Once you are a recognized authority in your field, people come asking to hire you. Unfortunately, to be a recognized authority, you must have written a book. People don't care if you self-publish a book as long as you have it. "But," you say, "I don't know how to write a book." Actually, you can do it as easily as talking.



You'll need to get your speech transcribed into text, of course. You can have that done cheaply. But you also have to speak the material, and that can be awkward. It is not something that most of us have experience with.

If you're comfortable giving speeches, you can just say the things that you would want in your book, working from your outline.

Most people, however, are not that comfortable just talking from an outline. It's much easier to write a book by answering questions. Write out a list of questions, and go through the list answering them. The questions can become the chapter titles, and the answers, the contents of the chapter.

How do you get this into written form? The easiest way is to hire somebody to transcribe it for you. You can go to a freelancers' web site and put up the transcription for bids. There are plenty of college graduates in India who will do it for $5 an hour.

How long will it take to dictate the book? For an e-book of 50 pages, guess 15,000 words. Since most people speak in about a hundred words per minute, that gives you 150 minutes or two hours 30 minutes. A 200 page book of 60,000 words will take four times as long, 10 hours. That doesn't count rewriting, editing, and revisions.

If you don't feel comfortable just reading questions and answering them in the privacy of your office, have somebody come in and read the questions to you. Then you get to talk to an actual person.

If you're a public speaker, you can record your speeches and seminars. If their content doesn't include all you want in the book, you can enhance your business while writing your book by holding tele-seminars. Just have the tele-seminar recorded and send out to the recording to be transcribed.

To summarize, you can record yourself talking and convert that into a book. It can be a bit awkward, but talking to other people, or answering questions can overcome that. It costs a bit to get your recording transcribed, but not a huge amount. You still have all the editing and revising to do, so writing a book isn't utterly painless. Nevertheless, you can produce a manuscript a lot more comfortably and a lot faster than by typing, and you have to have a book in order to be the go-to person, the person other people seek out to hire.