Designing the Meaning of Your Book’s Message

A book is more than a collection of useful ideas. It's a journey from a low point of understanding to a higher one. Your role as author is to guide readers to where you want them to be. You can only do that if you know where they are when they begin, what is missing from their paradigm, and the best way to introduce them to what they may not have even known they were missing.

The problem with many experts is that they take their knowledge for granted. Their unconscious competence might make them great performers in their fields, but it doesn't make it easy for them to teach others what they know. Being acknowledged as an authority makes it easy for someone to stop questioning how they know what they know. To place your knowledge into other minds, you will have to remember the steps you took to get where you are.

Unconscious competence means you have forgotten what it was like not to know the things you are now an expert on. Your knowledge has transcended the need for verbalization in your mind. You act without thinking about why. But education requires explicit, verbalized exposition. Just try explaining your knowledge to someone completely foreign to your field (preferably a curious child who won't be shy about asking questions) and see how often they get lost or need you to backtrack in your analysis.

In the coming months of writing, you are going to attempt to make conscious and explicit what is unconscious and implicit within you. You may even identify major gaps or errors in your understanding. By teaching others what you know, you will learn it better than you knew it before. By writing out your unspoken knowledge, you will apply order to your experience.

Look at the information that populates your life. Look at the conversations in which you often find yourself. These things don't just happen out of habit. There's a reason you keep coming back to the same stories and discussions. Take time to ponder your intended meaning before you invest your time in writing sentences, paragraphs, and chapters indiscriminately. You will soon realize why outlining your work is philosophically necessary, not just a practical approach to make writing your rough draft easier.

In the age of information, it might surprise you to realize how much vital information is still not easily accessible to the public. Many high-dollar professions are built around helping normal people with urgent and complex processes that require special expertise. You might have to pay thousands of dollars to a consultant or licensed specialist in the area of health, law, or finance to get reliable advice on some subjects. While a book doesn't completely replace a hired professional's live, personal advice, it can liberate sacred information previously kept behind closed doors.

A good example of liberating exclusive information is a book I produced called Get Bail, Leave Jail: What Every American Needs to Know about Hiring a Bondsman and Getting Released Before Trial by S.J. Plotkin. You've probably never thought about what you should do if you ever get arrested and find yourself locked in a jail cell, accused of a serious crime and awaiting trial. The bail bond process, which is an integral part of America's criminal justice system, is not something most people have accurate or detailed knowledge of. The consequences of their ignorance are compounded when they or someone they love are dealing with an emergency situation that requires immediate action.

The author of Get Bail, Leave Jail saw the lack of common knowledge about bail bond processes as an opportunity to brand himself and his bail bond agency as reputable sources of information in what many people consider to be a controversial profession. Because his is the first book to adequately cover all the bail-related issues that can arise from the moment someone is arrested to the time their bond is exonerated in court, it has taken this important and misunderstood industry out of obscurity and into the public light for the low cost of $9.99 for the e-book and $19.99 for the paperback. That's quite a bargain compared to the alternatives of spending dozens of hours trying to find the right information yourself from free sources, paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in consulting fees from experts, or facing the legal consequences of your ignorance behind bars.

Focus, Scope, and Resolution

Different types of messages carry different focuses and intended outcomes. Works of a philosophical nature open up the way readers think to a larger context. They guide readers to ask new questions. They don't just offer easy or functional answers. The purpose is to leave the reader pondering the many possible answers and potential meaning of what the message has revealed.

Works of an informational nature tend to do the opposite: They provide answers to specific questions readers have when they begin the journey. The goal is to move from a wide, open, and aimless approach into sharply delineated categories. They exist to make readers' conceptual maps smaller and more detailed, zooming in from the broad overview they had when they began.

Another way to think about the focus dichotomy is through the frame of problems and solutions. When someone knows the nature of their problem, they naturally seek out the most appropriate answers they can find. When a person runs out of pressing problems, they seek out others worth taking on. As an educator and philosopher, you facilitate motion through the different stages of this psychological cycle.

Ask yourself now: Is the primary purpose of your book to offer answers or instigate questions? Or is it some combination of both? Whenever one need is satiated, it opens to door to a higher level of thinking than the questioner had before. By stacking layers of questions and corresponding answers throughout your book's chapters, you will create a path to a higher understanding of previously unfathomed things. To do this well, you'll need to research the questions commonly associated with your field (especially if their answers are not easy to find elsewhere) and plan your content around them.

Magnification and resolution describe how deep you will go into the subject of your book. An infinite number of books can be written on increasingly refined, yet related, topics belonging to the same category. You can take the stance that your reader is a total newcomer and only needs a basic overview of concepts (the "intro to" or "101" approach). You can challenge the established wisdom on a complex but well-known subject by bringing it into a new esoteric domain.

If your goal is to write something more groundbreaking and pioneering, you won't just want to rehash commonly discussed ideas about your subject. You will want to open up minds already interested in it to a bold new perspective. The biggest obstacle you will likely face will be figuring out how to frame your message so that readers who are already well-versed in the common discourse will be receptive to the unprecedented conclusions you will be drawing.

You can also take a common subject but talk about it from a perspective that only applies to a rare and specific kind of person (instead of "social media marketing," write about "increasing Facebook ad conversion rates for stay-at-home dads in the aerospace industry"). Plenty of types of people need to understand social media marketing, but not all of them need to improve their Facebook ad conversion rates, and certainly, most of them aren't involved in the complexities of working for the aerospace industry from home. Your options are only as limited as your imagination and your ability to find enough people to pay for what you write about.

