If you’re writing a nonfiction book, ask yourself two questions. Is your idea unique? What do you know that nobody else knows? If you can’t answer that question, you don’t have a book (or if you do, it is not worth writing). The unique qualities of your book could include: Here’s a complete list of…
Yesterday I told you to make sure your book is about one idea. If you have multiple ideas, how should you choose? Here are some criteria on which you can evaluate your ideas. Making a decision After evaluating these criteria, figure out what book best balances the effort you’ll put in and the benefits you’ll…
People contact me all the time for help with books. I usually take the time to talk with them and help if I can. I’ve become very efficient: in five minutes, I can typically tell whether to take the book idea seriously or not. I look for three things: Unless the author and their idea…
This is exactly what you need to know about business book ideas — in 49-seconds. (At least until Twitter — er, I mean X — stops allowing me to embed video.) From the John Jantsch Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.
Authors have questions. Once they start working on a book, the same things seem to come up over and over. So let’s get you some answers. Is my idea worth writing a book about? An idea worthy of a whole book should be big enough to have a set of nonobvious consequences. You should have…
It’s easy to tell people “I have a book idea.” But before you invest your time in writing, you need to make sure that idea is powerful enough to build a book on. Here are 11 questions to ask yourself before you exert significant effort towards becoming a nonfiction author. If you can’t answer these…