Are you writing more than one book?

Three years ago, Sheryl Andrews and I originally wrote the Get Started workbook.

We developed the 21 questions that every business author needs to know the answer to before they start to write their book.

Last month, we were revising the workbook, and it reminded us why we get so much great feedback from it!

I’d like to take Q3 as an example…

How many books are you writing?

Your first response to this question may be ‘one’.

But we find with many authors that once they start to review everything they could share in their book, more than one book starts to emerge.

One of the biggest mistakes you could make is trying to shoehorn everything you know into one book IF there’s more than one message that you want to get across to your reader.

And when you know how many books you are writing, whenever you get a piece of information, you’ll know whether it fits in the first book, the second or the third.

Plus, you can see how they all fit together.

It’s certainly a question I wish I’d asked myself back in 2009, when I made the decision to write my first book. As it would have made the transition between my first book and my sixth so much easier!

So if you’re thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, you’ve got more than one book to write, how would you know?

1. The overview book first

Some people realise that they need to write the overview book first.

This is the one that introduces the overall concept that you want to share. Subsequent books would then go deeper into specific parts of this concept. Which is what I did with three of my books (books two, three and five).

How to Stand Out in your Business has a chapter on book writing.

Your Book is the Hook expanded on this chapter, and I wrote this book about writing a book, taking people through the whole process in detail. A second edition was published a couple of years later.

Then I took the sixth part of Your Book is the Hook, which is all about book marketing, to write a book solely about this topic. That’s when Book Marketing Made Simple was created, focusing on the three phases of book marketing – pre-launch, launch and post-launch.

2. Multiple ideas for the same audience

This is likely to happen when you know your audience well and you have multiple ideas that you know they’d love.

So you might decide to write many shorter books for them. And every book would cover a specific topic or theme for your niche reader.

If you know that this is what you’re doing at the start, you can cross-promote the books as you write and publish them. Thus maximising your book sales.

3. The same idea for multiple audiences

This is relevant if you have one core theme or concept that could translate to multiple audiences. Think Stephen Covey’s ‘Seven Habits’ series or Jack Canfield’s books under the brand, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’.

The key text and ideas may be the same, but the ideal reader is different.

This is a great focus to follow when you’re sure what you want to get known for (Q7!), but you don’t have a clear ideal client in mind, as you know your concept can help different types of people.

4. The ‘how to’ book and the autobiography

You may know that you need to write an information style book for your business, but you also have a story to tell.

And in this situation, you might write the how-to book first, where you hint at your story, and the other one comes later. Or vice versa.

Because if you try to amalgamate the two, it can get a bit messy if you’re not smart about it.

And if you have multiple stories to tell, like one client I’m working with, then you may have two different memoir books covering two distinct moments in your life history.

So, after you’ve read this, are you writing more than one book?

If you’ve not already downloaded the Get Started workbook, you can get free access here.

And if you’ve previously downloaded it and not completed the 21 questions, then I suggest you do this today!