The Why Behind Your Nonfiction Book
“I basically have two books I want to write,” a prospect said last week on a call.
I already knew what he was going to say next.
“There’s the book I should write—the business book with all the frameworks. But I can’t stop thinking about writing a book about my journey.”
For the first twenty minutes of the call, all he’d talked about was his journey. The personal struggles he’d faced, how he’d persevered and grown through the challenges, what he’d learned. He’d barely mentioned his business.
Until now, when it came time to describe the project he was considering hiring me for.
“I don’t know who would want to read about my personal story, though,” he continued. “I should probably stick with the business book.”
But I could tell in his voice that his why wanted something more than a lead magnet or a collection of essays on Business Leadership Lessons(TM).
He had a real story to tell, even if he was just getting used to voicing that impulse out loud.
He was harboring an unspoken “why”
When I’m speaking with a prospective book coaching or ghostwriting client, I’ve learned one of the most important signals for good fit is their why.
Why—really—do they want to write this book?
And why now?
Think about this for yourself. When you imagine finally writing your book, what is that little voice really saying?
Writing a book…
- Will give you a leg up in your industry—it’ll help you land speaking engagements and podcast appearances, and show you really know your stuff.
- Is a smart business investment—it’ll bring in new clients and open new revenue sources.
- Will strengthen your legacy, extend your impact, and scale the reach of your message. It will leave your indelible mark on the world.
- Can help you make meaning and sense of a story that might have been extremely painful to live.
It's absolutely okay to have multiple reasons to want to write a book.
You might want to leave a legacy and also drive people to your business. You might want to establish yourself as a speaker, and process what you’ve been through and find the lessons within.
We are complicated humans, with complex emotions and motivations.
The problem comes when we don't acknowledge the breadth of our whys when embarking on a project as massive and thorny as writing a book. When we make pivotal choices based on what we feel like we “should” be doing rather than the true reason we’re drawn to the project.
$$$? Service? Catharsis? Why not have it all?
I was reminded of this earlier this week when I recorded a coaching podcast with Stacey Brass-Russell. (I’ll add the link to it once it goes live.)
She asked why I wanted to expand my ghostwriting business to include book coaching, and I told her it's because even though I don’t have the capacity to write more than one book at a time, I wanted to be able to help more people tell their stories.
“It’s great that you want to help—and yet you also used the word capacity,” she said. “How much of your motivation is also to grow your income? Because it's okay to want that too.”
The way I was raised, “helping people” is an acceptable motivation. “Making $$$” is not. Which means that I sometimes (often) approach big business decisions solely from a lens of service even if secretly it’s about getting paid.
Predictably, this leads to cycles of burnout and resentment that feel baffling until I reflect, and realize I didn’t take my full whys into account.
(I’ve had to do a lot of self-work over the years to bring my money-based motivations closer to the surface.)
But for many entrepreneurs who want to write a book—like the prospect I mentioned above—business-based motivations feel more socially acceptable than emotional ones.
Saying you want to earn money off your book, or use it as a lever to get speaking gigs, or create a lead magnet to attract new clients—that feels safe.
And getting a business ROI off your book is a perfectly legit motivation!
But ignoring your more subtle emotional reasons will send you into a similar cycle of dissatisfaction as someone who ignores their revenue-based motivations.
You could write a very serviceable lead magnet, but as soon as you hit publish, you know in your gut that you left your most important and impactful stories out in order to make it more palatable to a wider audience.
You might have this sneaking suspicions that by ignoring your personal journey, you missed an important opportunity to help people and create something that lives beyond you.
No one why is the best
Now, I want to make a few things clear.
Thing one:
I’m not saying you have to have both financial and emotional motivations, or that the only good books are ones that share a personal story while also making business impact.
I'm saying that if you keep telling people the reason you want to write a book, but there's a quiet but nagging in the back of your mind, it's worth investigating that and making sure that you fully understand your whys before you get started.
Writing a book is an intense and often quite long process. Don't let yourself get to the end wishing you'd done something different.
Thing two:
I'm also not saying that one (1) book has to do all the heavy lifting. You can absolutely write more than one book if you have multiple whys!
In fact, that's what I recommended to the prospect above—and it's what I'm working on with a current client.
We've already written his manifesto book that touches on his deep beliefs, and now we are translating that into a targeted business book that will serve as a lead magnet for his ideal customer.
Thing three:
Finally, I'm not saying all this to scare you or trigger any fears of perfectionism and not getting this 100% right.
I’ve just had so many calls with people who didn't get to the heart of their why until the end of our conversation. Only then did they say it in an offhand way, almost apologetically. Like they knew this thing all along, but it was too embarrassing to say out loud.
Friends, those are the reasons that matter most.
What’s you why?
So. What are those secret whys behind your desire to write a book?
- You might want to prove that you're capable of writing a book, and give the middle finger to your doubters.
- Maybe you have a health concern or an illness that's putting pressure on you to get out everything you know and codify it before it's too late.
- Maybe life recently delivered you a mortality reminder, and you realized that the time is now or never.
- Maybe you want to make boat loads of cash, and a book is a key part of the business model you’ll use to do that.
All of these reasons can exist together. It's just important that you acknowledge all of it or you won't know how to hit your metrics of success.
When you finish that book, when you hold it in your hands, I want it to feel complete.
And that means acknowledging the glorious, multifaceted “whys” behind why you wrote it in the first place.
So say it. Get to the heart of it.
Don't be afraid of your messy, complicated why—embrace it!
And if you want a sounding board, book a Story Clarity Call with me. It's a 90-minute call where we get to the heart of your story and talk through the hows, whats, and—of course—whys of the book you're writing.
A Story Clarity Call is also a great way to test out a longer-term engagement with me, because the cost of is applied to the next tier of book strategy sessions if you decide you want to go deeper in this work.
Let’s talk.
—> Read this post on the Story Rebel blog.