Your Book’s Promise
Welcome to day one of the No Rules Book Sprint!
NOTE: This lesson will be available until the end of the day on Sunday, June 7th.
Transcript of Day 1
Welcome to the No Rules book sprint. Over the next three days, we are going to get clear on the strategy for your nonfiction book, so you know exactly what you’re writing, who you’re writing it for, and the rough outline and shape of it. Every day, you’re going to get a short video lesson, just like this one, and a short homework assignment. Your job is to watch the video, do the homework, and optionally post it for my review.
Don’t worry if you fall behind a day or two in posting. Absolutely fine, but I really want to encourage you to take action right now and not just save this for later, which is why these videos will only be available for 72 hours.
You’re also getting access to a book organizer, which I developed to help my book coaching clients organize their thoughts around their books. This will not go away after 72 hours, that’s yours to keep, that’s your place to do your homework.
Tour of the Book Organizer
So, let’s go ahead and take a look at that book organizer and talk you through your first lesson.
Okay, so when you clicked the link, you should have been prompted to make an editable copy of this book organizer. So notice over on the side here, there are these document tabs, and if you don’t see that, you might have to click this little icon here, okay, that’ll show you the tabs.
So, start here. This has a little bit about how to use this organizer, kind of the 10 cent sign posts on the trail to a finished book, the different steps, little bit more information.
Your homework, most of your work is going to be happening in this My Book Organizer tab, so if you click it a second time, you’ll see the signposts along the side. There are different exercises, and then there are starred sections that are places for you to do your work, so they’re starred in the sidebar, so you can find them really easily.
There’s also this additional exercises tab, and here you’re going to find a book ROI worksheet, and also a template for if you want to work with any beta readers, and so the reason I put them over here is because they were a little distracting in the main section. Some of you may not want to work with beta readers, some of you may get stressed out by the idea of doing like a monetary ROI evaluation of your book. You can just ignore them, they’re over here in additional exercises, you can stay over here in the My Book Organizer if you don’t want to use those.
And then finally there’s a Tools and Resources section, and this is all the different tools that I mentioned throughout the Book Organizer, just all in one place.
Today’s Lesson: What Is Your Book’s Job?
So we are going to start today’s lesson, is going to be the homework is going to be in the signpost one. What is your book’s promise when you’re writing nonfiction?
Your book has a job to do, and when I say your book has a job to do, I want to be really, really clear about what I mean. I’m not saying you have to write some buttoned up corporate handbook. I’m not saying it has to be formulaic or that you have to be obsessed with making money with it.
What I’m saying is this: there’s a reason you want to write this book. There’s something you want it to do for you, or for the people who read it, or for the world, or for some future version of yourself. If you’re not sure what that reason is, or if you’re not honest with yourself about what that reason is, you could spend months writing the wrong book.
Every decision you’ll make around your structure, your voice, your audience, your publishing path, even the examples that you pull in, all of that gets shaped by the answer to one question, What is your book’s job?
Except that most advice about writing books doesn’t even talk about this. You’ll find 1000 articles telling you to start with an outline, pick a chapter structure, or figure out your three big ideas, or just start drafting and see what happens, and maybe you’ve done that, maybe that’s why you’re stuck right now and signed up for the sprint.
So, that’s why with every ghost writing or book coaching client that I work with, figuring out what the book’s job is is my absolute number one priority. Otherwise, we’re not going to make effective progress, and I don’t want them to be wasting their time.
Client Examples
So, let me show you what I mean. I want to walk you through three of my clients and their books jobs, because their books could not be more different from one another, and the why behind each of them is so critical to how we worked on them.
Client 1: The Productivity Consultant
All right, so let’s start on the real, like, business, the end of the spectrum. I worked with a ghost writing client a few years back who was writing a series of books on productivity. He had written a lot about personal productivity, but the one he hired me to work with him on was very corporate, and that was on purpose. He wanted to use that book as an entry point into consulting work with larger corporations, and so that really shaped the language we used. It shaped the examples. It even shaped his publishing path, like he told me at one point he’d actually have preferred to self-publish, because he had kind of the audience, he had the experience, but he also knew that traditional publishing would carry a certain cache with the kinds of clients that he wanted to attract, so traditional it was.
So that was goal number one, to be an entry point into consulting work, but there was a secret second goal. The book was meant to be read by both management types and individual individual contributors, and to empower people at every level. He wasn’t saying this to the extremely upper management that was bringing him in, but one of his goals was for them to promote his book to people at all levels, and for people at the lowest rungs to read it and learn how to advocate for themselves and make their own workplace better.
So, the book had a personal, social, kind of business impact job to do with his business, but it also had a social impact job.
Client 2: The Doggy Daycare Owner
Now let’s go all the way to the other end of the spectrum. I have a book coaching client who runs a doggy daycare. She spent her entire career learning how to speak dog, and she wanted to write a book that contained everything she knew. So when I asked her why on our first call, I was like, are you trying to attract new clients? Are you thinking about pivoting into speaking or consulting or training other business owners? Because that’s a really common move, right, especially for people who’ve been in business a long time.
