When someone brings me a book that's stalled, they almost always think the trouble is somewhere in the middle: a chapter that won't come together, or a section they've rewritten so many times they can't see it anymore. I've almost never found it there. The book got stuck before chapter one, on a question the author skipped right past. Who, exactly, is this for?
When that answer is fuzzy, every page turns into a negotiation. Should this story go in? Is this too technical? Too personal? You end up arguing with yourself line by line, and after a few months of that, the draft simply goes quiet. When the answer is clear, most of those questions answer themselves.
Writing to one person
Your book will reach plenty of people, but it should sound as if it were written to one. Picture a real person, ideally someone you've worked with, advised, or raised. Write down who they are, what problem they're living with right now, and what they've already tried that didn't work. Then answer the question that matters most of all: when they finish your book, what will they be able to do, believe, or decide that they couldn't before?
The second decision is what the book should do for you. A book can do several jobs, but one of them has to lead, because that choice shapes the length, the tone, and the very last page.
If you mainly want clients, show your method in enough detail to prove you know it, then point readers to the next step with you. Shorter is often better.
If you want to get booked to speak, build each chapter around a story you could tell from a stage. Event planners read the table of contents first.
If you want to be the person your industry quotes, lead with a point of view people will argue about. A book that agrees with everyone is easy to forget.
If it's for your family, give the stories room. They'll care about the scenes far more than the lessons.
If more than one of those feels true, choose the one you'd keep if you could only keep one.
Your one sentence
Fill this in, then rewrite it until it sounds like something you'd actually say to a friend:
This book is for ______ who ______. Through the story of ______, it shows them how to ______. When they finish, they'll ______.
Keep it right next to you while you write. When a story doesn't serve it, that story belongs in a different book. When you feel stuck, read it aloud, and if it needs rewriting, rewriting it counts as progress.
This sentence is the first step of The Manuscript Map, my seven-step method for writing the book yourself, in case you want a guide for the six that come after it.
What stuck sounds like
Nobody has ever said to me, "I don't know who my book is for." What they say sounds more like this:
"I've got three chapters from two years ago and no idea how to restart."
"I've got too much material. Is this a memoir or a business book?"
"Every time I sit down, I rewrite the first chapter."
"My calendar fills with things that have deadlines, and the book never does."
Every one of those traces back to the missing sentence. Without it, there's no way to tell which stories belong or when a chapter is finished, so the book loses every contest for your time. With it, a free hour comes with an obvious next task.
I'll show you what that looked like for one client. Her book had been "in process" for almost a decade, and she'd been stuck on Chapter 3 for more than a year. She had the story, what happened to her health and how she got herself well again. What she didn't have was a way for readers to do what she'd done. She could tell them about it, but she couldn't yet show them how. Once we saw that together, her sentence came together too: the book was for moms who didn't feel like themselves anymore, and when they finished, they'd have a protocol they could follow to heal the way she had. We built the second half of the book around those protocols, each one laid out the same way so a tired mom could pick it up and use it. We finished nine months later.
"When I met Nikki, I had been stuck on Chapter 3 for over a year and the book had been 'in process' for almost a decade. With her guidance and expertise, we finished the book in nine months. I count it among my greatest accomplishments."
Business leader, hybrid memoir and success principles for life and business
Would you send me your sentence, even a rough one? Reply with it, and I'll tell you whether it's specific enough yet.
From my desk to yours,
Nikki
P.S. The Manuscript Map is my client method, laid out so you can work through it on your own. It comes as a Google Doc workbook with a manuscript tracker and a starter file, for $397, and you can see everything in it here. Paid subscribers also get the step-by-step worksheet behind today's essay later this week. And next Tuesday, I'm sharing five of the questions I ask clients before we ever start recording.