I was just listening to a training by Derek Doepker, the bestselling author of many books on a variety of topics.  In that training, he quickly stated and passed by the idea that we an find some great ideas about the kinds of books that will sell best by paying attention to the kinds of New Year’s resolutions that people are making.  Since the idea seemed so interesting to me, I decided to find out more.

Here is a list of the top ten New Year’s resolutions for 2015:

1.  Lose Weight

2.  Get more organized.

3.   Spend less and save more (Includes getting out of debt)

4.  Enjoy life tot he fullest

5.  Stay fit and healthy

6.  Learn something exciting

7.  Quit Smoking

8.  Help Others Fulfill their Dreams

9.  Fall in love

10.  Spend more time with family.

Other lists can be found that give a little bit of a different twist on these, adding or subtracting one or two resolutions from the list.  If you are an author at heart, then another one would be how to write a bestselling book.

That first resolution is related to one of the highest demand book categories on Amazon.  I would go to the Kindle Store, Kindle ebooks.  After that, I would type “weight loss” in the search bar.  Amazon would then show me the bestselling books in that category.  I could use a tool like KindleSpy to see how well they are doing and what features I might want to include in my own book.  Or, which I might want to avoid.

Let me suggest that you could probably make a list of ten suggestions to help fulfill any of these resolutions, expand on each one by writing five pages, and then sell it on Amazon with very little effort.  Here are some other suggestions to help you make your bestseller dreams come true.

Literally, you need to do what I said in the previous paragraph.  If you write for about two hours per day, you should produce between 1,000 and 4,000 words.  Your 50-page book should be about 12,500 words.  You could be finished writing your book within 12 and a half days.

Before you start writing, spend one hour coming up with the ten suggestions.  Perhaps that means you make a list of twenty, but then pare it down to ten.  Carefully word these suggestions because they will form the framework of your thinking about the book and also the meat of what your readers will receive.  Arrange your list of suggestions into what you consider to be a logical order.

Spend about 30 minutes doing quick Google searches for the best ideas on how to implement that suggestion.  For example, to lose weight, one suggestion might be to drink more water.  Tell them how to calculate the amount of water they need to have.  Warn them that eight glasses a day is not enough for most of us.  Let them also know the factors that might mean they need even more than the calculated amount (higher temperatures, increased activity, etc.).   Give them a list of times when it would be common to add water to their daily routine (just after waking, before beginning a meal, etc.).  After explaining each suggestion at the beginning of a paragraph, you can explain why that works.  Got it?  The same strategy applies to other subjects just as well.   When doing your Google searching, you can copy and paste the best ideas into separate documents for each suggestion, then review, consolidate, simplify, and expand upon what you’ve found.

Now, it’s time to write.  Start with a clean document for each suggestion.  Based on what you’ve learned skimming through the Google articles, make a list of steps to accomplish that suggestion.  Each item in the list should be a very short sentence or a short phrase.  This should either be the first sentence of a paragraph or a bold heading for each new paragraph.  Let’s say you have ten suggestions for the book, each needing five pages of material.  If you add five to ten steps that become paragraphs, each paragraph would be just 125-250 words on average.   So, here’s how the process would look:

Of course, the book isn’t ready for Amazon, until you select an appealing title, get a great eye-catching cover, have the text edited and formatted, and then go through the upload process with Kindle Direct Publishing.   You can learn more about these factors in my book PREPARE! PUBLISH! PROMOTE! Book 2: Publishing Books for Growing Sales.