Ben Roy

I'm a notch more excited than usual because I'm putting the pedal to the metal in a couple major areas. First, I've been planning to create a product of my own for a while now, and in the last week or so I finally got down to business. This isn't something I've done before, which made it a mildly daunting task.

When I get into a pool, I don't like to slowly wade in and try to adjust to the temperature gradually. No, I'm much more in the dive-in-head-first camp. Which is exactly what I did: open up Word, flip into outline mode, and start typing. Once I had the skeleton for the book, I just started off at the beginning.

Besides the outline I made it to the 1000 word mark on the first sprint. Tonight I picked it up again and added about 2700 more words or so. It's hard for me to judge how long the final outcome will be, especially since they tend to be delivered in PDFs and with medium or large fonts and lots of white space.

It appeared to me from casual research that 200 words per page or so might be normal, so figuring on that I'm at about 18 pages out of a guestimated 50-70 for a final length. I'm planning to reuse some amount of content that I've created for articles and sites which should help me get there a little faster.

Back to my starting comment though, the mere fact that I'm forging ahead and actually making progress is a real moral boost. For all I know my velocity on this project is terrible, but right now it's feeling pretty good to me. I'd love to have a first draft wrapped in a couple weeks and start concentrating on the sales page and process.