5 components of crafting & writing (part-time) an inspiring business book
Some bad news & good news about your book :)
One of my favorite international covers… this is the Mandarin version of “From Impossible To Inevitable”
Soooo… my uncle Andy owned a bookstore in Berkley (anyone remember Cody’s?) for decades, before Amazon took over the book world. He recreated himself as a book agent. Turns out that’s a way better career anyway for him - he also loves books, just not running a physical store of them!
Now, about your book!
The Bad News:
Andy told me: “everyone has a book in them, and most should stay there.” (paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens) Ha! He was sick of getting sent too many badly written memoirs…
The Good News:
100% of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial people what want to write a business book have one in them, and it’s simpler than ya realize to craft and produce a great book that helps drive your business and unique opportunities. (Hey, the only time I’ve flown in a helicopter so far was because of my books.)
Everyone – yes, me too - deals with all the usual blocks and doubts like it’ll take so much time, overwhelm of too many great ideas and opportunities, ‘where do I start’, is this compelling enough, what’s next, how will I market it, etc.
So: busy people, especially those with kids or running companies – or both! – must simplify it all and get creative. They can’t afford to brute force the creation of a satisfying book that gets results. And “more hours” does not mean “better book”.
I’ve had to get creative to write books “very part-time”, while buried under kids and growing businesses.
Cue the engineer in me: let’s start breaking this stuff down into understandable chunks.
Components to Getting A Book From Idea to Shitty First Draft to Published
To craft and produce (part-time) an inspiring business book that will get you speaking invitations and grow your business, there are five key pillars.
While I’m listing them in logical order, you can knock these off in any order that works for you. And making progress in any one of them will help you in any other:
Structure
Premise (who’s the book for, what’s the title and promise?)
Roadmap (Outline / Table of Contents)
Writing System (how, when & where do you write + with what tools)
Team
Approaching these thoughtfully makes it easier to craft and write a book with fantastic time-efficiency.
Let’s start with Structure, since it’s usually the simplest bit.
Structure
This is the style or type of content your book’s written in. Most of you will want to do a Framework book (see below), but what’s most important isn’t doing what you ‘should’ do, but what calls to you. Sometimes picking the right Structure for you flips the book from chore to “oh I got this!”
Framework (Predictable Revenue / From Impossible To Inevitable) … ‘problem, desired solution, steps, stories’. I like writing books like a series of standalone Lego blocks that I can rearrange, without having to tear the whole thing apart to move stuff around.
Collection (Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans)… a bunch of useful examples or ideas, letting the reader pick and choose what inspires them.
Fable (Patrick Lencioni’s stuff) … a fictionalized Framework.
Biography (“Elon” by Walter Isaacson)
Creative: I don’t have an example offhand, but this is usually done by a marketing or agency person with funky glasses. They have a variety of quotes, different fonts and styles, variety, designs and pictures. Ya feel me?
But like with any project, you first need to listen to what you’re drawn to, what inspires you: what is the book YOU would want to read? Structure, style, length and all. That’s been my north star for all my books.
Next time: gonna skip down the list to talk about Writing Systems. It’s been really interesting and frustrating that I’ve had to recreate different Writing Systems for each new book I do.
Aaron