Apply the habits of successfully published authors to your daily routine

Your daily routine--or habits--plays a "make" or "break" role in your success. Cultivate the right habits, those with a proven track record of success, and your progress will be rapid. "Reinvent the wheel," however, and your progress will be slower and less predictable.

During the past few years, I have interviewed over 200 highly successful, published authors. (Partial list). These range from "household names" to authors whose visibility is limited to their niche markets. You can listen to dozens of these interviews here.

Although the nature of their success varies, their similarities are more apparent than their differences. The following is a distillation of successful author habits.

1. Visualize your success

Success begins with creating a mental picture of both you and your readers from your book.

Begin by picturing the change that your book will bring to your readers; the problems that it will help them solve and the goals it will help them achieve.

Then, visualize yourself helping your readers, speaking to hundreds who have come to hear your ideas. Or, visualize yourself helping individual clients on a 1-to-1 basis.

Visualize how you will feel the first time you visit a bookstore, and see your book on display, and how you will feel when a stranger contacts you to learn more about your products and services.

2. Commit to daily progress

The "training" that many receive in college, i.e., "cramming" for exams, and successfully preparing term papers at the last minute, does not work for planning, writing, promoting, and profiting from books.

Successful authors commit to daily progress, often involving working sessions of just 30-minutes, or less. As Don Murray, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Boston Globe columnist, author of numerous books about writing, and Published & Profitable Editorial Board (Emeritus) member once commented: 90-minutes, an hour, 30-minutes, or even 20-minutes is enough to keep a project alive.

Robert Parker, (no relation), writes two books a year. How much time does he spend writing? He limits himself to a single hour in the morning working on one title, and a second hour in the afternoon working on the second title.

Short, frequent working sessions keeps your mind involved on the task at hand, whether it's a planning, writing, promoting, or profiting task. Daily progress, rather than occasional heroic measures, represents the best way to write and profit from your expertise.

3. Plan ahead

Before retiring for the night, glance at the planning, writing, promoting, or profiting task that you want to accomplish tomorrow. (This is where mind maps can be of great assistance.)

Simply glancing at a print-out of the project you want to address tomorrow can be enough to put your mind to work while you sleep, priming the pump for tomorrow. When you start to work in the morning, you'll probably be surprised at how easy the project turns out to be, and how much you get done in a short time.

4. Recognize the limitations of writing

Writing, alone, will not bring you clients, opportunities, or prosperity. The world is filled with well-written books that languish in obscurity.

Books must address topics desired by hungry, reachable markets, markets that you can efficiently promote and distribute your book to. The information you provide must be wanted, and it must not duplicate existing books. This requires planning and creating a title that clearly advertises the contents of your book and targets its intended readers.

No matter how well written, your book will require consistent marketing and promotion. New prospective buyers enter the market every day; your message has to be there when they're ready to buy.

Even if you write a best-selling book, as defined in conventional terms, profits from book sales are unlikely to support you in the desired manner. Successful authors recognize this from the start. They don't depend on publisher advance and royalties, or profits from direct sales. Instead, successful authors create their own back-end profits that leverage off their book's success.

5. Ask and accept assistance

Highly successful authors seldom work in isolation. They work in harmony with others. Assistance comes in numerous forms, from distributing advance copies of their manuscript to published experts in their field to sharing drafts of their book with readers through their blogs.

Often, highly successful authors share the writing tasks with others. Successful authors like Bob Burg, Rick Frishman, Rob Lebow, Rob Jay Conrad Levinson frequently work with co-authors to get their books written on time to the highest possible standards.

Other authors devise ways that their books can profit from the contributions and insights of those who have successfully faced and overcome the problems addressed in their books.

Mastermind groups are another way that individuals can accomplish more, working with mentors and peers, than they could ever accomplish working on their own.

6. Avoid the curse of perfection

Writer's block is a frequent result of the curse of perfection--the feeling that every sentence and every paragraph has to be letter-perfect in the first draft.

Highly successful authors recognize that the first draft is the most important draft. Improvement cannot take place until the words appear on screen for the first time, or written on a yellow pad with a felt-tip marker.

Once the first draft has been written, there are plenty of opportunities for the words to be perfected. They can be checked for perfect grammar by editors and proof-readers, or clarified by the author--themselves--at a later date.

Success comes from first making the ideas and the message tangible without self-censorship or draining self-editing. Later, words, sentences, and paragraphs can be finessed into shape.

7. Persevere

A surprising number of highly successful authors admit that they do not particularly enjoy writing, nor do they consider themselves good writers.

But, they do respect their credentials and qualifications to write a book, and they recognize the importance of the information they want to share. They are doing whatever it takes to get their message into their reader's hands as quickly and efficiently as possible.

One common sentiment can be summed up, "Writing is not particularly easy to do, but it is doable."

And--oh, yes--highly successful authors usually conclude by saying that: "Yes, the rewards are there, and it is very much worthwhile!"