How to Refine Manuscript Ideas

And better define your audience.

Being a published author was something I dreamed of as a child. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, from journals to school essays to stories to blogs.

My first book came out in 2017, my second book in 2018, my third in 2019, and I have an upcoming fourth in 2020.

In addition, I have ghostwritten a couple of books for clients and have coached and worked with many first-time authors on how to write their books.

To sum it up: I’m really, really familiar and comfortable with the nonfiction book-writing process from start to finish.

I literally wrote a book on it.

One of the most-asked questions I get about being an author is about how to know what specifically to write about.

Most of the time when people present their book idea to me, it is far too broad.

For example:

I’m an expert marketer, so I want to write a book all about marketing.

OK. Sure. What ABOUT marketing?

All about it. How to market things, what marketing is, how to market any product or service, high-level marketing models, the theories behind it, everything.

Great. So, what do you want to TEACH your readers?

Just all about marketing.

Do you see how cyclical this thinking is?

When it comes to nonfiction books, you must not only identify your specific audience but also decide what you want to teach them — the more specificity the better.

A book “all about marketing” sounds fine at first. But look deeper into it. A beginner to the space who needs to learn what marketing is and scripts and templates for how to do it is not the same person as an expert who is looking for high-level marketing models and marketing theories.

It’s also just an incredibly BROAD topic.

Yes, you could write an entire book about marketing and include as much as humanly possible — but it might be a 500-page tome that intimidates beginners or has too much extraneous information for the experts.

Drilling down to your book topic is more than just saying, “I want to write a how-to book” or “I want to write a book about productivity/spirituality/marketing/entrepreneurship.” It’s also a lot more than “I want to write the next 4-Hour Work Week or The Power of Now.”

Your job as the author is to find the topic which works best for you to teach others.

How you do that is to ask yourself:

What do I want to teach people, specifically?

You aren’t trying to teach people the entire field of marketing, but you may be interested in teaching readers how to effectively use social media in their business branding.

You’re not trying to teach someone spirituality as a whole, but you might be trying to teach people how the rules of attraction work when building a business.

You aren’t trying to teach someone all of the cryptocurrency industry, but you might want to teach people how to identify the best cryptocurrency for them to invest in and how to effectively invest in it.

I have more examples of this.

It’s not a book about cannabis, it might be a book about how the legalization of cannabis in the U.S. will affect taxes and crime statistics.

It’s not a book about IT as a whole, but it could be a book about how the Internet has made working remotely a possibility, which has since changed the face of business globally and how technical teams work together.

It’s not a book about sleep in general, it’s about how the quality of sleep affects your brain and productivity.

In my first book, Write. Get Paid. Repeat., I was not trying to teach every reader how to be a writer. Instead, I focused on how to start a freelancing business, with the emphasis on treating it and thinking of it as a business. Thinking of freelancing as a business and yourself as an entrepreneur changes your outlook and mindset on how you approach things like sales, marketing, customer service, client acquisition, having contracts, and more. It also gave me the opportunity to focus mainly on new/beginner freelancers and provide scripts and information specific to them.

In my most recent book, Concept to Conclusion: How to Write a Book, I knew exactly what I wanted it to be, but I needed to understand who exactly I was speaking to.

So, I took the time to really define my audience. It was NOT “people who want to write a book.” No, it was far more specific than that.

The audience I envisioned for CtoC is “first-time nonfiction authors who are experts in their fields and ready to be a published author to move their brand and business forward. They want to use a book for credibility and lead generation and are serious about doing it right and not just as fast as possible.”

Who, What, When, Why, & How

So, when you think about writing a book, focus on WHO you’re writing to first, which will then help you drill down and refine WHAT you’re writing about.

The WHEN is as soon as you’re ready. There’s never the “right” time, you have to make time for the things you want to accomplish.

Your WHY is yours to define.

And the HOW is the writing itself.

Check out my book Concept to Conclusion: How to Write a Book and learn everything you need to know to conceive of, outline, write, publish, and market a book!

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