When you’re writing nonfiction, your book is making a promise. It has a job to do.
And when I say your book has a job to do, I want to be 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 am 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 a future version of you.
If you’re not sure what that reason is—or if you’re not being honest about what that reason is—you could spend months writing the wrong book.
Every decision you’ll make about your structure, your voice, your audience, your publishing path—even the examples you pull in—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 a thousand articles telling you to start with an outline, or 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… and maybe that’s why you’re feeling stuck right now.
So that’s why, with every ghostwriting or book coaching client I work with, figuring out what the book’s job is my absolute number one priority.
Otherwise, we are not going to make effective progress.
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 each other, and the why behind each was critical to how we worked on them.
Three Book Promises
Example 1: The Productivity Consultant
Let’s start on the real business end of the spectrum.
I worked with a ghostwriting client who was writing a series of books on productivity. He’d written a lot about personal productivity, but the one he hired me for was very corporate. And that was on purpose—he wanted to use that book as an entry point into consulting work with larger companies.
That shaped the language we used.
It shaped the examples we used, it even shaped his publishing path. He told me he’d actually prefer to self-publish given his audience and his experience. But he also knew that traditional publishing would carry a certain cachet with the kinds of corporate clients he wanted to attract. So traditional it was.
So that was goal 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 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.
The book had a business impact job to do as well as a social impact job.
Example 2: The Doggy Daycare Owner
Now let’s head the other end of the spectrum.
I have a book coaching client who runs a doggy daycare. She’s spent her entire career learning how to “speak dog” and she wanted to write a book that contained everything she knew.
I asked her why in our first call. 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, especially for people who’ve been in business a long time and are ready to stop running day-to-day operations.
I could tell those ideas had genuinely never occurred to her. She seemed interested, but they clearly weren’t the reason she was writing this book.
She said, Well, people keep telling me I should write a book.
Which is a should, not a why.
So then I asked: Why now? What’s making this urgent? Why did you reach out to me?
And she told me, 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 so I said, Hell yeah. A book is a perfect way to do that. Let’s get your legacy on paper.
The way we’re structuring her book will still absolutely set her up for coaching or speaking or training someday, if she wants to do that. But the goal is cataloguing and passing on her knowledge.
There’s one more piece of this example that’s worth flagging: the 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.
Who she actually wanted to reach was dog owners. People who love their dogs and want to understand them better.
Two takeaways here.
One: sometimes “why now” is the question that unlocks “why”.
Two: it can take some time to figure out who your true audience is.
Example 3: The Real Estate Appraiser
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 for a fairly standard lead magnet about increasing the value of your home. Something that would bring him more work and help him grow his business through thought leadership
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 really feel valuable—the things that made you love living there—were almost never on the form.
People tell you that if you paint your house a crazy color, you’re never going to sell it. But what is the cost of living in a home that never really feels like yours because of something you feel like you “should do” because of the market?
What he eventually landed on 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.
He didn’t care about bringing customers into his business. He wanted to give other people permission to embrace their own creativity at home, and stop living in fear of other peoples’ judgement. 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.
When he’d mentioned the idea to people in his industry, they’d kind of scoff at him: What are you doing writing a book? You’re a real estate appraiser!
When he told me that, I laughed.
Because, in literally every other corner of the entrepreneurial internet, everyone is being told they have to write a book. Every coach. Every consultant. Every fitness trainer. It’s the no-brainer move, the obvious authority play, the thing you’re supposed to do.
But he was being told he was crazy for thinking of it.
He felt stifled, and sensed that from homeowners he worked with. He wanted to tap into his own creativity, and to help others do the same.
The takeaway here is that your book’s job can be about granting permission. For your reader, and sometimes for you.
But! What about making money with a book?
Some of you might be wondering, what about making money with your book? Can that be a why?
It absolutely can, 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’m sorry to spoil this for you, very few authors are making money on book sales alone.
Most of them are making money on book sales + new business opportunities, a speaking platform, new leads into their programs, etc. If you want to explore what that could look like for you, monetarily, I have another article that walks through four different ROI models my clients have used to make money off their books.
Your Book’s Promise
Okay. It’s time to figure out your own book’s promise. I want you to answer these two questions.
First: Why this book, and why now?
That’s your personal why. Your business outcomes, your timeline, your urgency. The thing that’s making this matter right now and not three years from now.
Second: Who is this book for, and what do you want it to do for them?
That’s your reader and the transformation. What changes for them after they close the book?
Spend some time journaling on both of those questions, and when you’re done, here’s how I want you to put it together.
“I’m writing this book because I want ____. This book is for ____, to help them ____.”
That is your book’s promise.
And if you want help shaping a book that’s perfectly calibrated to meet that promise, let’s chat. Whether you’re looking for a book coach to guide you through the process or a ghostwriter to bring your book to life, I’m here.
Head to story-rebel.com/meet to set up a discovery call.