Informational vs. Philosophical

Informational books are easy to spot by their titles, which typically denote the focus and resolution of the problems they solve:

• The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd by Allan Dib
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand by Al and Laura Ries
• Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
• Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Richard Todd and Tracy Kidder
• How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life by J. J. Luna
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

These are the kinds of instructional guides readers will turn to when they know they have holes in their understanding. The information they are missing prevents them from being able to do something they care about as effectively as they would like to. These books take something the reader knows they don't know enough about and give them more to know.

What issues are you attempting to solve for your readers? Why haven't they been able to solve those problems until now? What will make your book their best hope for resolution? It will have to do something that no other solution has offered. The better you understand the nature of the problem, the obstacles to overcoming it, and the approaches other authors have already offered, the more unique and effective your approach will be. That means happier readers, marketing that speaks to the right people, and more sales sustained for the long-term future.

Philosophically oriented books, on the other hand, take subjects readers think they understand and increase their awareness of how much they don't yet know. The more one learns about a subject, the more they see of what else they can learn about it, such as with the examples presented here:

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
• The Book of Five Rings: A Classic Text on the Japanese Way of the Sword by Miyamoto Musashi
• Destination Earth: A New Philosophy of Travel by a World-Traveler by Nicos Hadjicostis
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz
• Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

To me, the greatest books weave both philosophy and instruction into a dance of refining awareness. 

Whatever you write, it must accomplish at least one of two things:

1. Inform the reader of something useful to their goals.
2. Engage their emotions.

Every sentence you create must follow these guidelines. If it doesn't, why even bother to write it? Why should a reader bother to digest it? These rules are analogous to the common advice offered for writing fiction that every sentence must advance the plot and/or reveal character.

Fail to follow these principles, and you will end up with substanceless, filler content: words that do nothing more than take up space on a page and waste everyone's time. Engaging emotions matters because when readers enjoy the process of learning, they will welcome new ideas and lust for the expansion of their knowledge. Indeed, the success of all forms of education depends upon the quality of entertainment they provide.

This doesn't mean you can't repeat yourself ever. Some repetition is unavoidable in early drafts when you aren't certain in exactly what form and order things will ultimately be presented. A certain amount of reminding the reader of important data or tying new concepts into previously established ones is vital to retention, but only so long as you can find new forms in which to present it. Simply restating yourself ceases to entertain, causing the audience to cease to care. It will also make your book run longer than it needs to be to get its message across in its ideal form.

Scope and Length

Determining the ideal length of your book requires you to think about how broad a subject it is meant to cover and how deep into the details of that subject it will go. You also need to think about how it will appear in the eyes of readers once it is published, including the typical page count they have come to expect from other books on your subject. An extremely long book (compared to category conventions) can come across as either intimidating or impressive. An extremely short book can appear reader-friendly or underwhelming. The word count, once formatted according to the author's preferences for font size and page size (the trim size), will roughly determine the total number of pages in a book.

There's no definitive answer to how long a book should be. Having experimented with many sizes, shapes, and types of books, I can only suggest a few guidelines. To receive the full social and financial benefits publishing a book offers, aim for a minimum of 30,000 words (which works out to about 125 pages in a 6" x 9" book with typical book font sizes). Anything less than that feels like more of a glorified pamphlet than a real book. You'll know the psychological difference if you take a variety of short and long books off your shelf and pay attention to how each one feels in your hand and the impression it makes in your mind. Think about how you want your book to affect people when they hold it.

A shorter book can still deliver enormous, concentrated value, but it does not take on the same qualities and appearances book buyers expect when they hand over their money for a professional publication. Except in rare circumstances, you will not be able to charge as much money for your book, and it will not impress people as much to acknowledge you as its author. On the other hand, a Bible-sized nonfiction book (or, really, anything more than about 400 pages or 100,000 words) might seem like a more in-depth study than casual readers are willing to take on.

The Influential Author is about 110,000 words. That's quite a bit longer than all other books on Amazon about self-publishing. This length was not planned from the beginning of my drafting. It was arrived at organically as I outlined, drafted, revised, and expanded my vision for what the book should contain. Once a few chapters had been written and I had detailed notes on the rest, I realized this length would be necessary to contain everything essential I had to say and accomplish the book's purpose. Its extended length will also help it stand out to writers looking for a deeper and more complete guide.

I've also worked on books that were better suited for lengths between 30,000 and 40,000 words. Their subject matter and purpose made it more reader-friendly if people could quickly skim through to find exactly the information they needed on a specific topic (such as the case with the bail bond and tax books I produced). Expanding the word count with throat-clearing or philosophical waxing would have changed the fundamental functions of the books, diluting their effectiveness for readers seeking conciseness and precision. Their relatively short length was still long enough to be taken seriously but handy enough to carry around and reference as needed.

If you are not clear in your goal for your book from the time you start writing, its scope may shift and grow beyond anticipation. Endless rounds of editing and rewriting will ensue as you realize you aren't covering everything you want to (or that you've wasted precious time covering far more than you needed to). This is particularly a danger if you believe your book must include every valuable thought you've ever had or tell the story of your entire life. Believing your first book is your only shot to communicate what matters to you leads to a desperate state of content overstuffing. The influence of your book will be defined by its limits.