The final page of your book is one of the most important. It’s your final opportunity to impart your wisdom, encourage your readers, and leave a lasting impression on them. If you’ve ever watched a gymnast perform, she will finish with a dramatic flourish that leaves a lasting impression. Great books finish in the same way.

Some authors, like best selling novelist John Irving, actually write the end of their books first and then plot out the rest of the story working backwards from that spot. In non-fiction books, the end of the book is your opportunity to summarize all the key points in your book and make a final emotional appeal for your readers to take action.

Whether you are just starting your book or you are in the middle of writing it, take these steps to create a winning ending for your book:

1. Decide how you want your readers to feel when they reach the end of your book. Do you want them to feel elated, inspired, peaceful, empowered, or soothed? There are many emotions you can inspire in your readers so select the key emotion and craft the ending of your book to produce that feeling.
2. It is important to end your book with a lasting memory. Use a story, metaphor, poem, or word picture to create a visual image in your reader’s mind. Perhaps you paint a picture of a beautiful future, a loving moment, or a new life. Once you have identified the emotion in step one, you can create a word picture to anchor that feeling for your readers.
3. Remember that the end of the book is all about the reader. Some nonfiction authors create a weak ending when they use the end of their book as an invitation to contact them or visit their website. Those marketing invitations are important. However they are better placed in an appendix, afterword, or as a recommended resource. Make the ending of your book a powerful appeal to your reader’s best interests, then insert a blank page so she will take a mental pause, then insert any marketing invitations.
4. Carefully consider the emotional tone of your book. The best books, like great songs, have emotional peaks and valleys so that readers do not feel overwrought by the intensity of the book. Save your highest level of emotional content for the final chapter so that your book ends in a crescendo, like a cymbal crash at the end of a symphony.

Some books end weakly, like the author became tired and just stopped writing. If you follow these four steps, you’ll end your book in a way that empowers your reader and has they eager to work with you more deeply.

To be an author requires that you give deeply of yourself: your wisdom, your knowledge, and your passion for your topic.

So today, in celebration of you, take 20 minutes and use these questions to explore yourself more deeply.  The insights you uncover will aid you in achieving your goals as an author and business owner.

Write your answers down.  You’ll find more information flowing to you as  you move your hand across the page.

Click here for the self coaching questions featured on the blog.

1. What do you want your book to do for you personally?
2. What do you want your book to do for your readers?
3. What do you want your book to do for the world?
4. What frightens you about becoming an author?
5. Does that fear stop you or spur you onward?  Why?
6. What thrills you about becoming an author?
7. How will you know if your book is a success?  Describe what success means to you personally.
8. How supported do you feel in your quest to become a successful author?
9. How are you celebrating your progress along the way?
10. What action step you can take in the next 24 hours to move forward?

What did you discover about yourself and your book project?  Share your biggest insight by commenting on the blog.

Today, we celebrate the newest Love Your Life Publishing book, Step Up Now: 21 Powerful Principles for People Who Influence Others by Susan S. Freeman.

Susan gave me the opportunity to publish her book and design her new website, www.StepUpLeader.com. She wrote a wonderful book so it was a joy to write her website copy and create a really professional website to showcase both the book and her business.

I’d like to use her new website as a case study so you can see some of the best practices in book websites today.

Go over to www.StepUpLeader.com and review this site as you read this article.

First, notice how we tied the colors and look of the website to match her book cover, using similar fonts, and images in the header and footer.

Secondly, we made sure that you felt Susan’s personality on all the pages. There’s a nice video of her on the front page, great author photos all over the site, and links to all her social media sites on every page. Review the page entitled, The Juggler and Me, which is a story about how Susan developed her work which is more personal than her standard bio, which is also featured on the site. Also notice her blog, and the wonderful photos from her recent trip to Africa, another way to high her unique personality and experiences

There’s a nice opt in offer on the first page, inviting people to register to download a content rich recording, which will help Susan build a mailing list of people who are potential readers and clients. Susan also started a newsletter so that those who opt in for her recording will continue to receive valuable information on a regular basis.

