A tool that does one job badly isn’t a bad tool. A tool built for a job nobody had is a different problem, and no amount of sharpening helps.
Most of my books I’d write again. A few I wouldn’t, and they weren’t the ones that sold worst or reviewed worst. They were the ones where the reason for making them was wrong from the beginning.
The useful part is that the reasons come in recognisable shapes.
The book written because the topic was available
I knew a subject well, it was adjacent to work I was already doing, and writing it required no new research. So I wrote it.
Nothing about that is a reason. Knowing a subject is a prerequisite and not a motivation, and the book that resulted was competent and had nothing driving it. I couldn’t tell you now what argument it was making, and I wrote it.
The test I use now is whether I’d be annoyed if somebody else wrote the same book badly. If I’d shrug, I have no stake, and a book without a stake is a long document.
The book on this: Don’t Live in Fear is one I’d write again, because the annoyance came first and the argument came out of it.
The book written to complete a set
A series had a gap in it. There was an obvious slot, the neighboring books were doing well, and filling it seemed like the natural next move.
The problem is that the slot was a gap in my taxonomy instead of a gap in anybody’s life. Nobody was standing in a situation the existing books didn’t cover. I’d built a shape and then written to the shape.
That book is fine. It also has no reader who needed it, and it shows in the way nobody ever mentions it. A series should grow because readers keep asking a question, and mine grew that way except for this one.
The book on this: Behind the Wire is the clearest case of a book with a reader who needed it, the test the other three failed.
The book written while I was still angry
This is the one I feel most strongly about and it’s the hardest to see from inside.
Anger is a legitimate reason to write and I’ve used it deliberately. What doesn’t work is writing while the anger is still moving, before you know what you think, because the argument ends up shaped by the feeling instead of supported by it.
The result reads as settling something instead of explaining something, and readers who agree with you enjoy it while readers who might have been persuaded stop early. That’s the opposite of what the book was for.
The fix is time. Write the angry draft, because it contains the energy. Then wait until you can state the other side fairly and rewrite from there.
What do the three have in common?
All of them served me instead of a reader.
Convenience, tidiness, and catharsis are real motivations and none of them produces a book anybody needed. A well-written book that exists for the author’s benefit is a well-written book nobody has a reason to finish.
The books of mine that work all began with somebody else’s problem, even when the material was entirely personal.
The book on this: The ADHD Marketer came out of burning out repeatedly on advice written for a different brain, a stake, not a convenience.
What questions catch a bad book idea early?
Three, and they take about five minutes.
Who’s standing in a specific situation that this book resolves? If the answer is a category of person instead of a situation, the book has no reader yet.
What would I be annoyed to see somebody else get wrong? That locates the stake. No annoyance means no stake.
Could I state the strongest opposing view fairly today? If not, the thinking isn’t finished, whatever the word count says.
Should you write the mistakes anyway?
Sometimes, and I say that having got value from all three.
The convenient book taught me that expertise isn’t a reason. The tidy book taught me the difference between a taxonomy and a market. The angry book taught me to wait, which has improved everything since.
What I wouldn’t do is write them now. Learning a lesson from a book that took four months is an expensive way to learn it when the three questions above would have got there in an afternoon.
The rest of this series is about the work as it happens: the project I said yes to, why most business books don’t work, and the problem with writing about what you’re good at. The Ghostwriting Hub has the rest, and my ghostwriting service begins with these questions before anybody signs anything.