Choose the right book to write, and you’ll be investing in a creative, collaborative project that will be transformative, personally and professionally, says Alison Jones
My Grandma always used to say: ‘You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.’
It’s not a bad mantra for life generally, but it’s particularly useful to keep in mind if you’re thinking of writing a book.
Because for most leaders and experts, the problem isn’t finding ‘the book’ that’s in them, it’s choosing one from the many books they could write to get started on. And choose you must: it’s tempting to keep flirting with all the shiny ideas without committing to any, perpetual possibility procrastination, but that’s not how books get written.
So how do you decide which book to write, or at least which book to write first?
You might be surprised to hear that my advice isn’t to start by narrowing down your options, but by very deliberately expanding them. Get serious about those possibilities. Generate as many as you can, whether that’s a wall of post-its or a physical or digital mind map, and start putting some working titles to those ideas.
If you’ve been thinking about writing a book on the lessons you’ve learned as a leader, for example, you might have ‘10 Lessons I’ve Learned’, or ‘How to Get to the Top in Financial Services’. You could also get more specific as you think more fully through your areas of expertise: ‘team dynamics’, or ‘culture change’, or ‘embedding technology’.
Or you might think how this applies in other areas where you have an interest: ‘corporate leadership for youth development’, or ‘how managers can support wellbeing’. What do you know about and care about? And just as importantly, because you’ll be spending a good chunk of your life on this, what are you interested in researching further?
(Note that we’re not interested at this stage in crafting the perfect title – they just have to capture an angle, so it’s best to keep them functional.)
Aim for 20, then keep going. Quantity breeds quality, remember, and the craziest idea can open up a brilliant new set of possibilities. Have fun with this, keep it going for a few days and see what new ideas emerge. Ask others for suggestions – they may see capabilities in you that you take for granted. Play the field shamelessly; you’re not aiming to fall in love with any of these potential titles at this point (although you’ll obviously fancy some more than others).
And after a few days, when the flow of ideas has dried up, it’s time to move from divergent to convergent mode.
This starts with getting clear on what you want this book to achieve for you, personally and professionally. So if you haven’t already done so, think about your direction of travel over the next few years. What do you want to be known for? Who do you most want to work and connect with? What opportunities are you best placed to seize? If you’re thinking about moving into consultancy, for example, what will be your signature programme?
And once you’re clear on what YOU want out of this book, think about your readers. Who do you most want to write for, and what do they most need to read? What’s happening in their world that they need to get to grips with? It’s helpful to create personas here, much as you might do for software or UX design: what are the ‘user stories’ that might bring people to your book and what are the outcomes it should deliver? (Hint: that autobiography you’ve been considering probably won’t survive this test.)
Then it’s time to bring all this thinking together to help you evaluate your ideas.
You’ll find that you can discard some ideas immediately because they just don’t fit with either your own plans for the future or your readers’ needs. But you should be left with a few possibilities that fit both criteria.
Now what?
Well, you could just pick the one that most appeals to you – and that’s a perfectly valid approach given that only the ideas with legs are left standing at this stage – but it’s worth thinking about it more rationally, too. Writing a book will absorb a significant amount of two of your most precious resources, your time and your attention. As with any investment decision, it’s important to be clear on how you’ll measure the ROI; the thinking you did about what you want this book to do for you will help you decide on your personal and professional critical success criteria (eg ‘will help me build a distinctive consultancy business’, ‘quick to write’, ‘will allow me to connect with policy makers’, etc) so capture all of those.
Once you’ve done that, you can create a decision grid to help you prioritise your ideas. List those critical success criteria down one axis and all the titles still in contention along the other, then simply score each potential title against each of those criteria. The obvious winner will be the one with the highest score, but it may be that some criteria are more important than others: use your judgement. At the end of the day, after all the rational evaluation, sometimes you just have a gut preference you can’t ignore. Go with it. Write the book you most want to write. But at least you’ll do so with your eyes open if you’ve done this work.
One last word: don’t focus exclusively on what the finished book will mean to you. I find that authors consistently underestimate the importance of the writing period itself. You will spend weeks, probably months, possibly years, researching and exploring this topic. From a self-development perspective alone it’s a great opportunity to follow your curiosity and deepen your mastery. But it’s more than just you and your manuscript: it’s also a powerful tool to help you build your network: writing a book on their area of interest is a great pretext for reaching out to pretty much anybody to ask for their thoughts. And if you’ve been thinking about building your presence on social media, the researching and writing process can be the engine for a steady, high-quality supply of posts and articles long before the book itself is published.
Don’t be shy about sharing your ideas. Own them, discuss them, test them in public and build on the feedback and insights you get from others in return. Your book will be all the stronger for it, and in the process you will build an engaged following of people who will not only be keen to buy the book when it’s finally published, but will spread the word on your behalf.
Choose the right book to write, and you’ll be investing in a creative, collaborative project that will be transformative, personally and professionally. As Seth Godin put it:
‘Here’s the thing: The book that will most change your life is the book you write.’
It’s worth getting it right.
Alison Jones is a publisher and book coach, founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing and host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club. A veteran of the publishing industry, she is on the board of the Independent Publishers Guild and Head Judge of the Business Book Awards. Her most recent book is This Book Means Business (2018).
