Make it your business to make it good
You’ve got a book underway. Maybe you’ve got a book contract. But now that you’re in the thick of it you feel like you’re just blundering through it—or even stalled out because your desire to write a great book is at war with your worry that you don’t know how.
Does that feel familiar?
What I’m about to say is a little bit of tough love, but when you accept it you might find that it helps: how your book turns out is entirely up to you. Whether it turns out good or bad is your choice.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t get help from your publisher, or an author coach, or a writing group, or even books on writing. What it does mean is that you are in the driver seat. If you don’t put your foot on the gas, the car’s not going anywhere. And if you don’t turn the wheel, the car’s not going where you want it to go. Your helpers can do things like read the map, hand you a snack, or put something on the radio when you get tired. But it’s your car. And that’s an empowering message.
There’s a world of difference between just writing a book and writing a great book. An “okay” book never spreads beyond the people you reach directly, whereas a great book takes on a life of its own as readers turn around and recommend it to other people like them.
Scenario 1 is what it looks like when you publish an okay book
Scenario 2 is what it looks like when you publish a GREAT book
Which do you want?
Often I refer to a book as a lever that will open new doors for you. That can be worth a lot—whether you’re thinking of value in terms of professional advancement, moving an issue forward, money you can earn (not directly from the book unless you’re an outlier, but from promotion, speaking and consulting, etc), or your legacy. But it also costs a lot in the form of the time and money you’ll invest. If you write for just one hour per day, four days per week, for a year, you’ll spend over 200 hours (and probably significantly more) as the bare minimum to write your book—and that will be just the first draft. Can you afford to waste that time by not writing the best book possible?
Think about it like this. If you were a blacksmith forging an actual lever, you’d be sure that your craftsmanship was perfect. Because a long crowbar with a tiny brittle spot in the middle is useless. The first time you try to use it, it will snap at the weak point.
How to write a great book
I’ll give you my favorite shortcut right now—this is the first thing you should do to make sure your book will be great. It sounds so simple that you might think it can’t possibly work as well as I tell you it will, but it does. It starts like this: if you could choose who reads your book—the specific people—how effective could you make it for them?
I recently heard from an author who I worked with early in his writing process. We worked through one of my favorite approaches to picking the right reader, and he wrote with that person in mind. The key is to pick a real person who you know well enough to talk to and/or write an email to, comfortably. They should represent the type of reader you want to reach, but they are not a composite—they are a real person. That’s your “reader avatar.” And then you write every word as if it’s just for them. The thing is, you never have to tell the person you chose them, it’s just for you.
So this author’s book just published a few weeks ago, and he sent a copy to the person he’d picked as his ideal reader (not telling them anything about that, just “hey, here’s a copy of my new book”).
And a week or two later, he came across a Facebook post from that person saying:
I highly recommend [the book] - it’s a vital read for folks who want to avoid making the same policy mistakes we’ve made in prior outbreaks and during COVID. I spent much of the pandemic enraged by pundits and politicians - and parents - who sought to advance their own middle, upper-middle, and wealthy class interests ahead of my students’ lives and the lives of their families. If you care about economic equity and opportunity, if you care about justice, if you care about making informed decisions to save lives, please buy and read this book!
This is exactly how scenario 2 gets started.
Your publisher’s role
Its normal for a publisher to react to an author’s manuscript with some degree of feedback—but it is always understood that it’s the author’s responsibility to write a great book. You never want to send an okay manuscript in to your publisher in the hope that they’ll grab the steering wheel and get everything on track. Even if they were willing to slide into the driver’s seat, would you want them to? Depending on how much time your editor has, they might decide that “close enough” is close enough, or that if it’s too far off it’s not worth the effort. So it’s absolutely necessary that you invest in the planning, process, and skill-building that will help you write the best book possible.
Does this resonate with you?
Are you ready to build skills, join a community of like-minded writers, and ensure that you make it through this book-writing process successfully?
Check out my Author Club, where you’ll find an amazing group of people to give you energy for your journey, share ideas, ask questions. We hang out, we do this stuff, we tackle the things we’ve been avoiding, and it’s all valuable enough that people log onto our meetings even when they’re on vacation or on another coast.
I’m inviting just five new members this month, on a best-fit basis. Learn more at the link above and find out if it’s a good fit for you. Invites start going out on Sunday.