Use “Nuggets” From Existing Content to Crank Your Book Out in 30 Hours
“There are 7 billion people in the world. Did they all see your lead magnet and read it cover-to-cover? I don’t think so,” said Michelle Martello of Minima Designs. She was the surprise guest at Laura Belgray’s first-ever Shrimp Club Meet Up in NYC. Marie Forleo has affectionately called Michelle, “Smartello,” for her marketing and design savvy. Knowing this, I was stoked to meet and learn from her.
Michelle’s talk was about repurposing content instead of always having to create something new. She was giving us an example of how she’d taken an old lead magnet and gave it a digital face-lift with some updated information and launched it again fresh with a new title. No one died when she repeated herself.
“Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself,” she continued. This comment made me think about repetition in general. We’re taught in writing classes not to repeat ourselves. Yet, we all know that sometimes you have to hear something over and over, and then finally one day it magically clicks. So, how do we find that balance between not sounding like a broken record and also not abandoning a big idea that you ought to be sharing again and again so it sticks?
Michelle’s take on this is to repackage the idea. Her example that stood out the most to me is about her word for 2020, “nugget.” Not Chicken McNuggets or nougat bars, but nuggets of teaching and information in your newsletters. Her strategy is to go through the old newsletters and collect all those nuggets into a new document. So we’re on the same page, I pasted an example of a nugget from one of my emails below:
We tend to keep retelling stories about ourselves until we learn the lesson inside. Our subconscious sends those stories to us to reflect on, which is why they keep being the ones we gravitate toward.
And that’s what I help my clients do when you have something painful to express that involves other people. You keep the focus on yourself instead of them, plus keep to the facts and avoid piling on. In that way, you tell a meaningful story that avoids sounding shrill or so raw you weren’t ready to share it.
Make more sense? Great.
Organize the nuggets you collect in the way that makes the most sense and flesh them out a little, create a Table of Contents, and voila! You can have an eBook. That can work with as little as 7K words. Or, with a little more writing, you can add some extra ideas and stories and turn those nuggets into a real book you can write and publish asap:
3 Steps to Turn Your Nuggets into a Book
1. Find and collect all your nuggets into one place
2. Organize your nuggets and look for content gaps to fill
3. Measure how much you need to add and make a plan for each chapter
4. Start writing!
When you do all four of these steps, you can have a first draft in as little as 30 hours. Keep reading to see how and make your own plan to turn your nuggets into a book to build your business.
1. Collect all your nuggets into one place
Don’t be embarrassed. Do you know where the content you’ve already written and shared is? Including video and audio? If you haven’t been that organized, now’s the time to start. Michelle suggests keeping an Excel spreadsheet with links to everything you create as you create it. You can organize the spreadsheet with tabs for different kinds of writing or media. You’d want to then link to all those pieces of writing in Google Docs or Evernote, etc. You might think this kind of organization is overkill, but your original content is potentially the greatest asset in your business, so you don’t keep repeating yourself or constantly scramble for new ideas. Plus, keeping up with your content is a big part of being able to quickly reuse it.
From wherever your content is now, scan through each piece to find your nuggets. Good nuggets are moments of teaching, explaining, or defining. They’re the turn in your newsletter when you move from story to quick “take away.” Don’t limit yourself to newsletters, either. In addition to my newsletters, I have great nuggets in my Instagram posts, as well as points I made in my blogs that I can further expand. Where else are your nuggets hiding? As you find each one, copy and paste them into a new document. Also, get started with that spreadsheet if you don’t have your content collected in one place yet. It won’t take that much time when you’re looking at each old newsletter to add those links to the spreadsheet. This will help you so if you want to go back to where you got that nugget, you can find that content quickly.
The document where you’re capturing your nuggets will be messy. I suggest numbering them with titles that describe what the nuggets are about and creating heading tags for each so you can create a table of contents and be able to see what you have with a birds-eye view. As you’re finding your nuggets, don’t worry about the fonts being different sizes or whether some are shorter than others. You’ll deal with all that once you’ve got all your nuggets in one place and it’s time for #2. It’s hard to say what amount of nuggets is enough, because that’s relative to how long your book will be, amongst other things. I would start with at least 20–30 nuggets and no more than 50. You’ll probably need at least 10 nuggets to be able to continue with this book writing strategy.
2. Organize your nuggets and look for content gaps to fill
Possibly, the best thing about using this approach to write your book is that you should already have some feedback on these ideas from your readers. Be discerning. Which nuggets were more popular or got more engagement? Consider moving them toward the beginning. Did a nugget tank? If so, can you revise it to make it clearer, or was it just a half-baked idea? It happens sometimes, so just delete it and move on. I once wrote a poem that even got published, and then I finally realized the idea in it didn’t really work, so I deleted it. It’s fine.
Look for nuggets that cluster around topics, and you’ll most likely notice a few topics that have the most clusters. When you look at each cluster, is there another nugget you’d want to add to flesh out that idea? Do you have some similar nuggets that can be lumped into one new nugget? For the topics with fewer nuggets, would it make sense to merge them with other topics instead of standing alone? Are you able to add more nuggets to fully round out those discussions? Or, are those nuggets great, but off-topic? Consider taking those out, along with the weaker nuggets.
With your 3–5 nugget clusters, consider what the best journey for your reader will look like. Which cluster should be first, last? Within each cluster, what order of information would make the most sense? Quickly add in any new nuggets you realized were missing. You’re ready to move on when you look at the list of nuggets within your topic clusters and are satisfied that you’re covering all the high points to help your reader go from having the problem you solve to gaining quick wins and wanting to learn more from you.
