Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. I’m B, a book development partner for non-fiction non-writers, and for the next few minutes, you are my author.
Don’t worry—that doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.
Today, we’re creating space for change.
When your book falls somewhere between a calling card and a calling, what you're really writing for is change.
Everything else is a bonus—book sales, new leads, perceived authority? Icing on the cake.
It's the change in your reader, the change in your world, and the change in how you see yourself and your work that matters most.
And that takes a different focus, a different set of priorities, than a business card book or career writer's work might require.
Writing for change is like writing a pitch for the world you want to see.
In a pitch, you do bring attention to the problem you’re solving or the pain point you’re addressing. But you don’t stay there.
The bulk of your time, energy, and focus is on the thing you want to create.
The vision you have for a world disrupted.
A world reimagined.
A world changed.
Your book is no different.
Sometimes I catch authors tying themselves in knots over the degree to which they should articulate the problem that inspired their book.
This is especially true for authors with multi-passionate backgrounds. They see authors who are doctors and professors and life long specialists going deep on one subject, and they want to replicate it.
What they don’t realize is that their broad expertise creates just as powerful a perspective as a narrow expertise—if they stand in that authority. If they honor their own expertise in the way they honor someone else’s.
The reality is that you would not see the change you’re writing for if you weren’t qualified.
You wouldn’t have a vision for a better corner of your world if you hadn’t seen enough of the world at large to know it needs to improve.
You wouldn’t be writing this book if you didn’t have the authority to.
Your work is not to prove that authority by mimicking anyone else, by matching other qualifications, or by laying out every last competing analysis of the problem in order to validate your own observation.
Your work is to meet your reader where they are, as you are, and then point them in the direction you’d like to lead them.
You're making the case for the world you can build together, and allowing them to decide whether to join you.
Your belief in that world,
your descriptions of it,
your defense of it in spite of the world we're currently stuck in—
that's what’s going to pull us into the experience of your book and “sell” us on putting it into practice.
And that’s why this shift matters: because an exposé about every last angle of something problematic but irrelevant is only easy to read because of its irrelevance.
It’s not asking the reader to do anything with that information. Of course we’ll escape into “just one more chapter.”
But if you want us to keep turning pages to eventually turn those ideas into our own beliefs, it’s your belief that we need most.
Acknowledge the world as it is, but make us believe in the world as it you know it could be.
You’re the only one who can.
Thanks for creating this space with me today. Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you're already doing it.
Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.
And so will I.
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