I turn down work, and not only for the reasons people expect.
The obvious ones are easy. Somebody wants a revenge memoir, or the story is not theirs to tell, or the project would take a year and they need the result in March. Those are clear and everybody involved can see it.
The harder cases are the ones where the person is credible, the material is real, and a book is still the wrong answer. They came to me because a book is what they have decided to buy, and the thing they want has a cheaper and faster route that nobody has described to them.
That conversation costs me a project and it is the whole basis of a working relationship, because a person who has been told the truth once tends to come back when the situation changes.
There are four or five situations where a book reliably disappoints, and they are recognisable in the first hour if anybody bothers to look.
If you are considering one, it is worth checking whether you are in any of them before you spend the money.
Check whether what you want from a book could be produced faster and cheaper by something else, because sometimes it can.
When you need something to happen this quarter
A book is the slowest instrument available.
Writing takes months, production takes more, and then the effects arrive on a delay measured in further months because the mechanism runs through readers instead of through advertising. A book commissioned in January is not producing anything by June, and probably not by the following January.
People in a hurry hear that, agree with it, and commission the book anyway, because the urgency is what made them act and a book is what they had decided on.
Then they judge it against the urgent need it was never going to meet, and conclude that books do not work.
When the goal is credibility with people who already know you
They have better evidence than a book.
Existing clients, long-standing colleagues and a network built over years have all seen the work. A book adds very little to what they already believe, and somebody writing primarily to impress that group is spending a large amount on the audience least affected by it.
A book works on strangers. That is its whole advantage, and it is worth checking whether strangers are the problem.
Frequently the real issue is that the existing network has stopped producing enough work, which is a different problem with a different answer.
When you do not have a position yet
A book without an argument becomes a description, and descriptions are forgettable.
Some people are early enough in a specialism that they are still working out what they think. They have experience, they have stories, and they do not yet have a claim they would defend against somebody competent.
That is not a deficiency. It is a stage, and writing a book during it produces a competent survey of what is already known with your name on it.
Better to keep working and write in two years, when there is something to say that nobody else is saying.
When the audience does not read
Some buyers do not, and it is worth knowing which you are dealing with.
There are fields where the decision-makers read books, and fields where they will watch a twenty-minute talk and never open anything longer. If your buyers are in the second group, a book reaches them indirectly at best, through somebody else who summarises it.
That indirect route still has value and it is a weaker version of the mechanism, and it should be priced into the decision instead of discovered afterwards.
The test is simple. Name three people in your target market who have mentioned a book to you in the last two years.
Should you write a book even when it is the wrong tool?
Then write it for a different reason and set the expectation accordingly.
Plenty of people write books that will never repay the cost commercially, and do it because the thing matters to them. A record for a family, a subject nobody else is going to cover, a piece of work they want to exist. Those are legitimate and they should be entered deliberately.
What causes damage is entering one of those projects while privately expecting a commercial return. The book gets judged against a goal it was never given, and the author concludes they failed at something they never attempted.
Say out loud, at the start, which kind of book this is. It costs nothing and it decides how the whole thing feels afterwards.
How do you tell which situation you are in?
Four questions, answered honestly before anybody quotes you a price.
When do you need this to have worked, and is that date more than eighteen months away. Are the people you want to reach ones who already know you. Could you write down, in one sentence, a claim about your field that a competent peer might dispute. And has anybody in your target market mentioned a book to you recently.
Two or more uncomfortable answers is a signal to wait or to do something smaller first.
Nobody selling you a book is going to ask those questions, which is the reason for asking them yourself.
When the thing you want is a document
Sometimes the actual need is a report, a framework or a long article.
Somebody who wants to establish one specific idea, or hand clients a structured explanation of their process, frequently does not need eighty thousand words. They need twenty pages done well, produced in a month, at a fraction of the cost.
Books get commissioned for this because a book is the recognisable format and nobody offered the alternative.
A twenty-page document that gets read completely beats a book that gets started and abandoned, and it can always become a book later if the material keeps growing.