3. Measure how much you need to add and make a plan for each chapter
Now that you’ve chosen your nuggets and clusters, it’s time to decide how you’re going to turn each idea into a chapter. Michelle’s idea for the eBook will require less work here. You might want to simply add some headlines and take away boxes and work with a graphic designer or design consultant to turn that document into a beautiful PDF that can either be free or sold as an information product. If that’s not the route you want to go, then let’s figure out how to stretch these ideas into chapters.
For the sake of discussion, let’s say you want to turn these nuggets into a simple 130-page book. You might have a goal of writing 30K words. For each nugget, how many words are they, on average? You can find out by highlighting a few samples and then selecting “word count,” and you’ll get the word count on just what you highlighted. My sample nugget from the introduction has 93 words, and my average is 75–150.
For a book with 30K words, then, I might challenge myself to have 21 nuggets with about 1,000–1,500 words each. To reach your word count quickly, decide how you’re going to structure each chapter. At the very least, you’ll want to introduce each idea and why it’s relevant to your reader’s goals, so that’ll be a paragraph or two. Then, look at each nugget and see where the micro-nuggets are. Micro-nuggets are the additional things you’ll need to include, such as definitions and context, examples and stories, or shout-outs to source material. Bullet out everything you want to add to each nugget. If you find a nugget with too many micro-nuggets, could you break that down into two distinct nuggets? Or, are you veering off-topic to ideas best left to a blog or social media post? You’ll also want to give each chapter a conclusion and set up the next chapter to keep the reader engaged.
Here’s a micro nugget to help you put all that together:
Chapter Framework
1. Compelling introduction to the topic (100–200 words)
2. Arrange nugget and micro-nuggets (500 words)
3. Satisfying conclusion and set up next chapter (100–200 words)
That really doesn’t look so scary, does it?
4. Start writing!
Set a goal for how much time it’ll take you to write the chapters. The first thing you need to know is, “on average, how long will it take you to write the 1,000–1,500 words per chapter?” So, pick a chapter whose nugget you feel really confident about and crank it out. How long did it take for you to satisfy yourself that you wrote what you needed for all the sections for that chapter? Multiply that amount of time by the amount of additional chapters in your Table of Contents. If it took you an hour and a half to write a chapter, then that’s 30 more hours to write the rest.
Look at your calendar and find those 30 hours. Some people might have to write in 15-minute chunks on daily lunch breaks, and others might find 8 hours a week, all on Sundays. You might decide to start getting up earlier, skip a T.V. show for a while, or even cut back on other work or projects you have. Remember, the time you’re working on your book is temporarily taken up, so after your book is done, you can binge on Real Housewives or return to knitting that scarf or whatever else you enjoy. Stick to writing on the schedule you decide. If you don’t schedule time to work on your book, it’s probably not going to happen. Treat those dates with your book as important as the biggest meetings of your life. You wouldn’t miss an appointment with a hard-to-see medical specialist or for the job/gig of a lifetime. Same thing with your book.
And, if you noticed I didn’t mention this yet, I talked about it last on purpose. Don’t make the first thing you write the introduction. You should write that last. I also suggest writing the conclusion next to last, just before you write the introduction. Here’s why. After you write all the 21 chapters, you’ll know what you’re concluding so that you can conclude it. And, you’ll know what you’re introducing. Trying to write either one of these elements of a book before you’ve written the content that goes in the middle can cause writer’s block, or even if you do get some writing cranked out, you’ll probably have to delete it later because it doesn’t fit what you wrote when you shaped your nuggets out into chapters.
Start this entire project with one more thing in mind: what you want the reader to do after reading your book? Will this book lead to a Facebook Group? Coaching program? Mastermind? Course? Membership site? Whatever that next step is, your call to action will be in the conclusion, but you’ll also pepper the idea of that offer throughout your book, so the reader already wants to know more about it when you tell them what it is and how to get it now.
Go Forth and Repeat Yourself
The cool thing about re-purposing your nuggets is that you can do this endlessly. From your book, you can chunk out quotes from it and post them on social media to promote your book. You might even find a micro-nugget that can be fleshed out into a blog post that can also link to where your book is for sale. You’ll definitely want to choose your capstone chapter as the basis of the signature talk that you’ll give to promote the book and go on podcasts to talk about. The more you talk about these ideas, the more you’ll be known as an expert around the topic clusters you were already creating content around. You might add a workbook, create a retreat, or start movement around the big ideas in your book.
I’ve done a version of this for my upcoming book, The Write Your Book Blueprint. My Table of Contents came first because it’s based on my framework, The Write Your Book Blueprint™. Then, I went through my existing content to find “nuggets” where I’d already taught those ideas or told stories I wanted to include, and I added them into the document. This got me started to write around what I already had and fill in the gaps so I could quickly get my first draft done and move to editing, which is a whole different topic.
Michelle’s going to be repeating and re-purposing her “nugget” idea all year long, so follow her on Instagram and join her email list to watch and learn more from her. Her strategy of re-using content helps her clients save time and make more money faster with ideas they already had instead of always coming up with a new thing, and I think that’s so brilliant. In fact, it makes me agree that we ought to be calling her, “Smartello.”
What else can you think of doing with your nuggets? Got a question about how to put them into clusters or what to do with micro-nuggets? Put it in the comments.
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