Questions for Preparing a Nonfiction Book
I am staring at this document. I was excited for it recently, but now I am just staring at it.
In order to finish writing your nonfiction book. There are some questions you need to ask for yourself. These questions will be hard for a number of reasons.
What journey are you taking your reader on?
This question is hard because you do not want the reader to replicate your own journey of finding the information. It probably took you a lot of time and a lot of pain to find the information, and probably there were a lot of side quests. In writing the book you are creating a distillation of everything you had learned on your quests to get the knowledge, so that their path is much more straightforward. While maintaining a relatable tone and character! And while not wanting to make it seem so easy! You may also be saving the information for your own saved state, so that you yourself remember the information before you forget it.
Therefore, you cannot just repeat the journey you went on for the final structure of the book. That would take your reader on these same tangly side quests that are painful and they do not need. But maybe you can repeat the journey you yourself went on, for your own self-knowledge. Generally what is tricky here is that you have had moments of “meaning-making” or “Eurekas” that are very strange, and then in order to figure out how they came to be, actually in a way that is both very honest and actually articulable to another person, there is a lot more thinking about the connections between the different things that needs to happen. Maybe you realized something after making a few unnecessary mistakes, and then had a sugar rush from a jelly donut, and you have this very clear memory of eating the donut and everything coming together. But then explaining what came together in that moment is hard. Or maybe you were fixing something for a client, and learned something, but cannot disclose what the client talked about exactly because of privacy concerns. Now you have to figure out how to tell the story in a way that is both true and hyper-true; true in a way such that the true things actually come across. Figuring how to structure these tales of learning and the specific insights can be challenging.
Who is your target audience?
This question is hard because probably you are talking to a few people about the book, but you cannot actually talk to people about the entire book without writing the entire book. And so you end up getting feedback in parts, about various parts. You do not actually deploy the entire payload because the payload (the entire book) does not exist. A certain type of people may light up when you bring up the topic at parties. Certain close friends are encouraging you to include certain stories. But this does not get you closer to figuring out this Big Important Question about Who Is Your Target Audience
Probably you want everybody to love it, and for the people who need it to need it. It can be hard to think that, given how hard it was to collect your sacred knowledge, many people will not be looking for your book.
It can therefore be hard to consider your book a “payload” to a kind of searching, eager audience, already willing to buy it. It implies the existence of 90% of people who are not looking for it and will not read it.
It can be helpful to remember that most people will not read your book because they will not be reading any books this year. This means that culling your audience to a very small very enthusiastic percentage is not such a bad deal.
If you are intrinsically motivated to write the book, because you already have a lot of passion for it, figuring out other people who are going to to be additional stakeholders and interest groups can be very hard to think about while not losing your connection to the source of your inspiration.
How will the book help your personal brand?
Sometimes you have a clear idea for your book’s connection to what you want the book to do for you. If you are an expert in a certain kind of electronics equipment, writing the Master Guide for that equipment could help you have street cred in your field. Or maybe you are starting a field by writing the quintessential book on that topic.
If you are starting a field or movement with your book, or are doing something new with an existing field or movement, then how it will help you might not be obvious. Chances are you are doing it because you have found something experimental, or a passion, and you want to write it up, like a scientist writing a scientific paper. There is some drive to share what you have learned, both for others and for yourself in its pristine form. Writing the book can feel like an art project than a branding project, even though it is both.
Therefore, thinking about it as an object “for your brand” becomes counterintuitive to think about, as it’s not the original source of the creativity.
In the next blog post, I will probably take a crack at these hard things.