TL;DR: What your book should be about is the most important question in the project, and most authors answer it against the wrong criteria. Authors who chase the topic that feels trendy, the one that “should” be written, or the one that covers everything they know produce books that struggle. The actual test is narrower and more demanding.
I care more about this decision than any other in a book project, because it’s the one that sinks books when it’s wrong. I’d much rather spend an extra week settling what the book is than watch an author rebuild chapters in month four that never belonged together in the first place.
Why the topic question is everything
Every other decision in the project rests on the topic decision.
I care more about this decision than any other in a book project, because it’s the one that sinks books when it’s wrong.
The outline, the structure, the audience, the marketing, the title, the cover design, all of it flows from what the book is about. Authors who get the topic right find the rest of the project unfolds with momentum. For more, see how a ghostwriting project works from start to finish and the AI labor split that actually works on a book.
Authors who get the topic wrong, or never settle it cleanly, end up restructuring in month four because the chapters don’t hang together. That’s the expensive way to discover the question.
The things that feel obvious to you may not be the things that make a book worth reading.Share on X
The topic question is also where most authors are least equipped to evaluate themselves. A view from inside your own life or expertise is biased. The things that feel obvious to you may not be the things that make a book worth reading. how I outline a book The things that feel like “your topic” may be the things you’ve written about most without being the things you have the most to say.
A working ghostwriter or a structured discovery process is partly about getting outside the author’s own assumptions about what the book should be.
What are the wrong ways to pick a book topic?
Several methods of picking a topic produce predictable failures. The first is chasing trends. A topic that’s hot right now will be cold by the time your book ships eighteen months from now, and the book will read as dated on arrival. The second is picking what “should” be written.
The topic the industry thinks needs a book, or that nobody has covered, is usually missing for a reason. Either it lacks the substance to carry a book, or the substance it has doesn’t match your expertise.
The third wrong method is trying to cover everything you know. Authors with deep expertise sometimes try to write a book that synthesizes their entire field. The result is too broad to work for any specific reader. The book that tries to be useful to everyone is useful to nobody, because the depth needed for any specific use case has been spread thin across the breadth. The fourth is picking the topic that’s most personally important to you.
Personal importance isn’t the same as book-worthy material. The topic you care about most may not be the one you have the most to say about at book length. Sometimes the most personal topic is a grudge. I decline revenge memoirs outright, and every prospect who wanted one walked away. A book written to punish somebody is a poor read and a legal risk, and the author is the one who lives with it after publication.
What is the test for a book topic?
The working test has four components. First, do you have serious material on this topic that goes beyond what’s already published? Opinions don’t count here. You need real experiences, evidence, or perspectives nobody else has, the kind that change the conversation. Second, is there a reader who needs this book and who you can describe in concrete terms? “Anyone interested in the topic” fails. You want a particular kind of person with a problem your book solves or a question it answers.
Third, would you stand behind this book five years from now, with your name attached to it, defending the ideas in interviews and on panels? A book is a long-term commitment that you can’t discreetly retire if you change your mind. The book has to be something you’ll continue to stand behind. Fourth, does the topic have enough material in it to support sixty to eighty thousand words, or is it an article stretched into a book?
I’ve written books whose views I completely disagree with, politics included, and even space aliens.
I’m not my client’s priest, therapist, or judge and jury. But I won’t be the one defending that book on a panel five years later. The author will, so the author has to pick a topic they’ll still believe then.
Most failed business books are articles that the author kept padding until they hit a word count. A topic that passes all four is a book worth writing. A topic that fails on any of them is a topic worth narrowing, reconsidering, or saving for a different format. The four-part test is designed to uncover the topic that can sustain the project.
Some topics fail for reasons the test doesn’t cover. I turned down a retired FBI mafia informant who wanted to write a book naming names, even though the offer would have been my biggest ever. I kind of like to be breathing.
What three questions reveal what your book should be about?
For authors who haven’t yet settled on a topic, three questions reliably turn up the right book.
