A few months back, I made an offer to help people on my list write a book — if they already had a catalogue of content such as daily emails, blog posts, or secret diary entries.
Some people who expressed interest had too little such content.
Not good. That means too much writing for me personally, and I’m not interested in becoming a full-time ghostwriter.
But some people had too much good content. A million words written or more, across thousands of emails.
Where do you possibly start with that? Or where do I?
I don’t have a great answer. But I will claim one thing:
It’s often easier to write a series of ten books than to write a single, one-off book.
Hear me out.
First off, it’s important to remember that the definition of what makes up a book in today’s world has changed.
A collection of words no longer has to be as much of a blunt weapon as Gone With The Wind in order to count as a book.
My own 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book, which has brought me hundreds of high-quality readers and tens of thousands of dollars in new sales, runs all of 12,266 words.
Ben Settle’s first Villains book, the book I believe has done the most for his positioning, has 118 tiny pages, and that’s with a giant font and US-national-debt-sized margins.
And yet, I never had nobody complain that my book is too short. I doubt Ben has either.
Today, in books as in sales letters, it’s not really length that makes the difference either way. Rather, it’s the concept, the headline or title, the “big idea”.
That’s why I say it’s easier to write, or at least honestly commit to write, 10 books rather than one.
Writing 10 rather than one forces you to be more specific, concrete.
It forces you pump out more decent ideas, rather than trying to come up with a single brilliant breakthrough.
And of course, it forces you to keep each of your ten books, including that crucial first one, short and manageable, rather than trying to squeeze in too much out of some subconscious guilt or worry.
Anyways, something to keep in mind if you want more influence via book publishing.
It definitely helps to have a big catalogue of previous writing, which you can then shape into a new book, or perhaps more easily, into five or ten.
In other news about influence:
Tomorrow, inshallah, I will make available my Influential Emails training. That training reveals some of the tricks I use to make my emails more interesting and influential than the average email writing bear.
It’s how I’ve produced content that could easily fill 10 tiny but effective Kindle books.
If you’re interested in Influential Emails, you will want to get on my email list first. Click here to do so.