The Minimalist’s Guide to Launching an E-Book

11 ways to use minimalist ideas to launch your e-book.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

As many of you know, I’m putting the final touches on my e-book The Art of Being Minimalist.

The Art of Being Minimalist is essentially the culmination of the ideas I’ve put out on this blog, along with my experiences traveling around the country over the last four months.

I’ve integrated some of the best articles from the blog (so you’ll recognize or have read some of the content before) with a lot of all new content that expands on my ideas.

How I went from zero to done in two weeks.

Some people have asked me how I went from having no plans for an e-book to selling in e-book in two weeks.

The truth is that I’ve always planned on having an e-book available through Far Beyond The Stars. This is why I’ve worked so hard on the content here, because I’ve wanted to put all of the ideas that I’ve developed here into an e-book.

The final product came together over the last two weeks. I felt like I had completed enough of the e-book to make it worth reading. So, I finished it.

I’ll be releasing The Art of Being Minimalist on Monday, February 1st at 6am.

I’ll be giving away the e-book for free for 24 hours, with the request that you spread to as many people as possible during that time. I’d rather this e-book be read by 10,000 people, than forcing 1000 people to buy it. All of you reading this now deserve to read it for free, because you’ve been so supportive over the last few months.

You’ve helped me write every word of this e-book, thank you.

I’m going to be offering the opportunity to earn 50% commission selling the ebook to everyone. There are many great minimalist blogs out there, I hope this e-book can help support your writing as well as my own.

Here’s what I’ve learned about launching an e-book. I hope this can help you with yours.

12 things I’ve learned about launching a minimalist e-book.

1, Make the end the priority.

My aim for this blog has always been to launch e-books, much like Chris Guillebeau does at The Art of Nonconformity. Every day I sat down at the computer, and when I wrote I was focusing on the end product. This created a consistency to my blog that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. From day 1 to day 124 this has been about The Art of Being Minimalist, and nothing else.

2, Write content that helps people.

Your blog and your e-book has to have the goal of helping people. Self-referential blogs are a dime a dozen out there on the net, and there is a reason why everyone’s eyes gloss over when they come across a diary blog. This blog and this e-book has always been about helping you, the audience. I want you to join me in living this life of minimalist freedom. I hope this e-book can help you achieve your goals.

3, Give yourself no other options.

I quit my job to become a minimalist and move to Portland. I’ve passed up other opportunities in order to focus on writing this e-book, because I knew I had to create something of value for the community. I also knew that I wouldn’t be happy if I wasn’t creating something that was going to build my legacy project. I was tired of my work going to benefit large corporations, so my focus has been on creating useful information for people. I hope this writing can help you. I also hope that enough people will buy it that I can support myself until I write the next ebook.

4, Write what you know.

This blog and the e-book are about the life that I live. I couldn’t have written this sitting at a desk in an office, because I wouldn’t have experienced the depth of being minimalist that occurs when you get on a plane with all of your stuff on your back. There is simply no way to have that experience while being safe at the same time. This writing wouldn’t have happened without making the leap to see if the life I dreamed about was possible. It is possible, I’ve been there.

5, Don’t stop doing the work.

This is probably the most important. Don’t stop working. I’ve never missed a scheduled post in the last 4 months. Once I settled on a publishing schedule of three articles a week, I didn’t take a break. I did the work every day towards this goal. If I knew I was going to have other commitments, or I’d be out of contact, I scheduled posts ahead of time. It’s a really bad idea to drop off the planet while trying to run a successful blog, if you do that the momentum is gone and you don’t have an e-book after 124 days.

6, Participate in the community.

I wouldn’t be here without the minimalist community. I’ve met some amazing people, and they’ve helped me more than they’ll ever know. See the blogroll on the side to meet some of these awesome individuals. I’ve received emails asking for help that made me think about how to help people better. I’ve received some emails challenging my positions, which made me think more about whether they were valid. I changed things if they were crazy. I stood fast if I found I could defend them. All because of the amazing people who read this blog. Thank you everyone.

7, Choose a mentor.