Next, look at the Book page. Notice the how we stressed the benefits of her book in the copy and then featured testimonials from early readers. These testimonials were also used on the first page of her book, to highlight the fact that others have read the book and liked it. Testimonials are social proof of the value of your book or services so we used them liberally throughout the entire website.

Finally look at the media page. This page provides all the information a member of the press would need to successfully interview Susan, including sample interview questions. As Susan receives additional media coverage, she will update the page with links to additional interviews. This page will become an important part of her author’s platform.

It was a joy working with Susan on this project and I predict she will do very well with her book. She wrote a great manuscript and participated fully in the development of her book and website. I can highly recommend her book to everyone in a leadership position. I am so proud of her!

Study her website and decide what you like best about it. Then, consider what ideas you can use for your own sites.

What inspires you the most? Share it here on the blog.

Few authors want to think about competition. It may feel crass or unspiritual to think of competing with other authors. It may frighten you to think that other books have already been written on your topic. Most authors don’t like the idea of crushing their competition and may even avoid looking to see what other books are available in their genre.

Here’s the good news: It’s great that other books are written on your topic area. It signals that people are interested in the topic and actively seeking information in book format. Rejoice!

Rather than letting the idea of competing books discourage you from writing your masterpiece, use these ideas to engage with your book competition in a positive and helpful manner.

Use competing books as a treasure trove of market research opportunities. Spend some time in a bookstore or online book seller and make a list of the top 10 books selling in your genre. Next…

1. Review the table of contents for each book. Notice common themes. Decide if you want to include some of those common themes in your book or craft your manuscript to appeal to the more advanced reader.
2. Look for opportunities. As you review the contents of those 10 books, seek out areas that are missing or underdeveloped. These missing elements are perfect material for your book.
3. Observe the tone and demographics. If all the top selling books are written to appeal to Baby Boomers, can you write to those in their twenties? If all the books are serious, consider writing your book with a humorous approach.
4. Read a few of the competing books. If you find books you really enjoy, contact the author and begin a networking relationship. You may wish to include that book as a recommended resource or create a joint marketing venture with the author.
5. Visit the websites and blogs of selected authors to assess how they market, what types of products and services are offered, if any, and the strengths and weaknesses of the site. Then, look for fresh ways to approach your book marketing which incorporate your personality and background.

In the early 1990′s sitcom, Seinfeld, the character George Costanza had a unique approach to success. He would find out what everyone else was doing and then do the opposite. Other characters on the show would refer to this trait as “Doing a Costanza.”

It’s actually good advice for an author.

Competing books can teach you, inspire you, and perhaps lead to collaboration with like-minded authors.

Instead of fearing competition or jealously regarding their success, embrace competing titles and open up to fresh streams of creativity and significance.

Each new year I select a word to focus upon, like a touchstone.  This word becomes a guiding force in all my work.  Last year, the word was community and I built new ways for authors to connect with each other into all the programs and services of Business Building Books.

It took me a while to select the 2012 word.  There were many wonderful possibilities.

After much deliberation and searching my thesaurus, my 2012 word of the year is

Significance 

When something has significance, it has quality, importance and worth.  It is distinctive and influential, with the potential to effect a change.

In 2012, I pledge to help you write with significance, whether you are writing a book, an article, or creating an information product.

Your words and ideas matter.  Your positive message is sorely needed in this world full of stress and challenge.

It is time for you to stand up and be counted as an author with significant ideas.

So, how to make your writing significant?

First, write.  Finish your book. Create your blog. Develop your presentation or workshop.  The format in which you deliver your ideas may change, but the process always begins with putting words on paper.

Next, refuse to settle for anything less than your best.  Challenge yourself to write boldly, sharing your most creative ideas and editing out anything tired, trite, or common.

Finally, share.  Commit to sharing your words with your ideal readers and engaging in conversations with them.  In this sharing, you will refine your ideas, sharpen your focus, and witness the impact your brilliance has on others, which will increase your significance.

