A common assumption among aspiring authors in the worlds of business, thought leadership, and autobiography is that the most appropriate time to share their expertise and experiences is at the end of their career. The logic is understandable: at this stage of your life, you’ve accumulated enough wisdom to fill 200 or so pages with invaluable advice for readers who want to emulate your success or simply understand a little more about life. And it’s certainly the case that some of the most successful books in these genres have been written by authors whose achievements and influence are hard to match—think Phil Knight, Ted Turner, Roger Iger, Martha Stewart, or in the UK, Lord Sugar. They often make absorbing, reflective legacy pieces.
However, there’s also significant space in the market for books whose authors are leading the charge in today’s business landscape—people who are exploring new ideas, setting new standards, and in many cases, changing outdated practices for the better. These books help readers enormously, while helping their authors build credibility and gravitas, not to mention visibility and other benefits that can lead directly to new business opportunities.
However, even when these advantages are understood, entrepreneurs often dismiss the notion of putting pen to paper. Working days are already long enough, and every hour is already fully accounted for. Customers need attention, employees need support, a constant stream of strategic decisions needs to be made, and even day-to-day administrative tasks can get in the way.
Writing a manuscript is often seen as a mountainous undertaking, a full-time commitment that will take years to complete. And while that may be true in some cases, it’s entirely possible to complete a book—and realise the benefits of publishing it—in a contained, manageable way. You just have to approach the process correctly. Treat it like any other major business initiative, such as a website build or a significant marketing campaign, and you can reframe the project in a way that fits within the priorities of your business schedule.
If you’re keen to embark on a publishing project, there are a few essential areas to consider.
Identify the Entrepreneurial Goal You Want Your Book to Accomplish
The first question you’ll want to address is: What do I want the publication of this book to accomplish? A clear answer should help you avoid the mistake of writing a book you may really want to write instead of the book your company needs you to write in order to support its current core business objectives. (The book you really want to write can come later.) Is this book intended to be a lead generator? A calling card for speaking agencies? A means of attracting investors? A personal brand builder? Your objective will shape every publishing strategy decision that follows: subject, title, tone, structure, marketing, and publication path.
Build a Writing Plan that Works with Your Schedule as a Leader
Once you’ve defined the objective of your book, it’s vital to allocate sufficient time to the project, as you would any other major project. Don’t consider it something you’ll do in your spare time (after all, you probably have little to none of this already). Build a realistic schedule, ideally at times and on days when you know your creative energy will be topped up, and you won’t be disturbed. At KAA, editors and ghostwriters spend many dozens of hours with our authors, and our project managers often create writing schedules spanning a year or more.
You probably know the time of day when your mind is at its most creative. You might block out two early morning hours twice a week, dedicate a full Friday every fortnight, or schedule more regular, short writing sprints. You’ll also know (or soon discover) your preferred method of writing. While it’s likely you’ll sit at your laptop and type, you might find that dictation works better for you, or even that you prefer to write by hand and convert that text to a computer-friendly format at a later date. One thing you shouldn’t do is to write your book using AI, for reasons we discuss here.
Audit your Expertise to Identify the Lessons You Want to Share
You might be the most confident presenter on the planet or be able to write a product deck in a matter of hours, but it could still feel daunting to look at the first, blank page of your manuscript, with a word count of 60,000 or more stretching into the distance. However, if you stop for a minute and review the expertise you’ve already shared elsewhere, you will likely find much of the material for your book is within reach.
As an entrepreneur, you’ll probably have pitched your ideas and work to clients, prepared business plans, and written and delivered numerous presentations. You may also have appeared on podcasts, given interviews, or delivered podium speeches about your area of expertise. Or your entire business may have been inspired by the dissertation you wrote as an undergraduate. Wherever your business ethos, mantra, principles, or approach came from, you’ll likely have useful source material to draw from. These sources can also reveal a natural structure for your book by helping you group related topics and noting which ideas recur most frequently to identify the core principles of your work. To bring those ideas to life, you can use genuine case studies of customers you’ve helped or problems you’ve overcome.
