Why Are You Writing a Book? The Purpose Question Most Authors Only Half Answer

I was running a session a while back and I asked everyone to answer three simple questions. All that was needed was a pen, a piece of paper, and whatever came into their head first.

At the end I asked how the exercise had made them feel.

Someone typed: tTeary.

Someone else: eEngaged and ready to get going.

Three questions. Maybe four minutes of work. Then people who had been circling their book for months were suddenly inspired.

I will give you the three questions further down. First I need to deal with the answers most people give when I ask why they are writing a book... because until that one is out of the way, nothing else matters.

The answer that sounds right, but is wrong

There is a lot of buzz about how writing a book will help your profile and your positioning.

It will. That's true.

But that is the result of a great book. A book that is well thought out, has real depth of thinking, and connects with the right audience in the right way. It is not a reason to write one.

Writing a book to position yourself as an authority in your field is vague, general, and therefore unattainable. It is setting yourself up for failure. It makes the book much harder to plan and write because it has no clear purpose underneath it.

In my opinion this is why a lot of books fail to hit the mark. It is why they sit idly on nightstands, or collect congratulations for a month or two and then quietly fizzle out.

You might have written a book like this before.

You know that although it helped you knock on a few doors, opened up some conversations, got you in front of a few of the right people... it's simply not your best work. It no longer reflects your thinking. You are not really very proud of it. You might look at it now and feel a bit embarrassed about the quality, or the ideas inside.

Becoming an Amazon bestseller is the same trap wearing different clothes. What does that really mean? Will it help get your book into the right hands of the right audience for you?

To get a much better result, you actually have to think about what you want people to do after they have read your book.

Purpose is written forward, not backward

Purpose is the first pillar in our Book Canvas. It comes before audience, before market, before anything else you do or think about.

You are going to be working on this book for weeks and months. Where you are now is not where you will be when the book exists. Your thinking as an expert moves quickly, and the version of you holding the finished copy is not the version you start when you draft.

You are not writing a book for now. You are writing a book for where you want to be.

Your future self and your readers' future self.

There is a second reason this matters, and it is more practical than it sounds. You have to be motivated and excited enough to want to write this thing, so that you turn up and do the work!

If you're in any way bored of it now, then how on earth are you going to finish it later? You need to want to write about something particular.

What is something that keeps you up at 3am?

Once the love goes, your motivation dies, and your readers can sense this in your writing. If you are padding out a section, or dropping in a story to make up word count, you know, and so do they. Think about a book you have read where you found yourself glossing over the pages, where it felt lacklustre and you struggled to connect with it.

There will be absolutely be ebbs and flows in your book - there's no such thing as perfection. Not all of it is going to be A-plus. But it's much harder to keep going, and much harder to be happy with what you end up with, if you are not convinced about your why.

Two sides of the same coin

This is the part to part attention to. Purpose has two sides.

The first side is focused on "you". What are you doing, why are you writing this, how will you use the book once it exists. You must have a strategy and a plan.

But if you stop there, you are at risk of writing a book for yourself.

So the second side is "your reader". And the way I get people to approach this is to contemplate the same thing from the other side.

What is something that keeps your reader up at 3am?

Same question. Two different sides. Purpose is the bridge between them.

The three questions

Here is the exercise and 3 simple questions to ask yourself. These questions are contained in our Author Your Journey journal and were a product of working with author Simon Dowling on his book Work With Me: How to Get People to Buy-in to Your Ideas. (Hint: it's only once you are completely convinced of your own idea, that you can begin to get buy-in or belief from others.)

So grab a pen and paper and pop the timer on. Two minute. Three questions. Jot down whatever comes into your head first. Don't overthink it.

1. Why does this project matter?
2. So what. Why does it really matter?
3. So what. Why does it really, really matter?

That's it.

The result?

Usually you'll see you start somewhere small and functional, and by the third answer you're somewhere much bigger, more important and much more honest.

One of our Expert Author Community authors went from "managing people from the inside out", to "knowing yourself", to "being of service to others". Another moved from getting an idea more widely understood, to the specific sentence her clients kept saying to her, "I wish I had got to see you sooner",  which helped her see the importance of helping others become healthier and contributing to a healthier world.

One author described it as the process of "an idea growing from a seed into something planetary".

Remember - this is not a one-off session. Come back to it regularly, particularly when you're stuck or you need motivation. It works before you start writing, while you are drafting, revising or even marketing!

Action breeds clarity

Yes, the blank page is crippling. It defeats us before we have started, especially when we're asking ourselves, "What am I going to write, and is anyone even going to care?"

Anything worth doing has fear attached to it.

But the worst idea you can come up with is the one that stays stuck in your head. Words are so much easier to work with on the page than as a messy ball in your mind.

Action is what breeds clarity.

So work through the Book Canvas and start with Pillar One. There are 9 pillars total and they only take about 15 minutes to complete.

And if you would rather not do it alone, Write Now is where our authors begin.

Kx