Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help authors and aspiring authors to write, publish and market their own bestselling books in eight minutes a day or less. Now in today’s I’m going to talk about something which I believe is so, so important and very few authors actually get it. But I learnt this principle from a guy called Mark Victor Hansen. Now many people would know of Mark Victor Hansen, he along with Jack Canfield created the Chicken Soup for the Soul series that has become a worldwide phenomenon. I think they have sold over a 120 million Chicken Soup for the Soul books. So, an incredible success story and I actually invested quite a little bit of money of learning from Mark Victor Hansen. I purchased a number of different CD programs from him over the years and studied his material religiously. But what are the things that he said that always stuck in my mind and this sentence I learned has shaped my book publishing career probably more so than any other sentence and I want to thank Mark Victor Hansen for teaching me this saying and I’m going to reveal it to you right now. And that is, don’t think book, think book series. Don’t think book, think book series. Because, well a lot of people do is they just think about just one book that they are writing and they don’t really have a big picture point of view. Now in order to demonstrate this particular point, I want to tell you a little bit about where we are located because we’re recording this video right now here at our office in Sydney, Australia and we actually work in our office right above an actual pizza store. So what we’re going to do now is just going to pan the camera across and we’re going to show you, it’s a restaurant called Lucky’s and Pep’s and they make fabulous wood fire pizza and we would normally head on down there. May be, you know, every forth night or so and have some pizza with the team. However, we have a bit of a problem right now and that is, we’re recording this video at around about, I think its just close to midday and they open at 5 o’clock so I have to do something that I really don’t like ever doing but we’ve had to do it for this particular video is we’ve gone to Pizza Hut. Not really the best pizza in the world however, doing it for this particular video.
Now, here we’ve got two pizzas. This pizza here is a single pizza. Now what do you notice about this pizza. Yes, it’s a pepperoni pizza, however, its not cut, its just there and its one solid pizza whereas over here, we’ve got another pizza and you may not be able to see that as well but its actually cut into pieces. So here, we’ve got a single book and here we’ve got actually got a book series and I want you to think about this, like it, like this inside your head. And I don’t want you to think you're just producing one book. I want you to imagine that you're actually doing a book series so don’t think book, think book series. So we’re going to put these pizzas aside now and come back to it a little bit later. Because what I find is, a lot of people, they just think that they're putting together one book and when you asked them, so how have you been working on this book for, they go, “Well, you know, I’ve been working on it for about five years.” And you say, “Wow! Five years.” And they say, “Yeah! This is going to be awesome. This is kind of like the -- everything you need to know. The complete “how to guide.” This is my 30 years of life experience that can be compressed into this book. I’m just putting everything I can in there.”
And for me, that’s really, really dangerous to put all of your ideas, all of your information into a single book for a variety of different reasons which I’m going to go through and explain in more detail in just a sec because as I have referred to on a previous video, you know, those kind of complete guides, The Complete Guide to Public Speaking or The Complete Guide to Fishing, The Complete Guide to Home Renovating, those books with everything in it, they kind of already being done. You think of the Dummy’s Guide. You think of the Idiot’s Guide. They’ve covered a lot of different topic areas. So if you're just going to do another book which is a complete guide of everything you need to know, then you probably will struggle when it comes -- time to getting your books picked up by a publisher or maybe even picked up by a distributor because what you want to do is you actually want to come up with some more specialized knowledge. Something that is maybe hasn’t been covered in those other books or maybe you're going to cover a segment.
So rather than just The Complete Guide to Renovation, it could be something like, the Complete Guide to Renovating for Couples or it could be A Guide to Renovating for Retirees or it could be a Guide for Renovating for People on a Tight Budget. So now, what we’re dong is we’re actually getting a particular on focus. We’re not thinking a single book anymore. We’re thinking a book series and we’ve broken it up into a number of different parts. So, in a future video because I’m kind of running out of time, I’m going to actually going to talk about all the reasons why you want to think book and not book series. Okay, so I’m going to talk about that because I’ve listed them all down and maybe this is probably going to blow out of time if I talk about it right. But he is the practical thing that I want you to do. I want you to think about your book ideas. Think about the topic that you're actually writing about. And then I want you to break it up into three or more parts. So if you are writing a book about, let’s just say, you're writing a book about training dogs or dog training. Then what I want you to do is I want you to really stretch your mind. I want you to think if you’d have to break that up into three different parts. How would you do it? How would you kind of dice it up? Would it be the dog training for beginners, intermediate or advanced? That’s one way of cutting it up. Another way of doing it is for different types of breeds, different breeds of dogs is another way to do it as well. And so there's probably a bunch of others as well you might want to do, you know, breeding -- dog training for, you know, for children, dog training for adults, dog training for seniors, you could do dog training for blind people. You know you could really go crazy with this thing but the moment you do that, you'll be so amazed with what starts to happen. All of a sudden now your vision for your book increases and this pressure to put it all into one book starts to dissipate and ideas start coming and flowing much easier.
So remember that saying, don’t think book, think book series. And make sure you come back. In fact tomorrow’s video, I’m on this topic now so I want to see it through. So come back and watch tomorrow’s video because I’m going to talk about the reasons as to why you need to think book series not just a book. So remember that saying or say it again, the correct way, don’t think book, think book series. And your practical homework, if you will to do is to think about your topic, whatever it is, break it up into three or more parts. Now, I say three because it will start opening things up. But once you do it, it could become 5, it could become 10, and it could become 20. For me, I actually took my idea and turn it into 15 different books. Originally, we’re just going to do one and I took that same idea and concept and I turned it into 15. Now, I don’t know what you are thinking right now. Maybe you're thinking, you know, this is kind of, you know, something that is a new idea or maybe you already think along these lines but just try this idea you're on. Just have a bit of a play with it and see where you’ll actually end up. And again this is not just -- I’ve given it a lot of examples for actual -- for non-fiction writers but you can do the same thing with fiction, novels as well. So rather than just doing one book and that’s a little island, and then another book, a little island, another book, a little island then think about a series, a book series for fiction novels is excellent. You know, a classic example is Harry Potter. Now, Harry Potter could’ve just been one book but it’s actually I believe six books. You know, I think of another example using the movies, think about Star Wars. We could’ve just packed that whole story into one book but there's a lot of reasons why that’s kind of probably not the best thing to do. By spreading it out, you get a so much more leverage. But basically come to the end of our video. I’m actually now going to eat a little bit of lunch. So remember, before we finish, don’t think book, think book series. Take your idea. Chop it up into three or more parts.
Here we go with our pizza. This is Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. Thanks for watching and bon appetite.
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