What about you?  How does this discussion of significance inspire you?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment here.

When something bad happens in your life or in your business, you have a powerful tool at your fingertips: your ability to write.

Follow this fool-proof method, and watch your stress level decline and your ability to cope grow strong every day.

Step 1 – Give Yourself a 24-48 hour Freak Out Period

When a crisis arrives, the first thing you need to do is give yourself a specific period of time to freak out.  During this time, give yourself permission to cry, whine, and experience your feelings of fear, loss, anger, frustration, or upset fully.

During this time period, be very gentle with yourself.  Cancel or reschedule all business meetings.  Your clients count on your professionalism, so refrain from business activities until you are more centered.  Refrain from any writing projects as you will not be able to create when you are in crisis mode.

Don’t make any serious decisions.  Just wait.  Ask for support from your team, your family, and your friends.  Give yourself comforting foods and nurturing music.  Ensure that you get a good night’s sleep.

Sit down with your journal and write about exactly what happened and all the feelings you are experiencing.  Name and experience all your feelings.  It’s even OK to rant a bit.  No one will see this writing, so vent all your feelings.  Research on resilience shows that stuffing or ignoring intense feelings actually increases stress, so the quicker you write out your feelings, the faster you will recover your equilibrium.

Step 2 – Shift From Feeling to Thinking

After your 24-48 hour Freak Out period is over, it’s time to move into a place of power.  Tell yourself that no more self pity is allowed, it’s time to do some planning.  Because you’ve waited until your emotions are calmer, you’ll be ready to think strategically.

Get out some paper and start making lists.  First, list all your assets.  Include your resources of time, money, strong client relationships, assistance from team members, and support from loved ones.  Spend plenty of time making a complete list of everything you can use to cope with this challenge.

Next, list all the issues that require a solution.  Rank them in priority order.  This list making will engage the logical side of your brain and move you from feeling like a victim to feeling in charge of the situation.  Once you can shift into that feeling of empowerment, you are ready to cope successfully with the challenge.

Finally, write out an action plan for each of the issues.  Assign a due date and list who you will be calling on for assistance.  This list can be very simple. It might look like this:

• Format ezine – Amy by Tuesday
• Reschedule coaching appointments – Sue by Wednesday
• Get groceries – Jo by Tuesday
• Pick up medications – Tina today
• Call housekeeping service – me by Friday

Once you can look at your written plans, you’ll feel stronger and ready to move forward into action.  When you shift from feeling to thinking, new possibilities open up and your coping skills increase.  It’s almost like magic.

The ability to write about your feelings and your challenges is one of the fringe benefits of being an author.  When you use this process every time you face a challenge, it will soon become second nature and one of your essential coping tools.

While your book provides education, entertainment, or information for your book, it is also an opportunity to create an on-going relationship with your readers. Savvy fiction and non-fiction authors know the power of those reader relationships and write their book strategically to foster them.

You’ve seen this in action many times. For example, the Twilight books were part of a series with cliff-hanger endings that left readers hungry for more. You may not know the individual titles, but you’ve probably heard of the Twilight saga. Non-fiction writer Seth Godin cultivates such reader loyalty that any book he releases becomes a best-seller.

One of the best ways to create eager fans for your books is to intentionally foster a long-term relationship with your readers by strategically seeding your book. A book seed is an invitation for readers to go to your website for a special readers-only gift.

For example, when Dr. Michael Kaye wrote A Boomer’s Guide to Chronic Pain, he included specific exercises that persons with chronic pain should do to strengthen their muscles. While the exercises were well-described in the book, Dr. Kaye also offers videos on his website where readers could watch the exercises being performed by other Baby Boomers.

The book seeding process works like this:

1. You create a compelling gift for your readers and place it on your website with an opt-in box, which means that readers must provide their name and email address in exchange for your gift.
2. While you are writing your book, you insert 3-5 seeds, or invitations to readers to go to your site and collect their special gift.
3. After readers register for your gift, you keep in touch with them and provide news, additional information, and insider tips about your next books. The best way to do this is via an ezine.
4. Readers feel a part of your writing and your business, as if they are members of your inner circle.  By giving them extra perks, they will deepen their connection with you personally and with your writing.  These readers become fans who repeatedly purchase books and services from you.

