Will It Fly?

I recently listened to a podcast of online author and marketer, Pay Flynn being interviewed about his latest book, "Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money ?"

This is a book all about thinking carefully before you launch a business as to whether it will fly (succeed) or not (fail).

He likens this to finding out if the wind direction is right before you fly a kite. If all the weather conditions aren't right, the kite won't fly.

He uses real-world case studies with anecdotes from his personal experience of making money online, hosting successful podcasts, testing niche sites, and launching several online businesses.

But anyway, this is not about Pat Flynn's new book, but about how much testing to do before you launch a business.

Which got me thinking about how much testing to do before you launch a product, i.e, write a book.

If you're going to spend a year or two writing a book, then you need to do a lot of research first if you want to earn enough money from book sales to cover all the time it took you to write it.

Publishing companies usually expect a book to make at least 40,000 sales a year to be considered worth keeping published.

For self published authors, these figures don't have to be so high, because you can publish a book online in minutes and get then get on with writing your next book.

And if you can write your books fast, then your ROI (Return On Investment) doesn't need to be high for you to be able to earn an income from your writing.

But don't get me wrong. When I say fast writing I don't mean bad writing. I mean writing quickly and not letting your conscious mind interfere and start criticising what you're writing. Just write in one focused window of inspiration. You'll find that you not only write faster, but better.

Take look at these numbers of book sales to see what I mean about income.

If you spend a year writing a book, then you'd need to earn money quickly from your sales to pay you for the time you've spent writing. It also means that you'll only be publishing one book every year so you still need to sell a heck of a lot of copies of that one book to earn enough money to live on.

But if you wrote a book and published it in just one week (which is SO do-able you won't believe it till you try it), then if you sell it as a $20 ebook and only make 100 sales a week, that's still a weekly income of $2,000. PLUS you'll still be getting income from other ebooks you've written and published.

This is why writing books quickly (instead of sitting around waiting for your muse to show up), is far more profitable.

Not only that but you'll feel great for working so hard and producing so much.

Which will only spur you on to do more.

So instead of sitting around and wondering if your ebook will sell or not, as long as there's already a market for your book, you WILL make sales.

Just know who your customers are and where they hang out online and then write books that they want to read.

Spending less time wondering and more time writing, can give you a much greater ROI, than thinking about whether or not your idea will fly.

Just throw it into the wind and see what happens.

If sales aren't that great and you only sell a few hundred copies, if it only took you a week to write it it's still a great hourly rate.

So don't get it right. Get it written.

And let it fly.