The best authors write on diverse topics. You shouldn’t.

Nonfiction authors tell me, “I want to be like Malcolm Gladwell.” So they look at Gladwell’s output and draw lessons from it.

Here are are Gladwell’s books and their topics:

The Tipping Point (2000) — the spread of ideas
Blink (2005) — perception
Outliers (2008) — what leads to success
What the Dog Saw (2009) — essays
David and Goliath (2013) — competition
Talking to Strangers (2019) — perception
The Bomber Mafia (2021) — military strategy
Revenge of the Tipping Point (2024) — the spread of ideas again

That’s a pretty diverse set of topics. Do not ask what Malcolm Gladwell is an expert in: he is an expert in all sorts of things, but mostly in selling books.

Is this an unusual pattern? Well, let’s look at the output of another multi-bestselling author, Daniel Pink:

Free Agent Nation (2001) — the rise of freelance work
A Whole New Mind (2005) — creativity
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (2008) — career advice
Drive (2009) — the science of motivation
To Sell is Human (2012) — sales
When (2018) — timing
The Power of Regret (2022) — reflecting on past mistakes

The first five Pink books are about work, but they’re still very diverse, and he has continued in unexpected directions in his last two books.

Let’s look at one more. Here’s the output of Steven Johnson:

Interface Culture (1997) — digital interfaces
Emergence (2001) — complex systems
Mind Wide Open (2004) — neuroscience
Everything Bad Is Good for You (2005) — pop culture and the mind
The Ghost Map (2006) — epidemiology
The Invention of Air (2008) — history of science
Where Good Ideas Come From (2010) — innovation
The Innovator’s Cookbook (2011) — innovation
Future Perfect (2012) — how we solve problems
How We Got to Now (2014) — six transformative innovations
Wonderland (2016) — the role of play in history
Farsighted (2018) — how we make decisions
Enemy of All Mankind (2020) — history of piracy
Extra Life (2021) — longevity
The Infernal Machine (2024) — history of stuff that explodes

Several Johnson books focus on innovation and neuroscience, but this list covers a pretty wide range of topics.

The lesson here is obvious: successful authors write about a diverse set of topics. So if you want to be successful, you should, too. Right?

Wrong.

An easier way to succeed

If you want to write books for a living, as Gladwell, Pink, and Johnson do, you’re going to need to build a career as an author.

The easiest start to a career like that is to start by writing a huge hit. The Tipping Point and Free Agent Nation were big sellers right off the bat. Johnson’s first few books didn’t take off immediately, but once he published Everything Bad Is Good For You, he was off and running.

Once you’ve written a huge bestseller, publishers are very willing to publish your next book. Readers are interested in reading it. You already have a speaking career and events will support you to create speeches on new topics that you’re exploring for a book. And you probably can afford a support structure (for example, researchers, speaking agents, and publicists) that will make it far easier for you to publish and promote another book.

Unless you are a very talented writer — a one-in-a-thousand talent — and also very lucky, this is unlikely to be you.

Take note of what happens when you write on topics all of the map like these authors do. You leave audiences behind. If your audience is people interested in perception and your next book is on success, or if your audience is people interested in brain science and your next book is on epidemiology, you’re going to lose a chunk of that audience. What you’re left with is people who are just willing to read anything you write because you’re fascinating. Unless you are a wild writing talent, that’s probably not going to work.

There is, of course, another way to succeed.

Shep Hyken has written eight books on customer service. People are not reading these books because he’s such a fascinating guy (although he is). They are reading them because he has established a reputation for expertise in customer experience. His audience can follow him from book to book, he always has new ideas for customer experience conferences, and he has a built-in audience of corporate executives who want to benefit from customer experience insights.

Tony Robbins has written nine books. They are all focused on how to succeed. He is a motivational author. He can write about how to succeed at work, in finance, or in personal health, and people will buy his books and take insights from them. If he wrote a book on the history of magazines or on politics, it would be very much off-brand. He succeeds within his space and doesn’t roam around outside of it.

John Kotter has written 17 books on management and change management. His credibility on those topics continues to build. That’s his brand, and it continues to work for him.

Why you should follow your audience, not your wanderlust

An audience is a valuable commodity. Once you start to build one, don’t squander it by writing books all over the map. Stay on brand.

Of course, we all know authors who keep writing the same book over and over. That’s boring to write and boring to read — and if you do that, your audience will dissipate.

But once you’ve established some success with a book, you can branch out in different directions and retain your audience. How does your idea apply in different corporate settings? How is technology changing your idea? What are the best ways to put your idea into practice? There’s always more to write about.

Authors who’ve written a massive seller (a million copies or more) can follow the Gladwell/Pink/Johnson blueprint. They don’t need my advice, they’re going to do fine whatever they do. They can define themselves as writers, rather than as experts in a specific space.

But the other 99.99% of us authors do a lot better by following our audiences and building on our expertise. The best part of that strategy is that it allows you to succeed at different levels — and to build on your success. It’s not as risky. And your audience will like it.

So don’t follow Malcolm Gladwell’s model. Follow Shep Hyken’s, Tony Robbins’ or John Kotter’s. It’s a lot surer path to a level of book-driven success at which you can make a good living.