Is Your Nonfiction Book Idea Worth Pursuing?
Five steps to help you decide whether the book you're imagining is the book you actually want to write.
Many nonfiction authors begin their publication journey with a version of the same question: “I have a book idea. Is it a good one?”
It's an understandable question. Writing a book is a substantial investment of time, intellectual and creative energy, and often money. Before committing to that investment, authors want some assurance that it will be worth it.
So they jump into questions about viability, commerciality, and salability. They ask whether there's an audience for their idea. Whether a publisher might be interested. Whether the book is worth writing in the first place.
But for me, that's an impossible question to answer until I understand more about the author's purpose in writing a book.
Because what makes a book idea worth pursuing depends, at least in part, on what the author hopes to accomplish.
I know authors often wish there were a scale of 1–10. An 8 out of 10? Worth pursuing. A 2 out of 10? Give up the dream.
But that's not really how any of this works, is it? Determining whether a book idea is worth pursuing requires a great deal of self-awareness.
So what's a would-be nonfiction author to do?
I suggest starting with a simple exercise.
Step 1: Write down your book idea.
Give yourself 150 words to describe your idea. What is the book about? What approach might you take? Who do you imagine reading it?
Don't worry about getting it exactly right. You're simply capturing the idea as it exists in your mind right now.
Step 2: Put it aside.
Don't edit it, tweak it, or ask another soul whether it's a good idea.
We're going to look at another question altogether. One that I believe is fundamental to the entire process, rather than an afterthought.
Step 3: Ask yourself why you want to write a book in the first place.
Writing a book is hard. It takes time, intellectual and creative energy, and often money. Life will inevitably happen around and in between your writing sessions.
Your purpose is what you return to when the project gets difficult, when competing priorities demand your attention, or when you find yourself questioning why you started in the first place.
But understanding your purpose is also essential to determining whether the book you're imagining is actually the book you want to write.
So how do you identify your purpose? A book can serve personal, professional, intellectual, and social purposes, often at the same time.
Think about what you hope writing the book will accomplish for you, what you hope the book itself will accomplish for others, and what you want the experience of writing it to mean.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Personal motivations
Fulfill a lifelong ambition to write a book.
Make sense of a formative experience, personal loss, or major life transition.
Preserve your family's history for future generations.
Tell a personal story that has been misunderstood, overlooked, or told by others.
Prove to yourself that you can complete a substantial creative project.
Professional motivations
Become known as an expert beyond your existing professional community.
Land more speaking engagements or consulting opportunities.
Build a public profile that extends beyond your academic or professional work.
Create new professional opportunities or transition into a different kind of career.
Establish credibility in a new field or area of expertise.
Intellectual motivations
Bring decades of research together into a single, coherent argument.
Explore a question you've never had the opportunity to pursue professionally.
Challenge an established interpretation of a historical event, institution, or social phenomenon.
Uncover a lesser-known history.
Make complex knowledge accessible to people outside your field.
Social motivations
Influence a policy debate or inspire a particular change.
Change how the public understands an important issue.
Bring attention to people or experiences that have been overlooked.
Challenge a widespread misconception or harmful stereotype.
Provide practical advice to people facing a particular challenge.
Maybe your purpose is on the list. Maybe it's not. The key is to be completely honest with yourself. There are no right or wrong answers, only the ones that are true for you.
And don't feel that your motivations need to be entirely selfless or particularly grand. Wanting to write a book because you've always dreamed of seeing your name on the cover is just as legitimate a starting point as wanting to change the world.
Step 4: Rank your motivations.
Once you've identified your reasons for wanting to write a book, rank them from highest priority to lowest.
This prevents you from simply saying, “Well, all of these!” A book cannot serve every purpose equally, any more than one relationship in your life can.
Maybe you want to make an original contribution to scholarship, reach a broad public audience, and establish yourself as a recognized expert. Those motivations aren't necessarily incompatible. But what happens when pursuing one means making compromises elsewhere?
Knowing what matters most to you will help you navigate those decisions.
The key is to know what your primary purpose is and to calibrate the decisions that follow with those stated intentions. And to recognize when those intentions have genuinely changed.
Step 5: Return to your original book idea.
Now, take another look at those 150 words you wrote at the beginning of the exercise. Does the book you've described actually serve your primary purpose?
Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. Both are useful pieces of information to have.
For example, perhaps you're a historian who initially envisioned writing a comprehensive account of a little-known historical event.
You know the history, the debates, and the evidence. You've spent years researching the subject and have enough material to fill several books.
But through this exercise, you realize that what most motivates you is the opportunity to explore how that event continues to shape the lives of a particular community today.
You might decide that a comprehensive history isn't quite the book you want to write after all. Instead, you might focus on the relationship between the historical event and its contemporary consequences, using the history to illuminate the questions that matter most to you.
The underlying subject hasn't changed. But your understanding of what you want to accomplish has.
Or perhaps you're a researcher who wants to bring together decades of work into a single, coherent argument.
As you work through your motivations, you realize that this is precisely what matters most to you. And the book you've been imagining is already organized around that argument.
You don't necessarily need to rethink your idea. You've confirmed that the book you want to write aligns with your primary purpose.
And that's useful information to have, too.
Understanding your purpose gives you a way to evaluate whether the book you're imagining is the book you actually want to write.
It can shape the decisions that follow, from the book's scope and approach to its intended audience and eventual publication pathway.
It might even lead you to realize that the idea you've been carrying around for years isn't quite the idea you want to pursue.
And that's useful information to have before you've invested months or years in writing it.
So, is your book idea a good one?
Maybe. But before you ask someone else to evaluate it, make sure you understand what you're hoping to accomplish by writing it.
Knowing your purpose won't guarantee that the investment will pay off. But it will help you determine what a worthwhile investment would actually look like for you.
And once you know what you're hoping to accomplish, there's another question to consider: How would you know if you'd accomplished it? What would need to happen for you to feel confident that writing the book had served its purpose?
But we'll get to that next time.
If you've written a book, what motivated you to start? And if you're thinking about writing one, what's driving you to do it?