I also wouldn’t be here without the help of Leo Babauta, the author of The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life. 1, Because the sales of his e-book helped support me while I worked on my own e-book. 2, Because many of you probably found my blog through him. When I say mentor, I don’t mean that I bothered Leo all of the time for help. We’ve probably spent three minutes interacting over the last four months, mostly on Twitter. I wouldn’t dream of taking up any more of his time. He’s made the decision to link to my blog a few times over the last few months, and that has made a huge difference in how much traffic I’ve received. Thank you Leo.

8, Study the best.

I spent the last year studying e-book launches. I did this by watching some of the best. Darren Rowse of Problogger, Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Nonconformity, Jonathan Fields of Awake at the Wheel, and many more. These people are the masters of creating e-books that help people. I spent endless hours reading their material and learning how they do what they do.

9, Spend less time with hype.

I’ve noticed that many bloggers announce the e-books they’re working on around a year in advance, and then every couple of weeks they write a post about how hard it is to write an e-book. That’s cool, but it’s not helping anyone until you’ve finished it. I also have artist friends that spend years talking about “amazing projects that will rock the world” that they never finish. I figured the minimalist approach to launching a blog e-book would be to not speak of it at all until it was ready to go. Then launch quickly, decisively, and actually launch (most people don’t get to the launch point.)

10, Let people help you.

I’m so thankful that I’m not doing this alone. Chris O’Byrne was thoughtful enough to email me a few days ago offering to copy edit my e-book, he did a great job. As you all know, clean copy is definitely not my strong point. I’m so thankful for his help. I’m also thankful to all of the people who have offered to help market the book on their own blogs, such as Tammy Strobel, Jules of Stone Soup, and Chris Baskind of the upcoming blog The Minimalist Century. I’ll be releasing more details on how you can earn 50% commission selling my e-book on Monday. If you want to get on board earlier than that, drop me an email and I’ll get you what you need to make sales and get commission.

11, Ship the e-book.

As Seth Godin writes in his new book Linchpin: the enemy of shipping is the resistance. Making the decision to overcome all of the fears that are associated with publishing a work is hard. I’m sure there will be people who read this book and decide to criticize me for living the way that I do. I’m okay with that. I could have let fear overcome the decision to publish this, but I didn’t. I fought it, I wrote for hundreds of hours. I did all of the design and photography on this e-book. I set a date and I shipped.

On Monday it will be available for the world.

I believe this e-book will help a lot of people begin living a simple and more minimalist life. I hope that you will enjoy it.

Thank you for making this possible.

-Everett Bogue





The Unconventional Truth of Being Minimalist

There comes a moment in time for all of us when we realize the rules just don’t work anymore.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

There is a moment when we decide we can’t handle one more trip to Target, when we can’t buy another McChicken nugget. This is the moment when we begin to accept the unconventional truth of being a minimalist.

There is also a moment when we decide we just don’t want to go to work anymore. We don’t want to continue to be a cog in the system. We want liberation, not another flat screen TV.

We all could just as easily sit back and continue to be part of the problem, that’s easy enough. Just keep buying $2 goods from China in bulk. Put them in your closet, or fill up the other side of your two-car garage. That’s what they want us to do, that is what is easy.

But we don’t to anymore, so we decide to opt out.

I imagine the similar change in mindset happened to Jay Parkinson, when he decided to revolutionize the medical industry. He could have of simply joined part of the problem after med school, but he didn’t.

I imagine the similar change came over Mike Horn when he started What Is Fresh. He could have just kept on going to C-Town, and buying wilty greens, but he didn’t. Instead he created part of the solution: a website that tracks exactly which farmer’s markets are open in the city.

Now we don’t have to remember that the only good place in New York to get locally grown food is on Wednesday is Union Square, because we can just check.

The same change came over me, when I decided to limit myself to 100 things, and adopt a 30-day rule for my stuff. When I decided to live and work from anywhere.

The same change came over you when you stumbled across this blog, whether by word of mouth, or Twitter, or a link from another brilliant blog on the internet.

You decided to start accepting the unconventional truth about the stuff that’s cluttering your life. Physical, emotional, manifestations of time best spent.

You want to change, enough is enough.

But change doesn’t happen without action. You can read about being minimalist for ages, becoming minimalist is a different story.

I have a list of people living with 100 things on Twitter. It’s very short, I wish it was longer. I know there are more people out there like us, I know there are more people who have made this unconventional leap.

I need your help to find them.

