You’ve been told to widen the audience. Make it useful to more people. Don’t narrow it down so much that you cut out potential readers. That advice sounds obviously right and it produces books that nobody finishes. I think widen-the-audience advice has ruined more business books than bad grammar ever did. It sounds generous and safe, and it strips out every sentence that would have made the right reader sit up. I’ve read too many manuscripts that say nothing wrong and nothing new, written by smart people who can’t understand why nobody finishes them.
A narrow book can say something that’s only true in one setting. It can name a constraint that applies at a particular size, describe a decision that only makes sense with a particular board, use the word your reader uses instead of the generic one.
The specificity is what I love in a business book. When an author names the exact constraint I’d hit at a particular size, I trust the next hundred pages. When the author hedges so it applies to everyone, I stop believing they’ve done the work themselves. I’d make that trade every time, and you make it by excluding people.
Why does a broad book reach fewer people?
Because nobody recognizes themselves in a description written to fit everybody.
A book about leadership has to describe situations that occur across every industry, at every scale, in every kind of organization. What survives that filter is the part all of them have in common, and the part all of them have in common is the part everybody already knows.
So a broad book is accurate and unsurprising. A reader gets three pages in, recognizes the shape of advice they’ve read before, and stops. A narrow book can say something that’s only true in one setting, and the person in that setting reads it and knows immediately that the author has been where they are.
What does exclusion look like on the page?
Specifics that would be wrong for somebody else.
Naming a constraint that only applies at a certain size. Describing a decision that only makes sense with a particular kind of board. Using the word your reader uses for a thing. Every one of those sentences costs you readers who aren’t in that situation, and every one of them convinces a reader who is.
The trade isn’t close. Somebody who feels described will finish the book, recommend it, and contact you. Somebody who feels vaguely included will put it down.
Does a narrow book limit who can buy from you?
No, and most people get this wrong.
Aimed precisely at one kind of reader, a book still gets read by adjacent people, and they read it more carefully because they can see it was written for somebody. A reader in a neighboring field translates as they go and respects the specificity.
What doesn’t happen is somebody reading a general book and translating it into their own situation, because a general book has already done the translating and thrown away the detail. Books travel outward from a narrow starting point. They don’t travel inward from a broad one.
How do you decide who to exclude?
Work backwards from the conversation you want to have. Think about the engagement you’d most like to be doing next year. Who’s on the other side of that. What’s going wrong for them right now that made them start looking. What do they already know, so you don’t have to explain it, and what do they believe that you’d push back on.
That’s your reader. Everybody else is somebody you’re willing to lose. If naming that list makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is the reason most books end up broad. I understand that discomfort, and I still think it’s the most expensive feeling in nonfiction. It costs the author the one reader who was ready to hire them.
What happens to the people you excluded?
Most of them were never going to buy from you. A marketing director at a bank isn’t going to buy a book aimed at operations leaders in mid-sized manufacturers, and that marketing director wasn’t a prospect. Writing more generally wouldn’t have converted them. It would have cost you the manufacturer.
Some of the excluded will read it anyway and pass it on to somebody it was written for. That’s a better outcome than being mildly relevant to both.
What does the excluded reader experience?
A brief moment of recognition that this isn’t for them, and no resentment at all. People are used to sorting themselves. Somebody who picks up a book aimed at a different role reads a paragraph, understands the situation, and puts it down without any sense of having been rejected. What they don’t do is feel misled. That’s what happens with a book that promised general relevance and delivered advice they can’t use.
Precision is a courtesy. It saves people time and it costs you nothing you were going to get.
How narrow is too narrow for a book’s audience?
When the reader you described couldn’t fill a room. There’s a floor. A book for chief operating officers of Canadian mining companies with between three and five sites has an audience measured in dozens, and dozens won’t sustain a book even if every one of them buys.
The test is rough. Can you name twenty people who fit the description, and does that suggest hundreds or thousands more exist who you can’t name.
Most people are nowhere near this line. The overwhelming failure runs the other way, and if you’re worried about being too narrow you’re almost certainly not narrow enough yet.
What happens when the narrow book works?
You stop having to explain what you do. Readers of a precisely aimed book arrive already sorted. They found it because it described their situation, they read it because it kept describing their situation, and they contact you because the situation is theirs.
That’s a different kind of inbound from a general book. That produces enquiries from people who liked it and aren’t in your market.
The narrow book brings fewer enquiries and better ones, and when your capacity is measured in projects per year instead of units sold, only the better ones count.
That’s the part that excites me. A precise book turns the inbox into a list of people you’d want to work with, and anyone running a small practice should care about that more than any sales figure.
How do you test whether your book’s audience is narrow enough?
Describe your reader in a sentence that somebody could disagree with. Senior executives isn’t a reader. Operations leaders in companies between one and two hundred people, who inherited a system nobody documented and can’t get budget to replace it, is a reader. The second one excludes almost everybody and it’s the reason the book will work. Somebody in exactly that position will feel that you wrote it for them, because you did.
Why do people resist writing narrow?
Because the broad version feels like more opportunity, and it’s easy to picture.
In the imagination, a book for everybody in your industry has an obvious upside. More readers, more markets, more possible buyers. The narrow version has a visible cost and an invisible benefit. That’s a bad shape for a decision.
There’s also a status element nobody says out loud. A general book sounds more important. A book for operations leaders at mid-sized manufacturers sounds like a trade manual, and a book about leadership sounds like a book somebody serious wrote.
That status worry is vanity dressed up as strategy, and it sinks good books. The people who hire you from a book are the ones who saw their own Tuesday in it, and a grand general title rarely shows them that.
Fewer people will read the general one and none of them will remember it, and the trade manual will be on desks for a decade. I’d much prefer to see an author write the trade manual. It takes more nerve, and it’s the book that repays the year it took to write.
