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Say that you’re a relatively senior marketing executive. You’d like to advance your career, land lucrative speaking gigs, impress your peers, raise your profile, generate passive income, and cement your status as a leading thinker in the field. Writing a book can certainly help you achieve your ambitious goals, although there are no guarantees.
But how exactly would you go about it? In today’s post, I’ll provide the mainstream options available to you—the hypothetical marketing bigwig. Regardless of your profession, though, this post will apply to you if you’re thinking about writing a book.
The Nike Method
You adopt the company’s icon slogan: Just do it. That is, you sit down and just start pecking away.
Is This Approach Likely to Result in a Professional Book?
No. This method all but guarantees that you’ll end up with a morass of overlapping ideas, redundant text, chasms, sequencing issues, and other massive problems. It’s hard to see your efforts bearing fruit. Even experienced scribes benefit from extensive planning—or prewriting.
Mine Your Previous Content for Book Ideas
Avid bloggers, speakers, and podcasters can—and should, for that matter—routinely review their previous contributions and identify underlying themes in their work. Maybe you’ve written 200 posts on your marketing blog or your private journal. Embrace taxonomies. Your tags and categories can help you home in on specific areas of interest that can inform your forthcoming book.
Is This Approach Likely to Result in a Professional Book?
Will your book read like an AMA?
This technique bests the prior one, but that bar is low. Copying and pasting selected posts into a manuscript isn’t likely to translate terribly well. What’s more, blog-to-book efforts don’t seem nearly as popular as they used to be.
Rely Extensively or Exclusively on AI Overlords
Any number of tools these days can provide quickie outlines, tables of contents, synopses, and even prose. Below I’ve prompted Perplexity to get us rolling:
Is This Approach Likely to Result in a Professional Book?
The answer here may surprise you: Probably.1 Before proceeding, consider a few essential subquestions:
- Will the book be original?
- Will it be interesting?
- Will its content be accurate or rife will hallucinations? Many words describe genAI tools. Accountable isn’t one of them.
- Will your book differentiate itself from the other marketing texts?
Even if your AI creation clears these bars, consider the following: Since anyone can do what you just did, by definition you’ll be producing a generic book. Adding salt to the wound, you may well have violated fair use. In other words, you may well have unwittingly plagiarized others’ work.
Do All the Work Yourself
You read a few dozen books about marketing. You ultimately identify what you believe is a legitimate marketplace need. Your own professional stories and blog posts will add a personal flare to the book that will support your unique perspective.
Is This Approach Likely to Result in a Professional Book?
Maybe. You’re off to a good start, but there’s a limit to what the vast majority of first-time authors can do. I should know. I took this path in 2008 when I wrote Why New Systems Fail. It was a respectable effort, and I was proud of it. Still, in hindsight, I would have benefited a great deal by hiring someone with previous publishing expertise. The book’s second edition far exceeds its first.
Hire a Quickie Book Service
You’ve got ideas. You contract an interviewer to quickly transcribe your conversations and turn them into a physical product. This is the very definition of a paint-by-numbers approach to book publishing.
Is This Approach Likely to Result in a Professional Book?
No. It will read more like an AMA.
Hire a Human Co-Pilot
Consider two scenarios:
- Scenario A: You’ve done a bunch of writing and have developed your own framework or model, but you recognize the limitations in your thinking, research, and writing experience.
- Scenario B: You’ve done none of this and know that you won’t be able to figure things out on the fly.
In either case, you’re in a better place than our Nike-inspired friend in the first scenario.
Is This Approach Likely to Result in a Professional Book?
Yes, more likely. Working with a reputable and experienced writing partner greatly increases your odds of sticking the landing and putting your best foot forward. That’s not to say, however, that hiring a professional will ensure your book will become a true bestseller—and not the kind that charlatans trumpet. One more warning: If you ultimately lack something meaningful to say, there’s only so much your ghostwriter can do.
What You Need to Know
Of course, this list isn’t comprehensive. There are other ways to write a book. You can find a co-author, revise a previous edition, fuse several approaches above (as several AI-based startups are doing), or develop new ones. The choice is yours, though. As with anything, though, you get what you pay for.
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