Ramit Sethi discusses why most people feel they have a book in them and urges prospective authors to clarify their goals before writing. He treats book-writing like a business—emphasizing the importance of a strong platform, a clear proposal (like a business plan) for agents/publishers, and recommends building experience via blogs or freelancing before attempting a book. He also warns against romanticizing authorship and pursuing books for weak reasons (money, credibility).
Chapters
My big picture thought on, like, writing. Is that. Or writing books. Is that like. I think a survey around that 80% of Americans feel like they have a book in them and said, everybody wants to write a book, right? I never. I've never. And so my usual first advice is like, why you want to write a book, right? It's like, what are your goals? And the goals. There's tons of possible goals. What's your role play? I'll be the 80%. I'm gonna be an author who's asking me a special. Okay, all right, Then you're. You're a published author. I. He'll cr. So lucky to meet you. And where are my references? But second, I feel like I have a book inside of me. I really do. I've been thinking about this thing for 10 years, and I really want to write a book. So what do you suggest I do? How do I get this book in Barnes and Noble? So first for me, what are your goals with your book? I mean, why do you want to write? Why do you want to write a book? What do you mean? I have it in my head. I have to get this out. For a second. Just to speak. I think one really good goal, one really good goal to write a book is because you have an idea that you want to spread, and a book reaches an audience that blogs do not, articles do not, tweets do not. So if you have a really compelling idea that you want to get out in the world, that book reaches a different type of audience. I think that's a good reason to write a book, bad reasons to write a book, make money, be a bestseller. What makes no way to write a book is credibility. So if you're a consultant, basically 99% of business books are written by people who are consultants who want to do speaking and consulting and books, and credit the credibility. Let's continue with the roleplay. So you just told me this, and I'm saying, well, okay, okay, I understand. I need to have some goals. I'll write about that later. But I really want to get an agent. What should I do? Think of the process of getting an agent as like writing a business plan and trying to pitch to investors or customers. You have to have a plan set up that would present your book idea in a way that is compelling, will stick out, and it's like wasting money or selling products in the sense that you have long odds, right? Agents get overwhelmed with queries. Your chances of getting an agent are quite, quite low. But I really want to write this book. I Think the best way to approach agents. Most people approach their first agent by contacting their author friends and asking the authors to introduce them to their own agent. And I've introduced like three people, for example, to Lisa, someone we worked with, and all three of them have gotten booked dealers on the. So you're looking at 8,000 emails for people who don't really know the agent process works. So you get an agent and you have to sell the agent on your book, and then the agent will in turn sell your book proposal, which is like a business plan, to publishers. What I was getting at with that roleplay was just because you really want it, does it mean it's a good idea? Thank you for not picking up on. But just because you really want to do it doesn't mean it's good. Just the same in business, I really want to start, you know, Aztec antmorial, creations of, I don't know, dung. That makes no sense. That's not a business. Think of your book as a business. When you write your book proposal and you can just search for sample book proposals online, the content is important. But that's not all. Your platform is super important. If you have a huge platform and a mediocre idea, you're going to be able to sell that book a lot easier than a brilliant idea and zero platform. Okay. Ideas are cheap. The other thing is, do you have experience? Have you written before? What have you written for? Do you have contacts with journalists? Have you written articles? Like you. I mean, if you haven't freelanced anywhere or write a blog or don't know anybody, you don't start with the book. Yeah, the book's kind of the peak of the. Absolutely. Why would you. A book is really a dimensional process to write. It's years and it's pretty hard. And one way to cut your teeth. I'll give an example from. I will teach you. Rich. If I had written a book the first year I started the blog, it honestly would not have been as good because I hadn't gotten my ideas as sophisticated as they later became. And the blog let me do that. It was a testing ground to let me figure out what people responded to, what were holes in my idea, et cetera. And it also gave me great comments and stories. So there are other ways of working out towards a book. The problem is that often writing a book is like losing weight. We want to lose weight. We don't want to go to the gym to do it. So if you tell people, well, why don't you just start a blog it's free. That quickly takes away all the excuses. And that's what a lot of people will say, oh, I'm not so interested in that. So try to do something where your barriers are low because if you're targeting here for writing a book, your barriers are quite high. And it's often a good example of just using excuses. I think one last thing we move on is I think Penelope Trunk wrote a good post on why people shouldn't write a book. And I've read your post on why people should go into speaking. The book writing process and doing speaking. These are highly romanticized pursuits that are often much grimier than they appear. And that's why I think both Ramit and I are not we don't kind of always evangelize people or don't always try to tell people to write a book, right? Well, usually it's not the best thing for you to do. Yeah.