There are many different types of seeds you can plant in your book. This list may inspire you:

• Worksheets
• Journaling pages
• Additional information about the characters in your book
• Sample chapters from your next book
• Guided meditations
• Audios or videos where you share the background of the book
• Discussion guides for book clubs
• Music downloads
• Short ecourses where you deliver a lesson via email over the course of a few weeks
• Recordings of expert interviews featured in the book
• Webinars or teleclasses where you teach how to implement the material in the book
• Excel spreadsheets useful for tracking budgets, fitness goals, or anything which can be tracked over time
• Videos of you reading selected passages from your work

To effectively seed your book and harvest the maximum benefits from your seeds, you’ll need:

• A website for your book
• An auto responder service which can deliver your reader gift automatically and manage your list.
• On-going communication with people who register for your gift

When you plant seeds in your book, you will not only grow your fan base, you will create a more meaningful reciprocal relationship with your readers.    Plus, you’ll create anticipation and desire for your next book.  What a rich harvest from a small seed!

Successful non-fiction books have a balance to them.  They don’t just give readers dry facts, intense feelings or a list of action steps for self improvement.  If a book was all facts, it would be as entertaining to read as the phone book.  If it was filled completely with feelings, the experience of reading would be an emotional roller coaster.  A book filled just with lists of things to do would be dull and uninspiring, providing no context or explanation why the recommended action steps are important.

To create a book that is both enjoyable to read and creates a positive change in the lives of your readers, seek to balance information which will appeal to the head, heart, and hands of your readers.

Head – Involve the minds of your readers by providing facts, statistics, case studies, results, and concrete information about your topic.  This information will speak to the logical, left brain of your readers.

However, when you provide facts, share them in an interesting way. Readers are too stressed to spend time with boring books.  You can make your facts interesting by expressing them crisply, linking them to things the reader really cares about, and providing new information that sparks further thinking for your readers.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, and other best-selling books, writes about factual, scientific material in such an engaging way that readers can understand the material easily and feel inspired to learn more.

Heart – To appeal to the heart of your readers, enhance your writing with stories, motivational quotations, and information that produces an emotional reaction from your readers.  This emotional content will appeal to the creative, right brain of your readers and help them remember the facts more easily.

Do this thoughtfully and monitor the intensity of the emotional journey you provide for your readers.  If you produce very intense emotions in the beginning of your book, give your readers a break by producing a more gentle emotion in following pages.

Mix up the emotions just a bit to provide variety.  For example, in the book, Flunking Sainthood, author Jana Reis tells touching stories about her failures when living spiritual practices.  She also sprinkles in some humorous stories as well so the reader alternates between a giggle and a sigh of shared pain.

Hands – Give your readers something to do with the facts and feelings in your book. Create action steps, journaling exercises, or suggest concrete physical actions that will help your readers implement what they’ve read immediately.  Getting your readers to move their hands or bodies to do something during the course of your book will help them to integrate what they are learning and create results for your book.

Many authors who write in the personal development or self help arena do this naturally.  One example is Byron Katie, who provides worksheets for readers to complete, both in her books and on her website so that readers can complete her signature process, The Work.  Completing the worksheets is a much more powerful experience than simply reading about it.

When you balance your book to appeal to the head, heart, and hands of your reader, you will create a book that teaches, inspires, and motivates your reader.

What more could any aspiring author ask for?

How does this information inspire you?  Share your comments here.

St. Louis is celebrating baseball!  Our home team, the St. Louis Cardinals, won a spot in the World Series, despite having a terrible slump and many losses in the middle part of their season.  The team was plagued by injuries until August.  Once everyone was healthy, the team has been on a winning streak that just seems magical.

