As someone who works with expert authors to write and publish books that build careers, I speak with a lot of folks who aren’t quite sure if they’re ready to start their book. And I totally get this. It is so difficult to know whether your confidence is warranted—and even more so whether your imposter syndrome is warranted.
That’s why I want to give you three concrete questions you can ask yourself to decide: Are you ready to write a book?
One of the most difficult questions authors have to ask themselves is whether they’re actually ready to start their book. And one thing I find, especially among the high achievers I tend to work with, is that there is often a real disconnect between how much we know, how much we have to share with our audience and the world, and how much we really trust that knowledge is actually valuable to others.
And y’all, I feel this in my own life so hard. It can be so, so, so difficult to give ourselves an accurate assessment of whether we’re actually ready to get started with something like a book—something that is not only going to take a pretty large amount of time, effort, and energy, but will also be around for probably forever. We need to be sure we’re ready.
At the same time, I know y’all don’t want to wait so long that you miss the window of opportunity when your book could really do the most for you and your audience.
So I want to break down three questions I try to get at when I’m chatting with aspiring expert authors.
What Is an Expert Author?
Let’s start by clarifying what I mean when I use the term “expert author,” because this is a new term I’m workshopping, and I really, really like it. I want to toss it out to y’all and see what you think.
One of the things I have really grappled with as I’ve built this podcast—and as I’ve built my company—is helping people see themselves as someone who could write and publish a book. Someone who should write and publish a book.
And one of the things I hear so, so often is that the term “writer,” or even the term “aspiring writer,” can feel a little intimidating. If we don’t feel like we have enough credibility, or we haven’t spent enough time working in the world of books to call ourselves a writer, we often feel stuck in this kind of liminal space.
That matters more than you might think when it comes to deciding whether you’re ready to write your book. The terminology we use to describe ourselves matters because our identity is very, very closely tied up with our readiness.
As long as we don’t feel like our identity is one of expertise, authority, or credibility, we will very, very often shy away from writing a book. We’ll basically assume we’re not ready because we don’t yet feel 100 percent confident that we are the best at this thing.
And that can mean we wait and wait and wait and wait while other folks pass us by, and we miss out on all the benefits of writing a book.
Here’s the catch-22: One of the benefits of writing a book is gaining that authority and credibility. So I think you can see where I’m going here.
We often end up in this vicious cycle where we don’t think we’re good enough to start the book yet, but the book might actually be the thing that helps us feel as though we are good enough.
I see books giving people that confidence in two ways every single day.
The first is external authority and credibility. And I suspect that if you’re kind of itching to write a book, you want that. I totally get it. And it is worth it.
When we write a book, that often signals to others that we are either the authority or at least an authority. After all, we have this phrase: “She wrote the book on the topic.” We all want that, particularly if you are in the leadership space, the speaking space, or any space where your expertise is leading the way in the work you’re doing.
When the book comes out, you will experience that boost in credibility and authority because you’ve got the book. And I’ll tell you, I see this across the board.
In fact, one of the things I think is so striking is that I have often seen folks—especially people transitioning from one career area to another—use a book on a different topic to establish credibility and authority on their new topic. I know that might seem a little far-fetched, but truly, just having written and published a book will often give you authority, credibility, and external approval simply because you finished this process.
I think that is well deserved. But it is also something that comes after the book, so it doesn’t do you very much good if you’re waiting for that level of authority before you start.
The second way doing this work gives you a sense of authority is through internal clarity.
I work with folks in all kinds of areas, and I think a lot of you know I was a university professor for many, many years. I am someone who has worked with a lot of people to clarify and hone their ideas. We did this in all kinds of ways, and particularly when I was at the university, I worked in a communication and film department, so people were sharing and building ideas in all kinds of formats.
Let me tell you: I have never seen a process that creates as much clarity, or that helps people hone and dial in their ideas as certainly, as writing a book.
There is simply no way you will go through the entire process—from development to drafting to editing to getting feedback—without coming away feeling like your ideas are concrete. You will understand how valuable they are and how much more valuable they can become when you circulate and hone them.