The first works best for nonfiction: what belief in your field do most people hold that you think is wrong, and what do you have to say about it? The answer to that question often becomes the spine of a strong nonfiction book. It identifies a perspective the author earned and a conversation the book can enter.
The second works for both nonfiction and memoir: what question do people in your life keep asking you, and what’s the version of the answer that you haven’t had time to give them fully? The repeated question is a market signal. People are asking it because they need to know, and your answer is something they’ve come to you for. A book that fully answers that question has a built-in audience and a clear purpose.
Athletes are a growing part of my practice, and most of them arrive already knowing their book: what the sport taught them. That’s the repeated question in its clearest form, and I love working with an author who knows it on day one.
The third works especially for memoir but also for nonfiction with personal material: what story do you find yourself telling at dinner parties, in conversations with colleagues, in late-night conversations with friends? That story you keep returning to is the one your subconscious has been working on, and the version that becomes a book is the deeper version of that story with the implications drawn out.
When the story is personal, I go looking for the failures and setbacks on purpose. Readers want the ups and downs and how someone recovered, and a sanitized arc loses them. Clients drift to the extremes, either the hero of every scene or the person who ruined everything, and I talk them back toward the middle, where the believable version lives.
The Book Discovery Intensive handles a structured version of this work in formal interviews. That’s sometimes the only way to get past the author’s own blocks about what their actual book is.
What if you have too many book ideas?
Some authors come into the project with three or four possible books and can’t decide. The wrong move is to write a proposal for each and see which one the market picks. The right move is to apply the four-part test to each topic and see which one passes most cleanly. Usually one of the three or four clearly survives the test, and the others fail in specific ways that become obvious once the test is applied.
If two topics survive equally, pick the one with the more specific reader. Books with sharply defined audiences sell better than books with broad audiences, because their readers can find them, recognize themselves in them, and recommend them to others who share the same need.
A book for everyone is a book nobody recommends. A book for a specific kind of person is a book that builds momentum through the community that needs it.
The “I don’t have any ideas” problem
Less common but real. Authors with considerable expertise sometimes can’t identify which slice of their expertise is book material because the expertise is too internalized to see. The view from inside the expert’s head is “this is just how things work,” which isn’t a book topic, because the things aren’t “just how” to anyone outside the field.
The fix for this case is structured interviews with someone outside your field. An outsider can ask the questions that bring out the parts of your expertise that are distinctive. The questions sound naive to you, and that’s what makes them useful, because the answer to a naive question is often the territory of a book.
The expert who explains their field to a thoughtful outsider produces material that becomes a book. The same expert outlining alone tends to produce a flat survey of the field that nobody needs to read. I’d rather be the outsider asking naive questions for hours than polish a survey like that.
My take
Choose the topic with the narrowest reader, and drop the trendy one and the one that covers everything you know. A book for everyone is a book nobody recommends. Too many ideas? Put each through the test and keep whichever one still has a clear reader. If you’ve got no ideas, your expertise is so familiar you can’t see it. Spend a few hours with an outsider who asks naive questions, and record what you say.
What changes when you get the topic right
The downstream effects of getting the topic decision right are major.
An outline writes itself in a few sessions instead of getting stuck for weeks. Chapters have clear functions instead of a length quota defining them. The marketing position is obvious because the audience was defined at the start. Interviews go faster because the author knows what they’re saying and what they’re not. Voice in the book is consistent because the substance is consistent.
The downstream effects of getting it wrong are just as heavy. The outline keeps shifting because the topic isn’t stable. Chapters need rewriting when the topic clarifies in month three. The marketing has no clear hook because the audience was never defined. Interviews ramble because the author is exploring instead of executing, and the voice drifts with them. I’d rather lose a prospect over a hard conversation about the topic than take on a book whose subject was never settled, because that book fails its author and burns a year of both our lives.
Pick the right subject and the rest of the project gets easier. The Ghostwriting Advantage is the book I wrote on how to get your book written for you.
