Making a Book Stand Out from the Crowd

Every book is an enterprise in the fullest sense of the word. It starts off with the same cadre of dreams, passions, expectations and intellectual justifications that every business does. It has an expected target audience that helps shape its content, a delivery vehicle that defines the product and it goes through, prior to publication, the same business plan vetting process that a start-up is subjected to (though we call it editorial selection).

All of these elements create a blueprint which ought to make the job of writing (the execution stage), easier. It doesn’t. Just like any business, in the process of getting the idea from the dream stage to the market reality a whole lot of decisions need to be made and a truckload of compromises will have to be accepted.

Is the ‘packaging’ going to be blue or red? Is the content going to be sophisticated and high-brow or conversational and matter-of-fact? Do we need each chapter to be a fixed length or can we vary each as necessary (chapter homogeneity is employed to establish reader familiarity with navigation). Do we need to have questions? Do the answers have to be prescriptive? The list goes on and on and on and the choices made, at each point, betray the writer’s prejudices and passions, his (or her) understanding of the audience needs and the willingness to take on the editorial machine that wants a product that comfortably fits in within all its other corporate products because, damn it, the publisher also projects branding through each book in a series.

Of course the way out of all this is ‘easy’: make the guiding principle the reader. Think of the reader’s needs first and let that be the ultimate litmus test. The fact that (just like businesses) some books fail and other books succeed more than the rest suggests the dynamic is different each time, when it comes to implementation.

At the so-called ‘ground level’ where you make things happen perspective is easily sacrificed to expediency. In order to get something done, the closeness of action (the act of writing, the setting up of a business) involve its own set of pressures. How you solve that has to come down to each writer, each time, each business person, in each business, every time it is set up. But there are some key takeaways that are universal and can help.

Decide your core guiding principles from the very start. What is it you want your business to really do? What is this book intended to address? You need to exercise honesty to achieve that. Within the confines of your head, when you are drawing up plans, everything sounds perfect. Nothing can be perfect all the time. Externalize the core principles (in writing SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Steps that Will Help Your Business Grow, for instance I had to print out a card that said: “Practical application is key. The theory isn’t.”. As much as I want to explain how I arrived at a particular set of practical principles and how exciting the concepts behind it are, I didn’t. Or rather, to be truthful, there were chapters when I did and then I had to go back, cut all that out and rewrite them.

It takes a lot of discipline to go back and undo work you have wrought with loving care and attention. It requires you to have a split personality inside your head, with a voice that acts as an overseer and tells you: “This is great but … this is not what we have set out to do.”

You have to overcome fatigue. Writing a book (or setting up a business) takes a lot of energy and effort. When you are in the thick of it, about halfway through, you begin to lose focus. Suddenly you becomes conscious of the fact that you have as far still to go as you have travelled. You begin looking for shortcuts. You start wondering whether anyone would really notice (or if it matters after all) if this part here or that small part there is not pitch-perfect when, after all, it kinda does the job anyway.

We all know the answer to that of course. The things we invest ourselves the most in are the ones that do best. Value is always the result of hard work. Highly structured processes require an attendant decrease in entropy in any system.

How you get through that patch is where the magic lies. I give pep-talks to myself (yeah, nothing very dysfunctional in that, really). Businesses try to have an independent observer, an adviser or some kind. Ultimately however it comes down to those basic principles which means that the really hard work in terms of thinking is done before anything even begins.

And just like a business will, thrive or fail based upon its success of finding customers so will a book, ultimately, work or not by finding (and keeping) readers.