Leonelle - Dictate Your Book: How To Write Your Book Faster, Better, and Smarter

Contents

Dictate Your Book

How To Write Your Book Faster, Better, and Smarter

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Introduction

Hello there, and thank you for picking up this book! My name is Monica Leonelle and I've been an avid user and advocate of dictation software since 2012. I have used it to dictate the first drafts of at least 20 different books, including this one you're reading right here!

For those of you who don't know my story, let me give you the CliffNotes version:

2009 - I published my first book. Yay!

2010 - I didn't publish a book. This business was tougher than I thought.

2011 - My first fiction book came out! I was thrilled.

2012 - I published two more shorter fiction books, both mid-sized novellas. Still not a ton of momentum. But one of those books, I wrote in two days using productivity techniques I had learned as a freelancer. I posted it under a pen name, and it is still on the market today!

2013 - I published another book, a rewrite of an early one from 2011. Still not a ton of momentum. But I knew that I was onto something with increasing my writing productivityit just hadn't quite "clicked" yet. That's when I experimented heavily with dictation and embarked on a 2-month long writing experiment to improve my writing speed and consistency. I ended that experiment in November 2013, and that's when things got interesting in my author career.

2014 - I knew how to write fast after all that experimentation. Now it was time to work. And work I did, putting out eight books and one short story with the help of one amazing collaborator. This was also the first year I made a consistent $1000 a month several months in a row just from my bookssomething I'd been trying to do for five years previously.

2015 - Remember that 2-month experiment I did in 2013? That experiment became the basis for a book I published in early 2015, called Write Better, Faster: How To Triple Your Writing Speed and Write More Every Day. Because I talked about dictation throughout the book, I started getting a lot of questions about dictation from other authors. I wrote Dictate Your Book to answer those questions and share my own experiences with and philosophies toward dictation, all in one easy reference guide.

Also in 2015 - I'm on track to publish at least 17 books this year across three different imprints. If all goes well, I should have 22 books published in this year alone! So obviously dictation is working for meand I think it can work for you too.

If you are interested in a fuller story about my background in writing productivity and want to know how I reached writing speeds of 4000+ words per hour, Write Better, Faster has everything you wanted to know and more.

And if you are just starting out and want to build a daily writing habit, you'll love the strategies I share in The 8-Minute Writing Habit , which is aimed at busy people who need a writing routine that integrates with their lifestyle. All three books are available as part of the Growth Hacking For Storytellers series, which helps authors improve their productivity, nail their craft, and sell more books.

In Dictate Your Book , I share:

• Why dictation is one of the most important skills you can learn as an author
• How dictation protects your long-term author career and keeps you healthy
• Why dictation is for everyonenot just extroverts, or public speakers, or tech whizzes
• How to figure out if dictation will work for you with free apps and software that you can access on any device
• How to get over the initial hurdles of using dictation in your regular workflow
• My complete equipment list of everything I use for my home setup, my Walk 'n' Talks, and more
• How I prep my work for dictation so that I can have the most productive sessions possible
• How I've achieved ~98% accuracy in any room, on any device
• How I learn dictation commands for punctuation and formatting quickly and efficiently without feeling overwhelmed
• Why I don't bother with dictation drills
• All my best dictation shortcuts and workarounds for any frustrations that come up with the software

This book contains 50-60 of my best tips on dictation, coming from my personal experience of having used it to massively up my writing game for the past three years. I know in my heart that even if you've tried dictation before and hated it, or even if this is your first introduction to it, the strategies in this book will give you a lot to think about and implement. Dictation has changed my life and career and it might change yours tooin fact, I hope it does.

Chapter One

WHY YOU SHOULD DICTATE

W HY SHOULD YOU LEARN TO dictate? It's a question that's probably been on your mind for a while, especially if you've been writing for several years. After all, you already have a multitude of ways of getting your words out. You can handwrite them in a notebook or journal, you can use a typewriter, or you can do what most of us douse a keyboard and a word processor to draft our books.

So why add yet another piece of technology that enables us to do the same exact thing that we're already doing? It's a fair question, so I'm going to spend this chapter giving you a multitude of reasons why now is the time to get on board with this fascinating way of writing that is giving tons of successful authors an edge over their competition.

Reason #1: Because You Can!

The technology is here, why not use it?

The first reason that you should learn dictation is a pretty simple onebecause you can learn dictation. This is not technology that won't be ready for public consumption until the far-flung future. We have the technology to do dictation right now, and this is an unprecedented way of writing that we've never been able to do beforeeven as early as ten years ago.

I believe when you're given technology to do your job better, it makes sense to take advantage of it. It's an opportunity that millions of writers and storytellers who lived before us did not have. Give it a try for no other reason than that you were born in a certain time period and have lived to see this incredible day.

Reason #2: Because It's the Future

Consider your ancestors. Imagine someone telling you that they still do all their work on the typewriter just because they can't quite get the hang of a PC. You might be one of these people already, or you might be someone rolling your eyes at those people.

Now, imagine the typewriter just came out and you have an author friend who says they would prefer to write out their novels by hand, thank you very much! Still not rolling your eyes?

In the near futurelike the next ten yearsother authors may be rolling their eyes at you because you never hopped on board the dictation train. Dictation is here to stay and it's going to become more and more commonplace not just for authors, but for everybody. We're already seeing children who are learning to interact with smartphones using their voices rather than typing on a keyboard. We're already seeing our Xboxes and our televisions being activated by voice command rather than with a remote control. We're already seeing YouTube videos and podcasting overtaking blogging and other simpler media forms in popularity.

The world is changing faster than we can keep up with. The concepts that were in science fiction movies 15 years ago are now a reality. Voice instruction, dictation, and recognition are available now. It's only going to get more prevalent. You can start now for what is inevitablehands-free control of every object and tool we know of in the world.