A translator who works between four languages is doing one job in several directions.
My books cover household security, a prisoner-of-war memoir, workplace ethics, decluttering, marketing with ADHD and a philosophical structure. Listed like that it reads as somebody who couldn’t settle.
The work is the same in every one of them, and the range is the reason each is better than it would have been alone.
I get impatient with the advice that every author has to pick one lane. It treats the subject as the hard part. My whole catalog is a bet on the opposite: the hard part is getting knowledge out of one head and into another in the right order, and doing that across very different material has made me better at every piece of it.
What is the same across categories?
Working out what a reader needs to be told and in what order. That’s nearly the job.
Every nonfiction book is somebody who knows something trying to hand it to somebody who doesn’t. The subject changes the vocabulary and almost nothing else. Where to start, what to assume, what to hold back, when to show and when to explain: those decisions are identical whether the material is routers or grief.
I tell clients this when they worry I don’t know their industry. They already know the industry. What they’re hiring is somebody who can get it out of their head in an order a stranger can follow, and that skill carries from routers to grief without losing anything on the way. The second constant is structure. A chapter needs a spine, a reason to keep reading, and a closing that pays for the attention. That doesn’t vary by field. What differs is domain knowledge. Everybody assumes that’s everything, and it’s the easiest thing to supply.
Every nonfiction book is somebody who knows something trying to hand it to somebody who doesn’t.
My goal is always the best possible book for that client. The first few interviews pin down what they want the book to achieve, down to the nitty-gritty, and every chapter and every paragraph has to reinforce it. The client is the knowledge expert, and I’m not. I am an expert on digital transformation, because I did it twice. I didn’t know anything at all about the metaverse, and I still wrote a book on it, because my client knew the metaverse.
The book on this: Behind the Wire and the security work came out of the same job done in two directions, thirty years apart.
What can technical writing, memoir, and philosophy teach each other?
Technical writing teaches sequence. You can’t explain step four before step two, and a technical reader will stop at the first gap. That discipline transfers directly into memoir, where writers routinely assume a reader knows something they were never told.
Memoir teaches restraint. The material is emotionally loaded and the temptation is to tell the reader how to feel. That kills it. Learning to put the thing on the page and stop improved my business writing more than any book about business writing.
I’m hard on memoir writers who tell the reader how to feel, and I’m just as hard on business writers who do the same thing with words like transformative and game-changing. It’s the same failure in a better suit, and it costs the same thing: the reader stops trusting the author somewhere around page ten. Philosophy teaches you to state the opposing view fairly, because an argument that only defeats a weak version convinces nobody. That habit is why my most contested books survive scrutiny. None of that transfer is available to somebody working in one lane.
| Field | What it teaches | Where it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Technical writing | Sequence: you can’t explain step four before step two | Memoir, where writers assume the reader knows what they were never told |
| Memoir | Restraint: put the thing on the page and stop | Business writing, more than any book about business writing |
| Philosophy | State the opposing view fairly | Why the most contested books survive scrutiny |
The book on this: Family Cybersecurity is the technical half of that, written for people with twenty minutes and no vocabulary.
Does writing across unrelated categories confuse readers?
Less than authors fear. In my view the fear comes from marketing advice about positioning, and readers rarely share it. A reader arrives at one book with one problem. They’re not browsing your catalog and worrying about coherence. Somebody looking for help securing their household doesn’t care that you also wrote about decluttering, and would only encounter it if they went looking.
Where range does cost something is in the compressed formats: a bio, a conference introduction, a single sentence at a party. Those want one thing and a list reads as unfocused. I think the one-lane rule does its worst damage to experts. Somebody with deep knowledge in two fields gets told to hide one of them for the sake of a tidy bio, and they never write the book that only they could have written.
The fix is to describe the job instead of the topics. I write books for people who know something and can’t get it onto a page. That’s one sentence, it’s accurate across all of it, and nobody asks a follow-up about routers.
The book on this: God Is Everything is the philosophy end of the same range, offered on its merits and not on any authority.
Is there a limit to how many categories one writer can cover?
Yes, and it’s credibility and not coherence.
I write about household security because I spent thirty-three years in enterprise technology, twenty of them running computer operations at a large company. I write about workplace ethics for the same reason. Those are earned.
What I don’t do is write into a field where I have no standing, on the theory that the craft transfers. It does transfer, and the book would still be worse, because the private half of a subject only exists in people who have been there.
Writers who wander into fields they’ve only read about are overreaching. Their books sound right and are wrong in ways an insider spots on the first page, and the reader who trusted them is the one who pays for it.
The range is legitimate when each subject is one you have stood in yourself. It becomes a problem the moment it’s range for its own sake.
The book on this: Show Don’t Tell is the craft end, and the discipline in it came out of writing memoir and not out of teaching craft.
My take
Range doesn’t confuse readers. It confuses bios. A reader arrives with one problem and never checks your catalog for coherence. Each field I write in teaches the others something a one-lane writer never picks up. If you know two fields, don’t hide one for the sake of a tidy bio. Describe the job instead of the topics, and write the book nobody else could have written.
What does writing across categories mean for a specialist?
That the adjacent book is usually closer than it looks. Most experts have more than one thing they know deeply and treat only one as writable. The others get dismissed as hobbies or as unrelated to the professional identity, and they’re frequently the more interesting material.
The connective tissue doesn’t have to be topical. Mine is a way of thinking about systems that came from technology and applies to households, workplaces and beliefs equally well. A reader never sees that stated and it’s in all of it.
The neighboring arguments are the books that shaped how I write and how to structure a thought leadership book. The Library lays out all of it by series, and my ghostwriting service works across the same range for the same reason. My ghostwriting projects run from memoirs of very interesting people to technical books. I can do just about any of them, because the knowledge comes from the client and I’m the writer. It’s fun, too, and it’s what I want to do.
I think chasing a single niche because a marketing course said so is one of the worst reasons to leave your best material unwritten. If you know two things deeply, write both and let the craft carry between them, because the reader holding your book only cares whether it helps, and your catalog’s tidiness means nothing to them.
