One of the things I talk about often is that we should not be comparing our first-draft manuscripts with published, edited books. And yet, I find that these comparisons are incredibly persistent.
They don’t just happen at the book level, either. They happen at the idea level.
When you set out to write a book that really showcases your unique position—whether that’s a position you have in the nonprofit world, advocacy work, speaking, business, or work with clients—it’s very common to worry that your idea just isn’t good enough.
Sometimes that sounds like, “I’m not sure if I have enough for a book.”
Sometimes it’s, “I’m not sure if I’m ready.”
And sometimes it’s just the vague suspicion that other authors seem to have much clearer, more interesting, more original ideas than you do.
But often, what’s happening underneath all of this is a comparison between a raw, rough idea—one you may not have even shared with anyone yet—and an idea that eventually landed a book on the New York Times bestseller list.
Those things are simply not comparable.
If you’re trying to figure out how to develop a book idea, the first thing to understand is that the ideas you see in finished books did not spring fully formed from the author’s head. The idea itself has usually been through the wringer.
The author may have worked with editors along the way. They may have done market testing. They may have spent years teaching, speaking, writing, researching, or simply thinking through the subject. They probably did quite a bit of self-reflection before the book ever started to be written.
That development process matters.
In fact, I think we often want to skip it because we are so eager to get to the part where we can say, “I’m writing my book!”
But when we actually pause and take the time to develop the idea, the entire writing process becomes easier, more enjoyable, and ultimately more effective. If you’re still wondering whether you’re far enough along to begin, I’ve written before about knowing when you’re ready to start writing and choosing what your book should actually be about.
What a developed book idea actually looks like
I see this difference in real time with clients all the time.
I’ve been working with one author for about a year whose book, The Character Code, will be coming out this fall. He is a big-time tech startup guy, so he has a lot to share about business, entrepreneurship, startup life, financing, work-life balance, and success.
But he also wanted the book to contain a lot of wisdom simply about living. In addition to everything he had learned about succeeding in business, he wanted all of it to fit under an umbrella of being a really good person.
As we got into the writing process, I started noticing something.
The chapters covering ideas he had already spent a lot of time speaking and writing about just flew off the page.
And you know what else?
They were great.
I could almost always tell when he sent me a chapter on something he had talked about extensively before. The ideas were clear and well-developed. He could anticipate objections his audience might have. He had strong stories and examples because he had already practiced and refined them. And he knew exactly how to move through the points in a way that made sense.
The newer chapters were different.
This is a book of essays, and some of the more personal ideas were things he had not spent years speaking or writing about. With those chapters, we often had to stop and talk through what the idea actually was.
But once we did that—once we honed it, dialed it in, and got it into parameters that felt good to him—he could write those chapters almost as easily as the ideas he had been speaking about for years.
This is not an anomaly.
The more developed our ideas are, the easier they are to write. And the better the book will ultimately be.
So how do you actually do that?
Here are five ways I recommend when someone asks me how to develop a book idea before writing the manuscript.
1. Work with a professional to develop your book idea
I know this can seem like overkill.
One thing I find very often is that authors assume they need to write the book first and then bring in a professional.
And sometimes that works! Depending on how confident you are, how well you know your idea already, and how much experience you have writing long-form work, you may be able to make that process work perfectly well.
But if there is any shakiness around what you’re trying to say, what exactly you’re trying to do, how committed you are to one take versus another, or how you should angle the book, bringing somebody in early can actually save you quite a bit of time and money.
In other words, you do not necessarily have to wait until you have a 70,000-word manuscript to get useful professional feedback.
And you have lots of options here.
Maybe you already work with a speaker coach, business coach, leadership coach, messaging strategist, or book coach. If you already have somebody in your back pocket who understands how you think, how you approach your work, and what your goals are, that can be gold.
They can push you on the central ideas. They can ask the questions you don’t think to ask yourself. They can point out assumptions you haven’t interrogated. They can show you other people saying similar things and push you to explain how your perspective is different.
