The straight answer
Only if it can survive 300 pages. Explain it out loud as fast as you can. If you’re done in 4 minutes, you have a very good article. If every answer opens 2 more questions and you’re still going 40 minutes later, you have a book. The good reasons to write it: you’re sick of saying it, your field keeps getting it wrong, and a specific person needs it.
I talk people out of writing books fairly regularly, which is a strange thing for a ghostwriter to admit in public and a worse thing to admit to my accountant.
Not because the idea was bad. Usually the idea is excellent. It just wasn’t a book, and eighteen months of somebody’s life was about to go into making it one.
Most good ideas are not books. Knowing which yours is will save you a year, and if it turns out yours genuinely is one, you’ll write it with a confidence you didn’t have this morning.
A book has to survive three hundred pages
That’s the test. Almost nothing else is.
An idea becomes a book when it has enough underneath it to hold somebody’s attention for eight hours and still be revealing something new in the final third. Depth, not importance. Plenty of vital ideas are completely exhausted in nine hundred words, and that is not a failure of the idea.
Here’s the diagnostic I actually use. Explain the whole thing to me out loud, as fast as you can, holding nothing back.
If it takes you four minutes and you’ve said everything, congratulations, you have a very good article.
If you keep going, and every answer opens two more questions, and forty minutes later I’ve stopped asking things because I’m just listening, you have a book.
The tell is the branching. Books branch. Articles arrive.
What your idea probably is instead
An article. One argument, one proof, done. If your idea is a claim plus evidence plus a conclusion, write two thousand words and put it where your industry reads things. It’ll be read by more people this month than most books manage in a year, and you’ll know within a fortnight whether the idea has legs.
A talk. If the power of the thing is in the delivery, if you’ve been telling this story at dinner for years and watching people go quiet, that’s a stage. Some ideas need a room and a voice and forty minutes. Flattened onto a page they lose the bit that made them work.
A course. If what you have is a method and the value is in somebody doing it rather than understanding it, you have a course. Books are famously terrible at making people act. Reading about a framework and running one are entirely different experiences, and if the transformation requires the second, the book will disappoint everyone including you.
A memo. The best thing I read last year was eleven pages, written for about forty people, and it changed how all forty of them worked. It should never have been a book. Its power came from being exactly right for exactly them.
Nothing yet. The hardest one. Sometimes the honest answer is that you’re two years early. The idea is real and you haven’t lived enough of it. Write it down, go and do the work, come back when you’ve got the scars that make it undeniable.
The bad reasons, which I hear constantly
A book is what serious people have. It’ll say so on the cover and mean nothing inside it, and readers can smell that from page one. They will not be polite about it in the reviews.
A competitor wrote one. Theirs is probably not selling either. Books rarely win by responding to other books.
Somebody told you to. Nine times out of ten that person has never written one and is being generous with your eighteen months.
It’ll generate leads. It might. Slowly, indirectly, in about two years, and there are eleven faster instruments if leads are the actual goal. A book is the least efficient lead magnet ever devised and anyone selling it to you as one is talking absolute bollocks.
None of those will get you through month seven, and month seven is when every book tries to kill you.
Good reasons
You have said the same thing forty times, you’re sick of saying it, and you’d like it to exist without you in the room.
You know something your field keeps getting wrong and nobody with the standing to correct it has bothered.
There is a specific person you can picture who needs this, and nothing currently on the shelf serves them.
You cannot stop thinking about it. Least strategic reason on the list, by some distance the most reliable.
Why I keep saying this out loud
The industry has a strong commercial interest in every idea being a book. Publishers, coaches, ghostwriters, retreat hosts, the whole lot of us. Nobody in this business makes money telling you to write an article instead, which should tell you something about how often you’ll hear it.
What I’ve learned is that talking somebody out of the wrong book is how you end up writing the right one with them two years later. It’s also how they tell four people about you in the meantime, so it isn’t even noble, it’s just patient.
Test yours. Explain it out loud, fast, to somebody who’ll be honest with you. Time it.
Four minutes, write the article. Forty minutes and still branching, clear your calendar. You’ve got one.
Your Next Fave Read
- Is My Story Worth a Book? How to Know Before You Write One
- The Book Proposal Guide: What Publishers Actually Read
- How to Write a Book as a Keynote Speaker Without Losing Your Voice or Your Mind
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
