Many authors have the idea that a valid book must have a new insight that no one has ever considered. That’s ridiculous. Very few books are profoundly original—and the few that are tend not to be that valuable (because true originality demands that the idea be far too esoteric to be useful for most people). A book is valuable if the knowledge

For example, if the fear is “I’m afraid that I’ll write this book and I will look bad, and it will hurt my professional reputation,” then you can use the energy of that fear to motivate you to put in the work to do a really good book—to ensure that you do not look bad. This is possible for each fear. Every fear has the seeds of its solution in it,

People read books in order to get expert knowledge that will help them solve a specific problem they have. No one reads books to get a firehose of unconnected information.

It’s an awful feeling to know I had these books in me and never got to them, only because I was afraid to write them.

Imposter Syndrome is when someone—even a very accomplished person with a lot of experience and credentials—believes they don’t actually know what everyone thinks they know. They believe their ideas are either wrong or invalid, or that everyone already knows what they know.

Digital media has exploded consumer options, and made demographics less predictive of human behavior. Now, psychographics work better. The differences between how people think are now more important in (most) marketing than who they appear to be.

The objectives necessitate a certain audience. The audience have their needs that must be met by the book. And the book idea must attract and provide value to the audience, so you’ll reach the objectives you want to achieve.

The Three-Step Editing Method We recommend a three-step editing process: Make-It-Right Edit: Make sure everything is in there, in the right order, and it all makes sense. Line-by-Line Edit: Go deep into the chapters, paragraphs, and sentences to make sure it says exactly what you want. Read-Aloud Edit: Read the manuscript out loud—preferably to a

Most authors try to combine everything they know into one book because they think they don’t have enough information for one book. They’re insecure about the book and try to compensate by cramming it with everything possible.