write. You could also create draft cover templates if that’s your thing, but that verges into procrastination territory for me.

Authority/Niche Site Template

Once you have decided on your site idea and your products, then you’ll want to build a folder where you store things in so they’re easy to find and it’s easy to see what needs doing. You can skip all of this organisational stuff, but I wouldn’t: I have a lot of different manuscripts on my computer from a time before this, and I don’t remember half of them, let alone have a schedule to finish them.

In the following photo, you’ll see I’ve got “Blog posts,” an Excel file and a “books” folder as well as an empty research folder.

They’re all pretty much straightforward. Blog posts is a single document with a master list of all the things I plan to write about (usually for the first year or so.) Whilst with JamieMcSloy.co.uk I write on the day I post, I don’t do that with my other sites. I plan them out so each post is relevant to the book (or product) I’m going to sell. This also means I don’t run out of ideas and let the site flop into obscurity: another thing I’ve done in the past. The folder for blog posts is just where I save the draft posts before I upload them.

The Excel file just stores all the information from all the other stuff in the folder for easy viewing. The research folder just gets filled with links and other articles and whatnot relating to the niche.

The “Books” Folder contains documents. We’ll talk about this in the next section.

Book Template

If you’ve ever had problems creating a PDF or uploading to Kindle, Nook or wherever, you’ll know what a pain it is to have your manuscript rejected because one of the fonts is incompatible or the cover is too big or the table of contents doesn’t work.

That’s why I’ve got a book template. Essentially, you can create an empty book with headings and chapters and the TOC (which gives the most problems usually) and then not worry about it afterwards.

See:

This also means that you can accurately predict how many pages your book is going to be and then just write into the dark once you’ve got the structure sorted out. This means the maximum amount of words for the time you’ll spend, so that’s great.

Final Words

I’m sure to many readers this is probably getting boring. But creating shell folders and templates means that the job of writing is a lot less boring. There’s nothing more tedious than trying to work out what you need to write next, or spending two hours trying to fiddle around with Word’s Table of Contents creator.

By creating a template folder and pasting it to create new projects, you’re giving yourself a place to start and the tools and pathway to succeed.

So with that thought, I’ll leave you to create some files and folders!