Side note: It almost always is. You just haven’t necessarily thought about it that way yet.
And sometimes the biggest value of this kind of engagement is simply that it creates a container in which you have to sit with these ideas.
We are all busy. We all have a ridiculous amount on our plates. Having protected time with somebody trained to pull those ideas out of you can make an enormous difference.
This is a big part of what happens in one-on-one book coaching through Editor in Your Pocket, but you certainly don’t have to work with us. The important thing is finding somebody who is genuinely good at thinking with you rather than simply telling you what book to write.
And if your book is meant to support speaking, teaching, a business, or a larger body of work, this development has value far beyond the manuscript itself. A strong book idea can also clarify your messaging and help you identify the thing you’re actually doing differently—the core idea you want to become known for. Jessica Sato, for example, does this kind of thought-partnership work with established founders through her Big Idea Intensive.
That clarity is valuable whether you are writing a book or not.
2. Start talking about the idea before the book comes out
If you want to speak or teach about your book eventually, I want you to consider doing it now.
Yes, before the book is finished.
Maybe even before you start writing it.
I know this lands as strange advice for some people, but as somebody who has a podcast, I can tell you there is almost nothing that will refine an idea faster than having to talk about it for a long time every single week.
When you talk about your ideas regularly, you get feedback from your audience.
But you also get feedback from yourself.
You will notice that there are certain ideas that light you up when you talk about them. There are subjects where you suddenly have ten more things to say. There are questions people ask that send you down a rabbit hole. There are stories you keep coming back to.
Pay attention to that.
You may realize, “Okay, this subtopic actually has a lot more here than I realized.”
And if you have started building the infrastructure for however you eventually want to speak or teach—online, in person, through workshops, podcasts, newsletters, video, whatever—you now have a playground.
You have somewhere to bring these ideas out and see how they land.
That is one of the reasons I encourage nonfiction authors to start building an author platform earlier than they think they need to. Your platform isn’t just something you create to sell books after publication. It can become part of how to develop a book idea in the first place.
Smith Publicity makes a similar point in its guidance on building your book marketing platform: authors benefit from establishing the audience and infrastructure around their work well before publication.
So start now.
Talk about the idea. Teach it. Write newsletters about it. Record podcast episodes. Give a workshop. Try explaining it to somebody over lunch.
See where the energy is.
Because figuring that out now is much better than finishing the book and discovering you don’t even like talking about the topic.
3. Journal about the parts you want to gloss over
Y’all know I love to journal.
But I want to give you something very specific to journal about here: the parts of your idea that seem worth glossing over.
I think this happens in two different ways.
Journal about the things that make you uncomfortable
The first is particularly important if the thing you are writing about is at all emotional or sensitive for you.
You are very, very likely to want to gloss over the parts that make you emotionally uncomfortable.
But friends, that is often where the gold lives.
Maybe there are aspects of your healing you would rather move past quickly. Maybe there are parts of your struggle that are still confusing. Maybe there is something you don’t want to get too vulnerable about.
Your instinct may be, “Well, I don’t need to get into that anyway.”
Okay.
You do not have to put it in the published book.
But go into your journal and ask yourself:
Why do I want to gloss over this?
What am I afraid of?
What would it mean for me to really engage with it?
What might I learn if I did?
If I knew nobody else would ever read these pages, what would I actually say?
Use those safe, protected journal pages—not the pages of your published book—to investigate the question.
If you do this enough times, I often find that you start discovering things you have been hiding even from yourself. And sometimes those things turn out to be crucially important to the topic you are trying to cover.
They can also become the pieces that make your book unique while still allowing it to fit into the larger landscape of books around it.
That is the dream.
And sometimes this is the moment when someone who thought, “I don’t know if I have enough for a book,” realizes that they absolutely do.