In one of the recent play-off games, a squirrel ran onto the field, right in front of the batter.  Players and umpires had to stop the game and chase the squirrel.  When the game resumed, the Cardinals had new momentum and won the game.  Around town, everyone was chuckling about the squirrel.  It was nicknamed the Rally Squirrel.

Here’s where the story gets very interesting… especially for authors.

A man in the marketing department of the local children’s hospital immediately created a tee-shirt featuring the Rally Squirrel.  The shirts were produced locally and ready for sale two days after the squirrel sighting.  The first run of 10,000 shirts sold out in 45 minutes!

Over the last two weeks, more than 200,000 dollars was raised for the children’s hospital from sales of the Rally Squirrel shirts.  Stories about the shirts have been all over the local media outlets, giving the children’s hospital a boost in free publicity.

This story has a direct correlation to success as an author.  When you have a great idea, it’s important to move fast to implement it.  It’s important to respond to things that are happening in your environment and society at large, but if you get an idea and sit on it for the next 6 weeks, you will probably miss your window of opportunity.

There are so many things happening in our world today which may be opportunities for you to market and promote your book.  The media is always looking for experts who can add commentary to current news stories.  The best experts?  Authors!

Think about these current events.  Is there a way to link your book to one of these topics?

• The Occupy Wall Street protests
• Concerns over the water supply
• Demi Moore and  the rumors about her marriage
• The end of the Mayan calendar
• Europe’s financial woes
• Cyber bullying among teens
• The lack of job prospects for unemployed people over 50

If your book relates to any of these trending topics, you would be a valuable media guest – if you can move quickly.

Whether you are writing a book about relationships, business, spirituality, personal growth, or other non-fiction topics, you have information that would be of interest to the media.

Pay attention to the news and current events.  Whenever you are able, link your book topic to a trending event and contact local media outlets with possible story ideas.

Who knows?  Your “Rally Squirrel” idea may be as close as today’s newspaper!

How does this idea inspire you?  Comment below on the biggest opportunity you can see for promoting your book today.

Kathleen Ragan, a stay-at-home mother, loved reading stories to her young daughters.  She took them to the local library every week to pick out fresh books and made story time an important part of every day.

Kathleen began to notice a disturbing trend.  All the books she was reading featured male heroes.  As she began to study childhood classics by Dr. Seuss, she noticed the only female characters were negative ones – lazy mothers, gossipy women, or colorless sisters who had no dialog. She then started to study fairy tales and other popular children’s books.  There were few featuring girls who were brave, intelligent, or leaders.  Instead, the books featured princesses who required rescuing, were evil step mothers, and were wicked witches.

These were not the role models Kathleen wanted for her daughters.  She began an exhaustive search for folktales from around the world featuring female heroines.  It took several years of exhaustive research including reviewing more than 30,000 stories.

This research led to her book Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters, published in 1998.  The book features 100 stories from around the world with female heroines and are ideal for reading aloud to children.

Why is this story important to you?

Writing a book is a big job.  It requires an investment of time, energy, and effort.  In order to finish a book, you must have a passionate reason WHY you are writing that book.  That passionate Why will pull you forward and give you the energy you need to complete your book.

Kathleen was passionate about providing inspiring stories for her daughters.  Her passion propelled her to do whatever it took to create her book and share it with the world.

What about you?

Use these questions to measure your passion for your current writing project:

1. Do you enjoy learning about the topic of your book?
2. When you have extra time, does it feel like a treat to work on your book?
3. When you share your book idea with others, do you feel excited and exhilarated?
4. Have you clearly identified WHY you are writing this book?

If you notice that you are not feeling passionate about your book, don’t give up right away.  You have two options.  You can decide to select another topic which feels more exciting.  Or, you can make your current topic more enjoyable to write by adding stories, fresh research, or taking a bolder stand.

One of the quickest ways to increase your passion for your book is to have some conversations with your ideal readers.  Discover their needs and determine how your book can serve them.  Reconnect with your passionate heart for helping others and you’ll find you’ve come home to the real reason why you started writing your book in the first place: to serve the world with your unique message.

Share your passionate WHY here and make a public stand for your book.