And truly, when you come away with the book in your hands, there is such a sense of recognition, such a sense of understanding your purpose. In that way, perhaps even more than the external validation of holding the book in your hands, the clarity you gain through the process is going to serve you so well as you move forward into the kind of authority you’re looking for.
Unfortunately, again, that is something that happens through the process, which means we’ve got to decide we’re ready before we have access to it.
I know, y’all. This makes things so, so complicated.
So how does the term “expert author” serve us? What I want to encourage you to do is really latch onto the fact that once you start writing, you are an expert author.
There is no magic to becoming an expert author other than stepping into your authority. And as I just shared, the process of writing the book—as well as, of course, the outcome of writing the book—is what builds that authority.
In many ways, the first step to actually being ready is to claim the identity of readiness. I want you to start thinking of yourself as an expert author.
I know it feels really uncomfortable. Please don’t close this article. It’s going to take a little practice. You’re going to have to get your brain used to this reclamation of what has actually always been true: You are the authority on the things you practice every day.
With that said, I know it can still be confusing to know whether you’re ready to write a book. So here are three really concrete questions you can ask yourself. You can even do a little homework here—journal about them or talk them through with a friend—to figure out whether you are ready to start the process.
1. Is Your Book Both Unique and Recognizable?
I am borrowing this question from a pretty standard part of a traditional publishing book proposal. The section where we typically clarify that we have both a recognizable and a unique book is the comps section.
“Comps” can stand for different things: competition, competing books, comparable books. It depends on how you want to think about it. But effectively, what you are doing in your comps section is saying, “Here are some other books that are similar to my book, and here is how my book is different.”
The comps section of your proposal will typically include three to five books published within the past three to five years. And I find that folks are often surprised when I tell them what types of books should go in there, because a lot of people really resist recognizing that there are any books similar to theirs at all.
But this is a mistake.
The thing about the book industry—the thing about the book market—is that most of us look for books that are similar to books we have liked in the past. That means if we try to say our book is totally different from anything else out there, we have often “uniqued” ourselves right out of a market. We don’t want that.
Instead, we want to be able to show that there are books in the same general topic area, that the genre is recognizable to our reader, and that we are contributing at least one new thing.
And one is not too few. You can get that uniqueness angle by simply having one slightly different perspective on your topic.
One thing I really want to caution you about, as I’m writing this in mid-2026, is using AI for writing and idea development. AI will often push you toward what is relatable. It will push you toward the books that already exist. AI is a probability machine. It is always going to focus on what it knows to be true, and one thing it knows to be true is that books on particular topics tend to cluster around one generic idea.
That is where the magic of your expert-author authority comes in.
If you can add one unique twist to that idea, you are not only separating yourself from others in your industry; you are also demonstrating that this is a human-made book. If you can put that unique spin on it, you are making yourself so much more valuable than so much of the content being pumped out day after day after day in the year of our Lord, 2026.
I want to give you a really concrete example of what I mean when I say “unique,” because sometimes I think we can go a little too far in the other direction from AI’s version of relatable.
One of our authors at Page & Podium Press is Lisa Kutona-Smith. Lisa’s book, Parallel Recovery, is amazing. It is a guidebook for people who love someone with substance use disorder.
If you think about books on substance use disorder, there are so many. Many of them have even been championed by major organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous. And yet there is still so much more that can be said on this topic. This is where Lisa’s book comes in.
Lisa has a couple of different ways she has achieved uniqueness in this book, and I think they are both worth a listen.
The first is that Lisa looks at substance use disorder treatment from a slightly different perspective. Often, the families of people suffering from substance use disorder are told to cut the person off—to have no tolerance for any of their behaviors related to substance use disorder.
Lisa’s platform says we must give these folks a safe place to come home to. If there is nowhere for them to land, then there is no real motivation for them to work their way through this desert, this disaster of a world they have to fight through to come back to stability.
Lisa is not talking about how family members can fix their person with substance use disorder. Rather, she is talking about how the family can create a safe, stable neurological environment for that person to come into for support.
Well, that’s a different twist, isn’t it?
