Have you ever felt like the book you want to write has already been written? Like everything has already been written? When I was writing my book, Start Writing Your Book Today: A Step-by-step Plan to Writing Your Nonfiction Book, from First Draft to Finished Manuscript, there were several times when I came across titles or heard someone talking about a book they were writing and thought, “Oh no! That’s my book. We’re writing the same book!”
But, it always turned out that the books were drastically different than mine, but let me show you just how close two books can appear to be, at first glance, and then show you how and why they can actually be so drastically different.
Let’s look at the title, audience, and purpose of each of the books that I initially thought were identical to mine.
Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
Audience: Internet Marketers who have to create a lot of content for blogs, social media, even emails.
Purpose: To show people who do not consider themselves to be good writers that they can acquire the skills needed to write good content and be successful online marketers.
How to Write a Book! A guide for nonfiction and craft book authors on how to write and publish your eBook for Kindle
Audience: Writers who want to pop out a book quickly and get it on to Amazon.com, completely bootstrapped and on the cheap.
Purpose: To show people that even if they’re technologically challenged, it’s actually quite easy to publish a book for Kindle. Simple, short, step-by-step guide to everything from outlining to uploading cover art.
You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One)
Audience: General fiction writers who are afraid to step into the title of “writer” and who tend to procrastinate.
Purpose: To encourage people to believe that they can write a book, that becoming a writer is an identity challenge, and that the right mindset and good habits can take you to the next level. More inspirational than nuts ’n bolts. (Btw, I LOVE this book!)
How can my book be so different? Take a look:
Start Writing Your Book Today: A Step-by-step Plan to Writing Your Nonfiction Book, from First Draft to Finished Manuscript
Audience: Nonfiction writers who have struggled to start a book or have had several false-starts on a book. They’ve read other writing craft books, and they’ve attempted to write a book several times, but they feel like they need a step-by-step overview of writing a book (and a kick of inspiration) to really commit to the process.
Purpose: To show writers that writing a book is not a mysterious process and to walk them through the general steps of how to write a book. Half inspirational, half nuts ’n bolts.
Maybe you feel like your book idea’s been done before. It hasn’t!
Who you’re writing to matters.
The way that you speak to your audience is extremely important and affects everything from the tone you adopt, the vocabulary you use, and the topics you cover. You may be writing about puberty, but your book will be really different if you’re talking to teenagers, their parents, their doctors, or their teachers!
The scope of your topic matters.
No one book can cover an entire topic. The knowledge that we have, even of a very specific topic, is just too broad to be condensed into one book. Two experts on the Industrial Revolution could create two extremely different books, if one looked at technology patents and one looked at peoples’ every day lives.
The time frame matters.
We value new information. That’s neither good nor bad, it’s just true. While I do have a nostalgic longing for classics, like Strunk and White’s book, The Elements of Style, they wrote it decades ago. It’d be a shame to have no new, updated books on writing, wouldn’t it? In every niche, there are new bits of information, new perspectives, new angles, and it’s your job to keep the books in your field fresh.
Your call to action matters.
Every book is a call to action. As a writer, you identify an audience you’re talking to, you write about a particular topic, and then you hope to inspire them to either do something or change their perspective somehow. Maybe your call to action really is proactive, like my book, Start Writing Your Book Today, I hope to inspire people to literally begin writing. Or maybe your call to action is more subtle, like a Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, which asks us to see introversion as a worthwhile quality in a person. Both are calls to action, in their own way.
Your personal voice, story, and background matter.
As readers, we love to get to know the author. Having too many favorite authors is like having too many friends. We love them all, for different reasons, and we need certain friends (authors) for different phases of our lives. We like your offbeat jokes; we want to know your quirky childhood stories; we love identifying and empathizing with your background, whatever it is. Share your unique self with us. We want to know you.
But, really, this is about self-doubt, isn’t it?
We’re only partly worried that our book has only been written. We’re perhaps even more worried that even if our book is new and unique, we just aren’t good enough to write it.
But there is no one else with your audience, your scope, in this age, with your call to action, with your voice, story, and background to tell the story that you need to tell.
You can write this book.
And if you’re not sure how to start, grab a copy of my book, and I’ll walk you through, step-by-step, nice and easy.
Haha, that shameless plug was just too good to pass up. But, really and truly, with my whole heart, I believe that you can write the book that only you were meant to write.
Start now, it’s the only time to start.
What's your book going to be about? Have you ever thought your book had already been written? Leave a comment below. Let's talk about it.