A note: If you work with a ghostwriter from KAA, this person will interview you to help pull out the insights worth sharing. Our writers know what readers are looking for, and they’ll ask the questions needed to uncover your smartest ideas.
Assemble a Team That Understands the Publishing Process and Landscape
Whether you’re exceeding your weekly word count with ease or spending each session writing and refining just a few sentences, remember that producing a book is always a team effort. Even prominent, hugely successful authors often rely on contributions from specialists including editors, researchers, co-writers, production coordinators, designers, and proofreaders. It is entirely legitimate to recruit experts to help you produce the book that most effectively achieves your objectives, just as you would delegate different elements of any major business project to those best qualified to deliver them. You may have colleagues who are well placed to perform these roles, or you might decide to cast your net more widely.
Hiring an editorial team doesn’t mean your ideas are no longer your own, nor does it mean you lose control over the words that are written or the voice they’re written in. The best editors and ghostwriters are exceptionally talented at retaining authenticity of voice while crafting prose that delivers its messages with clarity and eloquence. And whether your team is internal, external, or a mixture of both, building a clear revisions process into your schedule will ensure the language and tone are calibrated to your satisfaction.
Identify the KPIs You’ll Use to Measure the ROI of Your Book
Once your book has made it into print (or digital or audio formats), it’s worth revisiting your initial objectives and assessing its performance as you would any other business activity. It’s easy to be seduced (or disheartened) by a book’s Amazon ranking, but this might not reflect your true goal. To take an obvious example, if your original intention was to use the book as a calling card to potential investors and you secure backing from a reader you hand-delivered a copy of the book to on publication day, that outcome may matter more.
Becoming a bestselling author definitely brings lasting value in many ways, but it’s only one measure of success. You might ask yourself some of the following questions: How many qualified leads or new customers has the book helped to recruit? How many speaking invitations have I received since publication? How many new relationships has it helped to cultivate? Some of these KPIs are more quantifiable than others, but you should be able to judge the return on investment of a book the same way you measure it for other sales and marketing activities. And with periodic updates to the content, your book can continue delivering value for years.
Finally, it’s worth considering how the book can add value across other areas of your business and beyond its initial objectives. Chapter sub-sections can become blog posts. Quotes can become marketing messages. The contents page can form the framework of a slide deck. Those 200-plus pages are more than a single piece of content—they’re an intellectual property library that you can fillet, repurpose, and draw on whenever needed.
Don’t Wait Until Retirement to Write a Book; You’ll Benefit More While Growing Your Business
A book demonstrates expertise, lends credibility to your opinions, raises your profile and visibility, and creates opportunities that can help grow your business for years to come.
Readers will always be interested in books that distil lessons learned from decades in business by authors whose experience and success have brought notoriety. But there is also space in the market for authors whose businesses are just getting started, and there are many compelling reasons to write about the enterprise you’re establishing now. It’s an entrepreneurial thing to do.
Explore KAA’s Book Writing Services here.
Written by Adam Strange, Director of Author Strategy (UK Office) at KAA
Adam Strange has been an editor, publisher and agent in the UK for 17 years, working with multiple #1 Sunday Times– and New York Times-bestselling authors, including Rafa Nadal, Seth Godin, JK Rowling, and Gwyneth Paltrow—among many others.
Previously, Adam was a publisher at commercial nonfiction imprint Sphere at Little, Brown (Hachette), before heading up the literary arm of talent management agency Gleam Futures. Adam has worked closely with dozens of writers of all experience and abilities to ensure that the publishing projects they undertake are as creatively and commercially rewarding as possible, and has published multiple bestsellers during nearly two decades in the industry. He has worked with a large number of high-profile authors across the celebrity, sporting, and business landscapes, along with lesser-known expert authors in a wide variety of fields.
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