Write books rarely, not on an 18-month schedule. Test your concept first through blog posts to see if people care, and check what's already been written so you don't spend 600 pages saying what others already said. Your book should map directly to what you actually sell.
Here's the exact formula for how often you should write a book. As least as possible. Ooh. How many of you have written, have seen this sort of, I call it sort of bookeria? They've written book 1 and 2 and they've already got the next 9 laid out. What are you doing? So from each book you should have in your mind content roadmap that comes out in terms of It could be sort of the same content that's in the book, but these are services and offerings to different markets and how you want to penetrate those markets, how you want to get it out there, and what the right cadence is. There used to be sort of the 18-month rule for books, every 18 months. It doesn't really exist anymore. The other piece is don't keep everything a secret. If you're thinking about writing a book on X, throw some blog posts and stuff out there to test the market, see if anybody cares about that, see if it resonates, and then Listen to the market. Don't create in isolation. I had a client that wrote a 600-page book on change, why he was the COO of a company going public. And I said to him, Tom, who's influenced your thinking on change? And he said, I didn't want to read anything else. I wanted to just go at it from scratch. Wow. And then he was a little depressed when I told him, well, 90% of your ideas are not particularly unique. I mean, this comes from this, and this comes from that. Know what's out there.