And I could tell, as we were talking, that those ideas had genuinely never occurred to her. She said, well, people just keep telling me I should write a book, which is great, but that’s a should, it’s not a why, so I asked, okay, why now? What’s making this urgent? Why did you reach out to me? Why did you hire me now?
And she said, well, I’ve got a chronic illness that I know might eventually affect my mind, and I don’t know how long I’ll have full access to everything I know. She wanted to get it out of her head and onto the page before she couldn’t anymore, and I was like, yeah, hell yeah, a book is a great way to do that. Let’s get your legacy into paper.
So, the way we’re structuring her book will still absolutely set her up for coaching or speaking or training, if that’s what she wants to do, but the goal is cataloging and passing on her knowledge for the next generation of dog trainers that will come after her.
And there’s one more piece of this example that I want to flag, which is her audience. When she first came to me, she thought she was writing for other doggy daycare owners. She wanted to show them a more ethical, humane way of running a daycare, but the more we talked, the more she realized she didn’t really care about that audience. What she actually wanted was to reach dog owners, people who love their dogs and want to understand them better.
So, there’s two takeaways here: one is that sometimes asking why now is the question that unlocks your why, and the second is that it can sometimes take some time to figure out who your true audience is, but it’s really worth digging into that question, because it will change everything about how you write this book.
Client 3: The Real Estate Appraiser
Third example, I had a book coaching client who worked as a real estate appraiser. He came to me with an idea for a book, but it was pretty vague at first. I thought we were going to go for a fairly standard lead magnet about increasing the value of your home, something that would bring him more work, help him grow his business through thought leadership, right, but his why was actually a lot more emotional.
He’d spent years checking boxes on appraisal forms, and what he’d noticed was that the things that made a home feel really valuable, the things that made you love living there, were never on the form. For example, people tell you that if you paint your house a crazy color, you’re never going to be able to sell it, but what is the cost of living in a home that never really feels like yours? Because you never made the choice to paint it the color that you really, really wanted it to be. You were doing things they felt like should do because of the market.
What he eventually landed on with this book was this: he wanted to write a book about increasing the value of your home, not in the way the market measures value, but in the way you actually live in it, the joy of it, the creativity of it. And he didn’t care about bringing customers into his business. He wanted to give people permission to embrace their own creativity at home and stop living in fear of other people’s judgments, or what they should do, which was not coincidentally part of his own journey.
One of the reasons it took him so long to articulate this idea to me is that nobody in his world writes books, so when he told people that he was kind of had this idea for a book, they’d scoff at him and they’d be like, ‘What are you doing writing a book? You’re a real estate appraiser.’ And so when he told me that, like, I had to laugh, because in every other corner of the entrepreneurial internet, everyone’s being told they have to write a book, every coach, every consultant, every fitness trainer. It’s like a no-brainer move, but over in his corner of the world, he was being told he was crazy for even thinking of it.
So he felt stifled, and he sensed that from the owners, homeowners that he worked with too. He wanted to tap into his own creativity and to help other people do the same.
So, the takeaway here is that your book’s job can be about granting permission for yourself and for your reader.
A Note on Making Money
Before we get into the homework, some of you may be wondering, okay, what about making money with my book, Jessie? Can that be the why?
And yes, it absolutely can be, but I don’t want you to stop at sell lots of copies and get rich. I want you to figure out exactly how you’re going to leverage your book to make the money that you want to make off it, because I am sorry to spoil this for you, but very few authors are making money on book sales alone. Most of them are making money on book sales, plus new business opportunities, plus a speaking platform, plus new leads into their program, etc.
So, if you want to explore what that could look like for you monetarily, you will find an article linked in the book organizer that walks through four different ROI models that my clients have used to make money off their books. It’s in that additional exercises tab.
Your Homework
Okay. Homework time. It is time to figure out your own book’s promise, and I want you to answer these two questions.
Question one: Why this book, and why now? That’s your personal why, your business outcomes, your timeline, your urgency—that’s the thing that’s making this matter right now to you and your business, not three years from now.
Second, who was this book for, and what do you want it to do for them? That’s your reader, their transformation, your audience. What changes for them once they close this book?
So, spend some time journaling on both of these questions. Set a time for timer for 20 minutes. Just write everything you can think of on those two questions.
And when you’re done, here’s how I want you to put it together. Write a single statement here. I’m writing this book because I want blank. This book is for blank to help them blank. That is your book’s promise.
And when you’ve got something, swing over to the Discord, drop that sentence in, or that two sentences. Sorry, and I will give you feedback there.
What’s Next
Okay, so tomorrow we are going to take that one sentence promise, and we are going to start working on the shape of your book. All right. Talk soon.