The idea

Here’s what kills a lot of books; the idea.

Most ideas have enough oxygen for 300-1600 words (ok, it’s really 183-1586 words but I just rounded up … where was I .. oh, yeah, the idea) 300-1600 words is an essay.

Read most business book and you can get the core thesis in the first forty-nine pages. After that, it’s just mostly cheap buffet-like sides and fillers. The idea is probably straight-forward and complete by then, but forty-nine pages is a pamphlet, not a book. Publishers need books; readers demand a whole book’s worth of stuff for $24.99. So the author keeps churning out words to fill pages, but rarely expands the idea.

Don’t even get me started on a novel! How anyone tells a story over 250+ pages when most stories can be told three times over in the time it takes to drink a beer, I’ll never understand. But novelists get my respect!

So there you are, wanting to write a book but you are done talking in twenty-three pages. Your plot has wrapped up, your main character has traversed their hero’s journey and you are staring at a blank page again, two hundred pages from “The End.”

But a book of essays solves that problem. 250 pages is anywhere from 50-75 essays, depending on length. At one essay a week, you’ve got a whole book in a year. The biggest issue at that point is how to organize them; by theme, by narrative arc, by chronology.

A lot of writers aren’t novelists and that’s ok! That should not stop you from becoming an author. If you’ve been writing on Substack, Medium or even LinkedIn regularly, chances are you’ve already written a book. Now you just gotta publish it.

Hi, I’m Gerard and I help writers publish their work as a legacy in a print book I call a Little Legacy Book — “little” because of the portable size, not the value. Follow along if you’ve ever thought about compiling your online work as a forever print book. This post ran on about 200 words longer than it needed to, but you already knew that… 😀