6.Going it alone. Successful careers involve a nurturing support group of readers and peers. Your quest should include support of your friends, other authors, book coaches, readers and others who will help you maintain your enthusiasm while providing ideas, assistance and feedback.

7.‘Event’ writing. Write a little each day rather than ‘going away’ to write your book. Stress is an author’s biggest enemy. When you attempt marathon writing, you’re putting an unrealistic burden on yourself. “What happens if I come back and my book isn’t written?”

8.Self-editing. Avoid unnecessary self-editing. It’s far more important to complete first draft of your book than to agonize over perfection of every word.

Editors will ensure that grammar is correct and ideas appear in proper order. But they can’t do anything until you submit final manuscript.

9.Failure to promote. Publishers are not promoters. Publishers are skilled at editing, manufacturing and distributing books. But they are not set up to give your book marketing attention it deserves. A single publicist may represent over 100 books!

If you want your book to succeed, you have to promote it as well as write it.

10.Failure to back up and save. Save frequently when writing. Always save before printing. Never turn off your computer without making a copy of your files for off-premises storage. Never end a writing session without printing out a hard copy of latest version of chapter you’re writing.

11.Failure to plan future profits. Before writing your book, create a book marketing plan. Book sales should be just first step in an ongoing relationship with your readers. Your plan should identify opportunities from consulting, newsletters, audio/video recordings, seminars, speeches and yearly updates.

A book can, indeed, change your life. But you must take charge; take a proactive role in promoting and leveraging its success.

Likewise, you may have planned to buy books in case lot quantities for resale and/or distribution to your prospects and clients. Understanding this before you sign contract, you can include right to purchase books for resale at trade discounts in your contract, ensuring your ‘book pipeline’ won’t get turned off.

If you know you want to offer telephone coaching at $75.00 a call, for example, you can negotiate written permission to promote this service within body of your book.

Remember: promises are written on air. Only written agreements count!

Other back-end profit opportunities based on your book’s title include:

•Articles, columns, newsletters •Yearly updates •Special Reports •Teleclasses and seminars •Speaking and training •Audio/video recordings •Choosing a web site address based on your book’s title •Free downloads of sample chapters from your web site •Fee-based web site services

The possibilities are endless, but nothing can happen if, after signing contract, publisher limits your ability to promote your business and your website in your book.

Thus, it’s imperative that you start by preparing a marketing plan that analyzes post-publication profit opportunities and describes steps needed to make them happen. Only then are you in a position to decide if publisher’s ‘boilerplate’ contract meets your needs.

The stronger your book proposal and more experienced your agent, more likely you’ll get what you want (need) in your contract.

Jay Conrad Levinson says first volume of his Guerrilla Marketing series earned him thirty million dollars. But only about $35,000 came from book itself. All rest came from back-end profits.

That’s how important this issue is!