  1. If you have less than 100 things, @evbogue me on Twitter and I’ll add you to this list.
  2. If you don’t have 100 things, retweet this on Twitter so people who do are able to find me.
  3. Follow the people on the 100 things list, because all of these people have made the leap. They are an inspiration.

The retweet button is either above or below, depending on if you’re one of the almost 1000 people (!) receiving free updates via RSS or Email, or you’re reading this directly on the blog.

Thank you for your part in this unconventional revolution. I could not do this without you.

–Everett Bogue





9 Ways to Distract Yourself with Work

There are a million things you can do right now instead of doing something important. How do you choose?

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

We are faced with unlimited choices in modern society.

There are millions of paths we can go down. One of the biggest questions inevitably is: which path do I choose?

Choose the one that is most important.

The most successful people I know aren’t on Twitter for two hours a day, they don’t watch TV three hours a day, and they certainly don’t own a Wii.

If you know what your important priority is, good. I applaud you.

If you don’t, your first priority needs to be figuring out what your priority is. Go on a vision quest. Lock yourself in a room. Read books. Anything until you have some idea, because until you’ve figured that out, it’s really hard to find an excuse to turn Lost off and do something worth your time.

What is important to me.

I have a little important project that I want to share with you: I’ve been working on a e-book on being minimalist.

Around a month ago I realized that I was writing too much material for this site, I had to publish it somewhere more important to me. An e-book seemed like a good choice. I hope you’ll agree.

I’ve never been a published author before, so I’ve been a bit nervous about how this e-book would turn out. So far I’ve been very surprised though. The words are just flowing out of me.

The e-book basically covers the minimalist journey that I’ve undertaken over the last year. It explains in detail the experiences I had ridding myself of my possessions, quitting my day job, and beginning to live and work from anywhere.

I hope this e-book will help a few more people take this rewarding journey.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll be sure to give you updates as the e-book progresses.

Obviously working on an e-book is hard. I’ve spent countless hours (probably in the hundreds) writing, designing, copyediting the final text. I want it to be perfect.

The constant threat of distraction.

Seth Godin writes in his new book, Linchpin, (aff link) which comes out Wednesday, the following:

“By forcing myself to do absolutely no busywork tasks between bouts with the work, I remove the best excuse the resistence has. I can’t avoid the work because I am not distracting myself with anything but the work.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this paragraph as I spend the hours making my e-book happen.

Many people would find something else to do, but I choose not too. I choose to make something important, a text that I hope will help people.

I could have watched TV, gone shopping, or had another cup of coffee. I could have complained about how hard it was to come up with ideas, or asked a dozen people to give their opinions on whether I’d fail or not. But I didn’t.

None of these things would have helped make this e-book a reality.

Here are a few techniques I’ve put into play to avoid distracting myself from the work.

  1. Incentives. Finish X before you’re allowed to have another coffee. When the going gets tough, I like give myself a little somehing that I’ll get once I’ve spent two hours working. Like I can’t have another coffee until I finish this blog post.
  2. Sitting in silence. Force yourself to sit in silence until your work is done. This is very difficult for many modern people, who are constantly updating the Twitter and digesting information. Don’t let yourself fiddle with a random thing until an idea comes to you, because it won’t come if you fiddle. Sit in silence until the idea comes, you’ll find that they come far more frequently.
  3. Continuing to do the work. When no ideas are coming, It’s important to keep on creating. There’s a common myth that creativity comes in waves, and you just have to catch the next one when it comes. Creativity doesn’t work like that though, so most people sit staring out a window waiting for the daemon to strike. It doesn’t just strike, you have to work for it. Sit and work for 30 minutes, and eventually your work will transition from crap to magic over that time.
  4. Take yourself away from distractions. If you’re having a hard time concentrating, consider moving away from distractions. I’ve been doing this by going to a coffee shop in Brooklyn, but there are endless other ways. Sit out in the back yard. Go work on a mountain top. Disconnect your Internet.
  5. Make everything else done first. I have two things that need to be done before I start working, the dishes and my email. I clean all of my dishes, and answer all of my email before I work. This is harder if you have a bottomless to-do list. I’ve programmed my life to have very few things that I’m required to do every day, so this works for me..
  6. Don’t allow multitasking. Don’t allow yourself to flip between Twitter and Facebook and chatting with your friend while you’re working. When you are creating something great, there is no way that randomly tweeting during the process will help make it better. Dividing your attention is project suicide.
  7. Recognizing the importance. I honestly can’t work on projects that don’t care about anymore. I’d rather starve than make another widget. The promise that I’m creating a work that is important in this moment in time has really kept me going. Are you working on what something that you feel is important?
  8. Deadlines. I’ve set the expectation that this my project must be done by the end of next week. I could have given myself an open deadline, but I feel like I’d then spend endless hours aiming for perfect. There is no perfect, there will be flaws, there will be things I wish I had said differently. The most important thing is to ship this project: 1, so it can start making good in the world; 2, so I can start on my next project.
  9. Off time. I don’t let myself do any work between 5pm and 10am. I know that sounds rediculous, but I’m convinced that workdays are too long, and we spend a good portion of them wasting time by procrastination and pointless busywork. I limit my work day, so I feel that I can barely get the goals I’ve set out to do. I finish the work without distraction, and then I stop. I read a book, I spend time with my girlfriend, I go for a walk, I cook dinner. The next day I can work again. The one exception is that I let myself write material at any hour of the day. Ideas come to me, I can have them finished and into Evernote in 15 minutes.

