Examples of what I mean when I say Write with a Book In Mind

More on the advice I’ve been giving Medium authors.

“Write with a book in mind” and “Write articles that are subscription worthy.”

I don’t mean write the book on Medium. I mean write with an eye toward a book. That means test out ideas, share stories, research. But when you write here it still has to work as an article.

Here are some examples from my own writing.

As an author, I’m best known for this iPhone article with 2M views. It’s nearly as long as a book and triggered an editor from a major publishing house to reach out to me about turning it into a book.

But I had a draft form of that article going for two entire years and during that time I was testing the ideas on real people. That’s the type of research that people tend to do for books and not when they are churning out daily content.

And because it was taking me so long to finish that article, I started pulling out smaller bits of the overall piece and testing them. Here’s an example: How to Configure Your iPhone for Productivity & Focus. That’s basically an article with a book in mind.

You’ve probably read a lot of advice on writing. It’s a genre of articles and every writer seems destined to write at least one article to share their writing process. Part of the genre is to try to make your personal writing process sound like a process everyone should follow. My…