The straight answer
Yes, if you run it small. Your members have spent 20 or 30 years getting extremely good at something, and nearly all of them think it’s ordinary. Skip the open invitation, because you’ll get the 3 loudest people. Take 6 members seriously, get each of them to a decision about what their book is, and publish something visible at the end for your board.
Open your membership directory and read it as a publisher’s catalogue.
That’s roughly what you’re holding. A few hundred people who have each spent twenty or thirty years getting extremely good at something specific. Most have never written a word of it down. Nearly all of them are convinced they’ve got nothing to say.
You already know your membership is the asset. Every association I’ve worked with knows it. The bit that’s harder to see is that the most valuable material in the whole organisation is sitting in the heads of people who genuinely believe it’s ordinary, and they are never going to volunteer it.
The sentence I hear on every single first call
Two hundred and something authors now, and it’s always some version of the same thing. “But everyone in my industry knows that.”
It is never true. What’s happened is that they’ve done the thing so many times it stopped feeling like knowledge and started feeling like weather. Mastery buries expertise. The better someone gets, the less able they are to see what they’re standing on.
Which is why “anyone interested in writing a book, come along Thursday” doesn’t work. You’ll get the three loudest people, and the three loudest are rarely the three with the best material. The member with thirty years of genuinely unrepeatable insight is at their desk assuming it’s obvious.
Let me be unromantic about what a book does
You get pitched enough inspiration. Here’s the flat version.
Almost nobody makes money on royalties. The Authors Guild surveyed nearly 5,700 published authors and found the median full-time author earns about $10,000 a year from their books. If a member starts a book expecting an income, talk them out of it. Kindly, but do it.
What a book actually does is change the category someone is in. It’s the difference between being a good practitioner and being the practitioner other practitioners cite. For your members that shows up as stages, including yours. The fee conversation ending early. Inbound work instead of pitched work. A second-generation family business finally having a way to say what the first generation knew.
The mechanism holds up under data, which is rare for this kind of claim. The 2024 Edelman and LinkedIn study asked 3,500 B2B decision-makers about the content they read. Sixty percent said they’d pay a premium to work with an organisation publishing genuinely good work. Eighty-six percent said they’d invite them into an RFP.
Then the number that should actually interest you. Only fifteen percent rated what they read as very good or excellent.
The bar is on the floor. Practically nobody clears it. Your members are unusually well placed to, because unlike most of the people producing this stuff, they’ve done the actual work.
What it does for you, which is the part your board will ask about
Most associations compete on benefits that are essentially rebates. Cheaper insurance, discounted training, a members’ rate. All of it replicable by anyone with a bigger buying group. A programme that turns senior members into published authors can’t be copied, because it’s built on your membership rather than your purchasing power.
It also solves a retention problem you probably can’t solve any other way. Your churn isn’t at the bottom. It’s the twenty-five-year member who stopped showing up because they outgrew the programme years ago. There is no CPD session on earth that fixes that. Being taken seriously as an author might.
Then the compounding bit. Every member book with your association in the acknowledgements is a permanent, distributed credential. A dozen of them across three years does more for how your sector sees you than any rebrand you’ll ever commission, and it costs a fraction of what you paid the last agency to change your logo by four degrees.
Your conference gets cheaper too, since you stop paying outside speakers for things your own membership could say better.
Why these programmes usually die
I’ve watched a few of these go badly, so here’s where they come apart.
They teach writing. Somebody books a workshop on craft. Structure, voice, the shape of a chapter. Everyone has a lovely time. Nobody writes a book. Craft was never the bloody obstacle. Your members aren’t blocked because they can’t build a paragraph, they’re blocked because they don’t know which of the eleven possible books is theirs and nobody has ever sat down and helped them decide.
They stop at the enthusiasm. A room full of energised members and no structure afterwards produces precisely nothing. Six months on everyone’s slightly embarrassed and the programme quietly stops being mentioned.
They treat every book as the same object. A technical reference, a memoir about building a firm, and a manifesto for where the sector should go are three completely different projects with different timelines and different definitions of finished. Lump them together and most of them stall.
What I’d actually do
Smaller than you’d expect and more selective than feels polite.
Start with a session that gets people to a decision rather than a skill. Most of your members don’t need teaching to write. They need somebody competent to sit with them and say “that one, not that one, and here’s why.” That’s a different session and it’s the one that works.
Then take six people seriously instead of sixty casually. Six members with real material and real deadlines will finish more books than sixty with encouragement. Publish something visible at the end, even a single essay collection from the cohort, so the whole thing has a result you can put in front of your board.
Run it again the following year with the first cohort in the room. That’s the point it stops being a programme and becomes a thing your association is known for.
If you want somewhere to start this week, pick ten members. Not the ten who’d volunteer. The ten whose brains you’d most want preserved if they retired tomorrow. Ask each of them one question.
“What do people in this industry keep getting wrong that you gave up correcting years ago?”
Then get out of the way. Irritation is expertise with nowhere to go, and you will get more usable book material out of that one question than out of every member survey you’ve ever run. Sorry about the surveys.
You’ve got a library in your membership directory. Nobody’s written it down yet.
Your Next Fave Read
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- How to Turn Your Business Into a Book Without It Reading Like a Case Study
- The Difference Between a Book Coach and a Ghostwriter
Ready to get your wisdom into the world, however you write it? Book a free validation call. I’ll figure out the right approach for your specific book and your actual goals, whether that’s coaching, ghostwriting, or the two of us writing it together. writewordmagic.com