Here’s one more thing that occurred to me recently, I thought I’d share:

We’ve been taught over and over again that great work comes from thinking incredibly hard for a lot of hours. This doesn’t make sense to me.

I don’t think great work comes by thinking really hard about things that are hard to think about.

To be honest, this upcoming e-book is based on my experiences. The techniques that I’ve learned and employed. They are natural to me, because I’ve mastered them. If I was writing a book about something I didn’t know about, it would be difficult and I’d have to think really hard. I would make my brain hurt. But I know this stuff, so it comes naturally.

Great work doesn’t come from overworking the picture box in your pre-frontal cortex. It should just flow out of you without prior contemplation. It just comes out of you onto the page.

Important work should come naturally.

I have a guest post coming up on Zen Habits, in a few weeks (not sure exactly, Leo has a long guest post cue because of his site’s popularity) which deals more with creative flow. It’s quite a privilege to have a post up on Leo’s blog, I can’t wait until it posts. I hope you’ll subscribe to Zen Habits, if you haven’t already, so you don’t miss my post.

Anyway, it’s really important to remove anything that will stop you from achieving flow with the creation of your project. Distractions kill great work.

How do you remove distractions? What great work are you creating?

If this was helpful for you, please help spread the word in any way that you can. The buttons below are two good options.

Thank you.





How You’re Hindering Your Potential (with your stuff)

There’s a good chance that your life’s work is holding you back

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

From an early age you’ve been indoctrinated into a society that values things above people.

We are what we own, or so you’ve been told.

They all told you that you wanted the two-car garage. They told you to fill one side with stuff you couldn’t fit inside your house. Indeed, one quarter of all Americans have a two-car garage in this condition.

The stuff just sits there. You walk by it, and wish that it would disappear. Secretly you wish someone would burn your two-car garage down, so you won’t have to make the decision to get rid of that clutter.

We find so many ways to keep us from reaching our potential. Stuff is just one of those ways. We don’t want to deal with the harsh reality of our lives, the fact that we haven’t really done anything important.

So we refocuse all of our attention on the endless burden of resorting our stamp collection.

A friend of mine, the brooklyn hip-hop artist D.O.V. of Verbal Graffiti, repeatedly loses his life work every couple of years. In 2003 his house burned down. In 2009 his laptop was stolen from his living room without a trace, containing years of un-backed-up recordings.

The loss is always devastating to him. He tells himself that this is the end of his career and he’ll never make another beat again.

But this wasn’t the case, there was no devastating repercussions. Six months after the loss of his computer he had a new album on the streets.

The beats weren’t on his computer, they were in him. By clearing away all the years of junk on his computer–all of the beats that never had any potential, but he continued to mess with,–he was able to free himself to create a new album.

A clean slate can be a powerful drive to create.

What if you were able to harness this ability for a lifetime?

D.O.V. is DJing a dance party in Bushwick Brooklyn on Saturday (tomorrow, Jan 23. 2010 10pm-4am) night. If any readers are in Brooklyn, the details are here. I’ll be there and I’d love to meet you.





