How to think bigger for your book

A nonfiction advice book makes a case for an idea. The basic structure is like this:

• This is the problem you (a person in the target audience) have.
• Here is the solution.
• Here are the elements of the solution in detail.
• Here’s how to implement the solution.

That’s fine. And depending on how much detail you go into, that could be five to 15 chapters or 30,000 to 70,000 words of advice.

But if that’s all you do, you haven’t gone far enough.

How to think bigger

Start this exercise by assuming that the reader accepts your premise and your advice and figure out what it means.

Now start thinking about a chapter or chapters what will answer questions like these:

• This could improve your work life, but how would it improve your family life, too?
• How will this trend impact professionals, managers, senior executives, and CEOs?
• What would the world look like if this caught on broadly?
• If this mostly affects one industry (say, media), how would it impact related industries (such as advertising or telecom)?
• Will this trend demand government regulation? How would that work?
• What impact will this have on macroeconomic trends? (If that seems like too big a question, consider past developments like ecommerce, mobile internet, outsourcing, and AI, which have certainly had major impacts.)
• How fast will this trend catch on? What would affect that rate of adoption?
• How will this impact the geopolitical balance between nations?
• How will it affect the job market?
• If someone were to invest based on this trend, what kinds of companies would they invest in?

Not all of these questions apply to all books. But whatever you’re writing about, some of these questions, or other similar ones, will generate interesting lines of inquiry.

You may be looking at this and saying, “Wow, I don’t know how to project impacts that far-reaching.” If this makes you uncomfortable, great. Find an economist, management expert, corporate strategy guru, or motivation expert and ask them for help. And don’t worry about being wrong; when you write about this kind of thing, people are wrong often. It’s about stretching your thinking, not making precise predictions.

You don’t need to do this. But if your book succeeds and you haven’t thought this big, someone else will. Why leave that opportunity to someone who knows less about it than you?