How an Idea Becomes a Book, Part 4: Who Else Might Care About Your Idea?
This is the fourth part of a series. You can catch up by reading the other parts here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
Once you know why you care about an idea, it takes on a whole new kind of life. It’s no longer one of the millions of shapeless ideas pinging around your brain, but something that has weight. This elevates it so that you notice it more than the other ideas, consider it more, circle back to it more. It rises.
The next step in turning this idea into a book is to start thinking about who else might care about it, too. Before I talk about this critical question, however, I want to talk about the question of when to ask yourself this question.
People sometimes get upset at me for suggesting that a writer think about their audience so soon. They argue that thinking about an audience can cheapen the idea or muddy it. I think this is one of the intractable myths about writing that can cause a great deal of damage — the myth that the ideas that spring fully formed from the artist’s mind are somehow better or more pure or more valuable than those that are made for an audience.
Sometimes ideas spring effortlessly to life fully formed, but most of the time they are hammered out in the forge of intense and intentional effort. And part of that effort is knowing that readers close the loop for writers, and determining exactly who those readers might be. The circuit ends when someone experiences what you wrote and without that step, the work is something different, something we do for our own awareness or understanding or pleasure.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
There are a lot of reasons to write that have nothing to do with being read or read widely. Journaling to make sense of yourself, writing poems to capture the beauty or the pain of the world, writing flash fiction because it’s fun, and writing your life story so that your grandchildren might one day want to know what it is you were doing in Rome in the ’60s are all excellent reasons to write. None of them, however, depend on people you don’t know becoming engaged in your work. That is what publishing is all about — getting strangers to care about your work — so it stands to reason that you should think about those people.
Too many writers don’t consider the reader soon enough in their process. They leap right from having the idea to writing about the idea. You would never do this in business — come up with an idea and launch it without knowing if someone is going to pay money for it and why they might pay money for it — and you shouldn’t do this in book writing, either.
We need to think about the eventual readers we want to delight or entertain or educate or illuminate or cause to take action, and the sooner in the process the better. Knowing who our reader is means that we can speak directly to them and give them exactly what they need.
All this being said, the time is not always right for a certain idea to come to life. Sometimes you have an idea and you’re not sure what it will be or if it will be or why it will be. This might be because you’re not sure why you care (see my post on this from earlier in the series), or because you’re not sure what it is, exactly, or you’re not sure you have the authority or the courage or the know-how to write it.
The migraine book I have been mentioning in these posts is something I have been thinking about writing in various iterations for more than 20 years. I have not been able to figure it out — to crack the code of it. I’ve written pages and pages in search of answers and, until recently, was not sure I would ever find them. But this idea I am working on right now — about how a book becomes an idea — leaped into my mind and then I immediately started to put it through the steps I am outlining here. There was no discernment period, no debate, no doubt — I just did it. In between those two extremes is what happens to most ideas.
Whether it takes you a few moments or many decades to start working on an idea, this is what I know for sure: when you decide to work on an idea — to take that spark and turn it into a book — and you want other people to eventually read it, you need to think about who exactly those people are and what they might get from it.
Consider the Reader
Start by asking, who exactly is this reader?
There are a lot of business start-up methods that recommend making an avatar for your ideal customer or, in this case, ideal reader. This is good advice. If you can draw or cut images out of a magazine or pin Pinterest posts to a board, this might help you visualize your ideal reader. You might be able to picture her — see how old she is, what she’s wearing, the color of her hair — but this is not where the exercise should end. You need to dig deep into why this reader needs your book, why she might care.
Readers usually come to nonfiction books for very specific reasons. You can look at your own book-buying habits for clues to what these might be. I read a lot of books on the history and current state of race in America this year, for example, because I was made aware by recent events that there was a lot I didn’t know and a lot I needed to learn. Many of my friends, family, and colleagues were reading these books, as well, and I wanted to be part of the conversation. I sought these books out with a great deal of intention in order to expand my perspective.
I bought a book called Burnout because I heard a Brené Brown podcast with the authors and thought they would have something to teach me about resilience and handling powerful emotions — which are often a trigger in migraines. I did not seek this book out, but once I heard about it, it touched on a topic that is of great interest to me. I bought it because I thought it might increase my self-awareness and my overall wellness.
I bought Seth Godin’s new book, The Practice, because I’m a Seth Godin fan and thought his last book on marketing was fabulous. I thought it would help me do a better job of coaching my writers and teaching our book coaching students.
I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up because I had a client who kept referencing it in relation to the book she was writing, and I had not read it and I wanted to be able to effectively guide her. (I bought this book to be of service to someone else but I ended up loving it. I had no idea that the concept of asking if a thing sparks joy, a concept that has entered the popular lexicon, was not just about decluttering your closet; it’s a deeply profound idea about knowing yourself.)
Sometimes a book is forgettable and we move on when we’re done with it and might not remember a single thing from it. But other times, books utterly change us. We become a different person after we read it. We are transformed.
This is why books and the people who write them are held in such high esteem in our society: they are instruments of powerful change. We cherish the books that help us become the people we long to be.
So who are you going to change with your idea?
Who are you going to transform?
Consider the idea you are noodling on, and consider your reader. Ask yourself:
- Why might they care about my idea?
- What do they need?
- What will they get out of it?
- What can I help them do?
- What can I help them learn?
- What can I help them become?
Next week, I’ll talk about defining how you intend to change this reader, by asking about your point.
