Today I want to discuss yet another obstacle that people put in the way of getting started writing their books: not knowing what to write about.

People often say to me, “Well, what would I write about? I don’t know what to write about. How can I write a book when I don’t know what to write about?” Well, the answer to that depends on your answer to a deeper question, which is, “Why do you want to write your book?” 

I don’t try to talk people into writing books. I’m usually speaking to people who have already had the idea that they would like to write a book. And so the first question I ask them is, “Why? Why are you doing this?” Usually, the answer falls into one of two categories: expert positioning and legacy. So let’s look at those two things individually.

Expert Positioning

Many people write business books because they are, or aspire to be, thought leaders. These people have usually been in business for some time. They might be corporate executives or they might be entrepreneurs, but they’ve been doing whatever they do for a number of years. 

They think differently about the subject matter they deal with, differently from most people, which is what makes them thought leaders. Their thoughts are leading the way for other people. 

Thought leadership books are usually quite long, sometimes quite dense, and take a while to write because there’s a lot of information in them. There’s a lot of thought in them because that’s what they’re all about — thought leadership. 

Although I have worked with authors of thought leadership books, most of the people I work with are in fact writing how-to books. They are codifying some method that they have for doing something. They’re teaching people to do a certain thing that’s within their area of expertise. It might be how to double your sales in six months. It might be how to close sales when you hate selling. It might be how to create a great PowerPoint deck. 

If you have expertise in a subject, you can teach people how to do that. And those how-to books will never go out of style because people are always wanting to learn how to do something. 

It might not even be business related. Sometimes it’s to do with a hobby. It might be how to hit a hole-in-one in golf. Maybe it’s how to draw portraits or build a model airplane or crochet a blanket. As long as it’s something you have some expertise in, and it’s something people want to learn, you can write the book.

If you play your cards right and you write a good book and you promote it properly, you can actually promote yourself as the expert you truly are in that area. 

Now think about that in a business setting. If you’re talking to somebody who is potentially a client and you can say to them, “Well, you know, I wrote the book on this,” that changes the entire sales conversation because now you’ve positioned yourself as an authority, an expert in that particular area. Why would they go to anyone else when you wrote the book on the subject?

Legacy

The other reason my clients write books is for their legacy. These books are either memoirs, biographies or autobiographies, so let me explain the differences among those three. 

A biography is the story of someone’s life, often from cradle to grave written by someone else. An autobiography is a biography about the author’s own life, usually up to their current age or sometimes ending when they retired from public office or from a high-visibiity career. In either case, it’s a life story.

A memoir, on the other hand, is not. A memoir is usually about a slice of a person’s life. It might be time-based — perhaps your childhood years in India, or the time when you were cooking on a ship for people on luxury cruises. It’s usually a part of your life you have stories about. They might be fun, upbeat, funny stories or they might serious stories that make your reader think. 

My most recent book, Rare Steak, Red Wine, Hot Tango!, is a travel memoir. I live a lot of the year in Argentina, so I put together a collection of stories about some adventures I’ve had during my various times in Argentina. It’s not an autobiography, it’s a memoir. 

Although I’m open to the idea, I’ve never written a biography, as my clients are usually writing memoirs. There are a couple of reasons people write memoirs. 

First of all, as I said, it’s for their legacy. I spoke to a man who wanted to write his life story simply because his family didn’t have any clue about what he had gone through in his life just because of circumstances, and he wanted his family to know. He wanted to leave this legacy for his children and their children to really understand his life. 

Maybe your book is not about your story, but someone else’s. Maybe it’s your grandmother’s story, and you want to interview her and write her memoir so that she will be able to leave her story for her family. 

Sometimes the reason for writing a memoir is just personal satisfaction. My memoir of Argentina came into that category. I never had any intention of writing a memoir about Argentina, or about anything else for that matter. But I simply sat down one day when I was out for coffee in a café in Buenos Aires, with a notebook and a pen. I started to just write down the stories of some of the things that had happened to me, and I was just doing it for fun. I had no intention of publishing it, but just thought I might make some copies for some friends. 

But I enjoyed myself so much when I was writing the book because I was just laughing over and over again about what had happened during these episodes, these stories. And then when I told a few people about it, some started to say to me, “Well, you know, I think that might sell.” So then I started to investigate and I realized that yes, indeed travel memoirs do sell and this is a good book and it will sell. And it does. 

But when I began writing the book, I was doing it for personal satisfaction. Don’t underestimate that, because writing a book and putting it into print, even if it never becomes a bestseller or anything like that, will give you more personal satisfaction than almost anything else I can think of. 

What Is Your “Why”?

So if you are asking yourself the qustion, “What will I write about?”, pause for a moment and ask the deeper question, “Why do I want to write the book?” 

So this is your homework for this week. If you’ve been thinking of writing a book, ask yourself the big why question, and give it serious consideration. You need a strong why because writing a book is a big commitment and you need a purpose that will not only get you started, but also sustain you through the whole process to get it finished. 

Why are you writing this book? Is to position yourself as a thought leader? Is it to bring in more business? Is it to leave your legacy? Is it to tell the world about your exploits in your life? Or is it something else entirely?

A word of caution here. If you decide you want to write your book for business purposes, avoid the trap of trying to write about everything you know. People are very busy today and their attention span is getting shorter and shorter. People no longer want inch thick books — if they ever did. They want a thin slice of your expertise. So you could be looking at a book of 100 to 150 pages. It’s a fairly slim book. But if it’s substantive and has good information in it, then it’s still an excellent business tool for you. 

So this week, get the answer to the question why you want to write the book and from there decide what book you’ll write. By next week, you’ll have a good idea for the subject of your book, and maybe you’ll be ready to start the process of actually doing it. How exciting is that?

Happy writing!