An Interview with Karol Gajda: Incredible Lightness of Traveling

Interview by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Every once in awhile I interview an important person on the subject of being minimalist. A couple of prominent minimalists I’ve interviewed in the post: Leo Babauta on the liberation of being minimalist, and Colin Wright about working from anywhere in sexy shoes.

This week I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Karol Gajda, the blogger behind Ridiculously Extraordinary. Karol is a perpetual traveler, living out of a bag and working from everywhere. He leaves for India in a few days. He hopes to help 100 people begin to live extraordinary lives through his blog.

We discussed tips for traveling lighter and supporting yourself while you’re on the road.

Everett Bogue: What made you decide to live a ridiculously extraordinary life?

Karol Gajda: It was either that or continue being normal.

But seriously, initially my only goal was to not have to get a job out of college by working for myself full time. That was almost 10 years ago. I didn’t really take advantage of the Ridiculously Extraordinary freedom I had by traveling extensively until recently.

Everett: You’re headed to India in a few weeks, according to your travel itinerary on your blog. Can you give us a short rundown of your travel plans?

Karol: I have a one way ticket and very general plans. I don’t even have my accommodations set yet.

My first month will be in Goa. A guy from the UK set up a little guitar building school there and I’m going to build my own guitar. If I love Goa I’ll stay there for a while after that.

Otherwise I’m not sure. I may visit Thailand after India, but again, it’s all up in the air. I am definitely visiting Poland when it starts warming up. I was born in Poland, but haven’t spent an extensive amount of time there. I do speak the language, but I’m looking forward to learning to speak much better.

Everett: I recently watched your interview with Baker, where you discussed traveling with three quick-dry shirts. Can you explain more about your approach to clothing while you’re traveling?

Karol: My approach is simple: take the absolute bare minimum and hand wash everything.

Having less makes my life easy. My single pair of convertible pants may look funny, but I don’t have to think about what I’m going to wear tomorrow.

Everett: What other essentials do you travel with?

Karol: My laptop so I can get work done. I do enjoy seeing the sights, of course, but I also love working in new places. To some that defeats the purpose of travel. But that’s the beauty of being free. I can do what I want.

If I want to work on the road perpetually I can. If I want to come back “home” (which is nowhere at the moment) I can. I’m not bound by the limits of savings. That said, I’m a pretty budget conscious traveler.

Everett: Can you recommend one way that we can all travel lighter?

Karol: Yes, my best tip if you want to travel light is to get a smaller carry on. Preferably a backpack. Mine is 32L. Then force yourself to fit everything you need in there.

Everett: One of the hardest aspects of traveling is being able to support yourself financially on the road, how do you accomplish this?

Karol: I’ve been working online for myself for almost 10 years now. It’s a little bit more difficult while traveling because of sometimes spotty Internet and because there are a lot of cool things to see and people to hang out with. I’ve found that it’s incredibly difficult if I’m constantly on the move so I’ve reassessed my travel goals. From now on I’m staying in each new place for at least a month. (Unless, of course, I just don’t like it.)

Everett: Can you suggest one method we can employ to support themselves financially while we’re traveling abroad?

Karol: That’s a great question, and one that’s at the forefront of a lot of prospective traveler’s minds. A lot of travelers I met in Australia saved up enough to travel for a few months and then found jobs along the way to extend the travel.

If you don’t already have an online business and want to get started traveling right away, I think that’s the easiest way.

Everett: When you first started traveling, did you bring anything with you that you thought was a necessity, but it turned out not to be?

Karol: Well, a couple of years ago I went on a 3 week US tour with my friend’s band, and I took a full suitcase. Not a small one either. I think I packed a full 2 weeks of clothes. 14 shirts, 14 underwear, 14 socks! Plus an extra pair of pants and 2 hoodies.

I’ve always been fairly minimalistic in other aspects of my life so I don’t think I ever had any other extras to take besides too many clothes.

Everett: And finally, can you think of one aspect of our lives that many of us can change, which can help us lead to life that is more free?

Karol: It’s difficult to state something that everybody needs to change. And my goals aren’t really aligned with telling people what to do. The most important advice I can offer someone is to take action. If you want to start a business, start it. If you want to write a book, write it.

If you want to travel the world, buy a ticket and go.

Karol Gajda writes the blog Ridiculously Extraordinary, a must read resource for anyone who wants to get unstuck and begin living to the fullest.