If this kind of avoidance is showing up as getting stuck rather than uncertainty about the idea itself, you may also find this question for unsticking your book useful.
Journal about the boring stuff, too
The second version is less dramatic.
I want you to dig into the basics.
Imagine your big idea floating up at the 10,000-foot view. Underneath it are strings grounding it to earth.
Those strings are the premises that need to be true for your idea to hold.
They are the mechanics and logistics—the things that actually have to happen for the idea to materialize.
They may be baseline scientific or psychological observations.
They may be things you have simply experienced over and over again in your day-to-day work.
They are the details.
And often, at least some of those on-the-ground details are things we haven’t really interrogated because we take them for granted.
But there can be gold there, too.
Not necessarily in telling readers basic things they have already heard, but in explaining those basic things through the lens of your larger idea.
Sometimes the simple things you take for granted are exactly where the growth is for your reader.
I think about this a lot when I follow people talking about AI. There are plenty of people talking about how AI is changing the world, and personally, I find a lot of it pretty terrifying.
But the explanations I find most useful are often the ones that go underneath the giant scary claim and explain the mechanics.
What assumptions are these systems making?
How does this thing actually work?
What is happening underneath the surface?
Once you understand those things, suddenly the enormous abstract issue has an entry point. It becomes more actionable. More practical. Honestly, sometimes more reassuring simply because there is a structure to understand.
Can you give that to your reader?
If you’re wondering how to develop a book idea beyond its broad premise, ask yourself which supposedly boring or obvious details underneath your idea you haven’t investigated yet.
Then journal about those, too.
What are the implications of combining one of those details with your larger idea?
What would you say if you had to explain how it works to your fifth-grade nephew?
What would you desperately want him to understand so he wasn’t being unduly influenced by somebody else’s explanation?
Write that down.
There is probably more there than you think.
4. Ask your future readers what they are struggling with
If you have begun building a readership or audience, go straight to the source.
And by “audience,” I don’t necessarily mean thousands of followers.
Maybe it is your clients. Maybe it is your newsletter list. Maybe it is twenty people in a community organization. Maybe it is your friends and family.
If you are trying to reach these people with your book, it is important to know what’s going on with them.
Ask them.
Where are they struggling right now?
What feels harder than it used to?
What questions keep coming up?
If you can create an ongoing conversation, even better. Ask questions. Gather information. If you teach, coach, consult, or advise, try offering possible solutions and pay attention to how people react.
This can be especially useful if you are relatively new to the work you eventually want the book to support.
It can also keep established experts from getting trapped in the same conversations they have been having for ten years.
I am a business owner, too. It is incredibly easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and default to the things we have always talked about in the ways we have always talked about them.
And sure, people often do need to hear things more than once.
But cultural contexts also change.
Society changes.
Industries change.
The pressures on your readers change.
Their understanding of the subject changes.
I’m certainly not suggesting that you change your core idea every time the winds shift. But if you’re still trying to figure out how to develop a book idea and haven’t really honed it yet, your future readers are one of the best resources you have.
This is also why I don’t love the idea that authors should disappear into a cave for two years, write the entire book in secret, and emerge only when it’s time to promote it.
Books are never really written alone.
So pull other people in.
And remember that the goal is not to let your audience vote on what your book should say. The goal is to understand what they are experiencing so you can make deliberate choices about how your ideas meet them there.
That distinction matters, especially if your book is part of a larger business or career strategy. I’ve written more about balancing what you want the book to be with what you need the book to do and about using a book to grow your business.
Your readers can give you information.
You still get to decide what to do with it.
5. Remember that your topic and your story are not separate
My final tip for how to develop a book idea is one I think expert authors especially need to hear:
Your topic and your story are not separate.
There is a reason you care about this topic.
I promise it is not just objective chance.
Whenever we are pulled toward a subject strongly enough that we want to spend years thinking about it and eventually write an entire book about it, there is usually something personal underneath that pull.
