I wrote a book for working consultants. No academic framing, no literature review. How to find clients, how to price, how to run an engagement, what goes wrong and what to do about it, written the way I’d explain it to someone starting out. Then a business school adopted it.
Professor Richard Makadok put it on his course at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management. I didn’t pitch it. He found it, because it explained the work better than the alternatives he had. The classroom was the reward for having a target. A well-made tool does that: you build it for one job, and a stranger picks it up for a job you never imagined, because it works.
Why does a specific book travel further than a general one?
Because a specific book is useful, and useful things get passed along. A book about one thing, for one kind of reader, answers that reader’s questions completely. When someone outside the intended audience picks it up, they find the same completeness, and completeness is rare enough that they tell someone. A general book about business answers everyone’s questions partially, and nobody passes along a partial answer.
Both audiences would have ignored the consulting book if I’d written it for both. Practitioners would have found it too abstract. The professor would have found it too thin. Written for practitioners alone, it was concrete enough that a professor could teach from it.
What did the adoption change?
It put the book in a record I didn’t create.
A syllabus. A university bookstore. A cohort of students who read it as assigned work and cite it later in their own careers. Each of those is a stranger vouching for the book, in a place the author doesn’t control, and that’s the kind of record that makes an author’s name checkable.
I write about entity records elsewhere on this site, and the adoption is a clean example of one appearing without being engineered.
I didn’t ask for it, and I couldn’t have. It arrived because the book was worth adopting. That’s the only reliable way to get that kind of record, and it starts with writing for one reader.
What is the lesson for an executive writing a book?
Write for the reader in front of you. The others find it.
Most people widen the audience to reach more readers and end up reaching none, because the wider book has no edge and nothing in it is complete. The book that travels is the one that was aimed precisely and was worth passing along, and it travels to places the author never aimed at.
It frustrates me because the people who make this mistake are usually capable, busy executives who’ll only write one book. They spend a year on it, aim it at a whole industry, and end up with a book nobody in that industry feels was written for them.
When a client tells me the book should appeal to everyone in their industry, I ask them to name the one person they most want to read it and describe that person’s week.
Then we write the book for that person. It’s the same move the consulting book made by accident, and it works on purpose too. The case studies include books that traveled the same way.
How the pattern held across 113+ books
Most of my books were written for one reader I could picture.
Some of them traveled: adopted, cited, recommended, handed to someone the author never met. None of the ones written for everyone did. I didn’t plan the experiment, but 113+ books is enough of a sample to see the pattern, and it’s the pattern I use when I write a book for a client.
I didn’t plan the experiment, but 113+ books is enough of a sample to see the pattern, and it’s the pattern I use when I write a book for a client.Share on X
It holds for memoirs too. A life story written for one reader, a daughter, a successor, the person who has to make the same decision next year, is the one strangers stay with. A life story written for posterity puts everyone to sleep, including posterity.
What does a university adopting your book not mean?
It’s not a marketing outcome you can buy. Nobody sells syllabus placement, and if they did, a professor would see through it.
It’s a judgment by someone with no stake in the author, made because the book did the job. That’s why it counts. A record you paid for says you paid. A record a stranger created says the work held up.
The same is true of every record that matters: reviews from readers, citations by other authors, recommendations from engines that checked. The book earns them or it doesn’t, and the earning happens in the writing, when the author decides who the book is for and refuses to widen it.
The tool
I keep the tool metaphor because it’s how the consulting book behaved. I built it for a consultant sitting alone with a pricing decision, and a professor picked it up to teach a room of students how consulting works, because the tool did the job cleanly enough to show with. Nobody designs a hammer hoping a sculptor will use it. The sculptor uses it because it’s a good hammer.
Aim the book. Make it complete for the reader in front of you. Then let it go where it goes.
Name the one reader you most want, describe their week, and write for them. The Book Discovery Intensive settles that reader, so the book is specific enough to travel: one engagement that turns an audience into a person and a person into a plan. The guide to ghostwriting covers what happens next. Send me a message on LinkedIn if you want to talk it through. Part of The Publishing and Marketing Hub.
The advice that tells authors to write for everyone so the book reaches more people is wrong. It’s the fastest way I know to write a book nobody passes along, and the authors who follow it end up blaming the market for a problem they built into the manuscript.
