You've probably been told that writing a nonfiction book will help you grow your business: Write a book, build your authority. Write a book, it's the best business card you'll ever have. Write a book, write a book, write a book.

And there are a thousand articles telling you how to write nonfiction. Start with an outline. Pick a chapter structure. Figure out your three big ideas. Or just start drafting and see what happens.

And maybe you've done that. And maybe that's exactly why you're feeling stuck right now.

Because almost none of that advice asks the one question that actually matters. The question I ask every single one of my ghostwriting or book coaching clients before we write a single word.

What do you want this book to do?

When you're writing nonfiction, your book has a job to do. And when I say that, I want to be really clear about what I mean.

I'm not saying you have to write some buttoned-up corporate handbook. I'm not saying it has to be formulaic, or that you have to be obsessed with making money off it.

What I am saying is that there's a reason you want to write this book. There's something you want it to do—for you, or for the people who read it, or for the world, or for a future version of you.

If you're not sure what that reason is—or if you're not being honest with yourself about what that reason is—you could spend months writing the wrong book.

Every decision you'll make about your structure, your voice, your audience, your publishing path—even the examples you pull in—gets shaped by the answer to one question.

What do you want your book to do for you, and what do you want it to do for your reader?

I figured the best way to show you this was to get specific with some real-life examples. So I want to walk you through three of my clients and their books' promises—because their books could not be more different from each other, and the why behind each one was critical to how we worked on it.

Example 1: The Productivity Coach

Let's start at the real business end of the spectrum.

I worked with a ghostwriting client who was writing a series of books on productivity. He'd written a lot about personal productivity, but the one he hired me for was very corporate. And that was on purpose—he wanted to use that book as an entry point into consulting work with larger companies.

That shaped the language we used. It shaped the examples we used. It even shaped his publishing path. He told me he'd actually prefer to self-publish, given his audience and his experience. But he also knew that traditional publishing would carry a certain cachet with the kinds of corporate clients he wanted to attract. So traditional it was.

So that was goal one: an entry point into consulting work.

But he also had a secret second goal.

The book was meant to be read by both management types and individual contributors—and to empower people at every level. He wasn't saying this to the upper management who'd be bringing him in, but one of his goals was for them to promote the book to people at all levels—so that someone on the lowest rung could read it and learn how to advocate for themselves and make their own workplace better.

The book had a business-impact job to do. And a social-impact job, too.

Example 2: The Doggy Daycare Owner

Now let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum.

I have a book coaching client who runs a doggy daycare. She's spent her entire career learning how to "speak dog," and she wanted to write a book that contained everything she knew.

When I asked her why, on our first call, I went down the usual list. Are you trying to attract new clients? Are you thinking about pivoting into speaking, or consulting, or training other business owners?

Because that's a really common move—especially for people who've been in business a long time and are ready to stop running day-to-day operations.

I could tell those ideas had genuinely never occurred to her. She seemed interested, but they clearly weren't the reason she was writing this book. And she said—well, people keep telling me I should write a book.

Which is a should, not a why. Right?

So then I asked: Why now? What's making this urgent?

And she told me she had a chronic illness that she knew might eventually affect her mind, and she didn't know how long she'd have full access to everything she knew. She wanted to get it out of her head and onto the page before she couldn't anymore.

And I said—yeah. Hell yeah. A book is a perfect way to do that. Let's get your legacy on paper.

Now, the way we're structuring her book will still set her up for coaching or speaking someday, if she ever wants that. But that's not the original promise.

The promise is to catalogue and pass on what she knows, so she can teach others to understand their dogs.

There's one more piece worth flagging here: the audience.

When she first came to me, she thought she was writing for other doggy daycare owners. She wanted to show them a more ethical, more humane way to run a daycare.

But the more we talked, the more she realized she didn't really care about that audience. Who she actually wanted to reach was dog owners. People who love their dogs and want to understand them better.

Two takeaways. One: sometimes "why now" is the question that unlocks your "why." And two: it can take some time to figure out the real promise you have for your audience.

Example 3: The Real Estate Appraiser

Third example. I had a book coaching client who worked as a real estate appraiser. He came to me with an idea, but it was pretty vague.

At first, I thought we were going for a fairly standard lead magnet—something about increasing the value of your home, something that would bring him more work and grow his business through a little thought leadership.

But his why was a lot more emotional than that.

He'd spent years checking boxes on appraisal forms. And what he'd noticed was that the things that made a home really feel valuable—the things that made you love living there—were almost never on the form.

People tell you that if you paint your house some crazy color, you'll never sell it. But what's the cost of living in a home that never really feels like yours, because of something you think you "should" do for the market?

What he eventually landed on was this: he wanted to write a book about increasing the value of your home—not the way the market measures value, but the way you actually live in it. The joy of it. The creativity of it.

He didn't care about bringing customers into his business. He wanted to give other people permission to embrace their own creativity at home, and stop living in fear of other people's judgment. Which was, not coincidentally, part of his own journey.

One of the reasons it took him so long to even say this out loud is that nobody in his world writes books. When he mentioned the idea to people in his industry, they'd kind of scoff. What are you doing writing a book? You're a real estate appraiser.

When he told me that, I laughed.

Because in every other corner of the entrepreneurial internet, everyone is being told they have to write a book. Every coach. Every consultant. Every fitness trainer. It's the no-brainer move, the obvious authority play, the thing you're supposed to do. And here was this guy being told he was crazy for thinking of it.

The takeaway here is that your book's promise can be about granting permission. For your reader—and sometimes for you.

Want the Rest?

This is just the opening of the full training. In the complete webinar, I walk through all six questions that help you nail your book's job—so you don't spend months writing the wrong book.

​Watch the full webinar at Indie Author Training →​

And if you want to work through the questions on your own, you can download them at story-rebel.com/book-job-qs.