We used to laugh about this a little when I was in grad school.
I straddled the humanities and social sciences but was in a very social-science-heavy program, so we were often encouraged to think of our subjects as these objective things we were studying. We objectively cared about them. We were passionless. We were removing our bias from the picture.
I never really believed that was possible.
I still don’t.
I think even the hardest hard-science people are driven by particular investments in their lives to study the things they study.
And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
In fact, if you tell me that you are completely passionless, that you were simply drawn by chance to objectively study this subject, I have a question:
Why do you care enough about it to write a book?
All of us are connected to our topics through our lived experience.
But expert authors sometimes hesitate to share that lived experience because they worry it will lessen their expertise.
It’s almost like: “Well, if I were really an expert, I wouldn’t need to use my own story. I would use other people’s stories. I would use research. I would use data.”
Friends, this is not how readers work.
We want to get to know you.
And as long as we only get to hear other people’s stories, we don’t really get that connection with who you are, what you want us to know, and why you care so much that we know it.
Your story does not have to replace the research.
It can sit beside it.
Your lived experience does not cancel out the degree, credentials, scholarship, professional experience, or years of work that make you an expert.
It can help us understand why that expertise matters.
This kind of combination is also one of my favorite forms of nonfiction—the books that use story and expertise together rather than forcing the author to choose between them. It’s part of why we spend so much time thinking about the relationship between an author’s vision and the book itself.
Your experience may be what makes the idea unique
One of our authors, Yolanda Bogart, is working on a book about autism and working with children with autism.
She has every credential.
She is a doctor and a psychiatrist.
She also has an autistic child at home.
And in her book, she is combining those pieces.
That isn’t necessarily easy. Combining personal story and professional expertise can be challenging.
But when you read her book, you learn about the nature of autism. You learn about neurodiversity more broadly. You learn about genetics and about the ways culture interacts with autism and neurodivergence.
And you understand those ideas through a perspective that could not have been created by simply gathering information from journal articles and putting it into a book.
Her lived experience helps pull out the best of what she’s trying to say.
More importantly, it helps make the idea uniquely hers.
Think about how many books already exist on neurodiversity.
Then think about what changes when you get a book written by someone who is not only an expert on paper, but also an expert through lived experience.
That combination matters.
So even if you have a PhD, PsyD, MD, MBA, decades of experience, or every certification imaginable, ask yourself:
How might my own story amplify what I’m trying to say?
It doesn’t take away from your expertise.
It may be the thing that finally makes readers understand why your expertise matters.
How to develop a book idea before you start drafting
We have a very understandable tendency to think of idea development as the thing we do before the “real” work begins.
I think that’s backwards.
This is the work.
When you talk about your ideas, test them, journal through the uncomfortable pieces, dig into the boring assumptions, listen to your audience, and investigate your own connection to the subject, you are doing the work that will eventually make the manuscript possible.
And this is why how to develop a book idea is not really a question of sitting down one afternoon and brainstorming a clever premise.
You are creating the intellectual foundation underneath the book.
You are figuring out what you believe.
You are figuring out where your perspective is different.
You are figuring out which stories actually matter.
And you are figuring out what your reader needs from you.
Once that foundation is there, outlining gets easier. Drafting gets easier. Talking about the book gets easier. Eventually, even marketing the book gets easier because you actually know what you want to be known for.
If you’re ready to turn that developed idea into a structure, you can also read about why outlining makes the writing process easier or explore The Memoir Method’s step-by-step outlining process if you’re writing memoir.
And if you want somebody to help you pull apart the idea before you start writing, reach out to us. We offer idea development both as a focused VIP-day-style engagement and in longer coaching relationships.
We can help you pull the ideas out, pressure-test them, identify what’s uniquely yours, and turn them into a solid outline and writing plan.
Because you do not need to show up with a finished idea.
That’s the whole point.
You just need to show up with the thing you can’t stop thinking about.
We can develop it from there.