Everything in this book is not different. Of course, many of the things that are true about substance use disorder are in her book and many, many other books. There are hundreds or probably thousands of books on substance use disorder published every several years.
And yet she has tweaked and twisted the idea just a little bit so that it speaks to something different. It gives us a twist. Most importantly, it helps people who have not been helped by the other things out there. That is what makes this book so unique within its topic area.
But there is a second thing I really want you to sit with. The second way Lisa’s book is unique in the space of books on substance use disorder is that it features her own story.
This book is not a memoir, which means it is not a narrative from start to finish. And yet Lisa is speaking from her own experience. She has worked with many people and families who love someone with substance use disorder, but she is also speaking from her experience as a mother whose son had substance use disorder issues and has now fought through them and is stable and thriving.
Once we combine our topic with our experience, we have a book that is an N of one. We have a book no one else can match.
I want to point that out because I find that many, many people—many experts, especially women, but some men too—resist putting their own experience into their book.
I get it. We often feel like giving our own experience is somehow less valuable than giving a famous person’s experience, dropping recognizable names, or citing studies.
But what I find with authors over and over again is that when we center your own experiences, we not only create uniqueness by putting your experience at the center; we also often discover that your approach is more unique than you even know.
Because you are naturally drawing on the things you know from your lived experience, I guarantee your approach to any topic is a little different from what anyone else could do. Lisa has leaned into both of those points.
What you will find in this excellent prescriptive nonfiction book is that, while it is not a narrative book, she has woven so much of her story into the prescriptive nonfiction writing we all know, love, and expect from this genre.
That makes the book unique, but not in a way that requires her to fall all over herself proving how different she is from everyone else. Rather, it feels effortless. It feels authoritative without trying too hard. She is working through both the topic and her experience in one very unique book.
So the first thing I want you to ask yourself is: Is your book recognizable within its genre and topic, but also unique because you have folded in your own experience and/or your own specific angle?
If you know your concept will incorporate those things, you are very, very likely further along than you think you are. If you have reached the point of having a unique perspective on your topic, you are more than ready to get started on that book.
I only have red flags when folks want to write a book that is really something we have already read many, many times before.
2. Are You Committed?
The second question I want you to ask yourself is: Are you committed?
Notice that I am not asking: Are you confident? Do you feel like you have done this long enough? Do you feel completely competent or authoritative?
Instead, I want you to ask: Are you committed?
Anyone who has been out there as a thought leader, running a business, speaking about something they are passionate about, or even just sharing ideas with friends day to day can tell you that when you first start thinking and talking about a topic, your perspective will slide all over the place.
When you are newly stepping into an area of thought leadership—or even just thought curiosity and exploration—you will often pick up all these different sources. With each new source, you will be swayed just a little bit here or there.
One thing that can happen if you start writing your book a little too early is that, as you move through the development process, you start to feel yourself pulled in all these different directions. That is a strong sign you are not quite ready. You may need a little more marination time before you are ready to pin down your book.
On the other hand, think back to the concept we just talked about: something unique and also recognizable. If you feel that you can commit to that concept—if you feel certain that this is the stake you are driving into the ground—you do not have to feel fully competent or fully authoritative.
You can lean on the fact that you are committed to this particular angle. As you grow and learn, which of course we all do, you know that all those new ideas will be able to funnel and filter roughly into the angle you have chosen.
I’ll give you an example of someone who came to me for a consultation and whom I actually suggested was not quite ready to write her book.
She had just decided to start a new coaching business. She wanted to work with people coming out of an industry that is socially looked down on and somewhat socially ostracized. I thought it was a great idea to help people move out of this particular area and into new career fields. That was what she wanted to do.
And she was setting out with all kinds of things in place that sounded like the dream.
She had a branding and website designer, and a brand-new fancy website was in the works. She was working with someone to launch a professional podcast. She was working on getting expert guests onto that podcast so she could establish herself as a thought leader. She had a whole plan for building a platform that would then support the book.
On the surface, that is excellent.
I always love to hear that authors are thinking about how they will promote the book before they have even started it. A lot of the struggle of releasing a book is actually coming into the discomfort of being pretty visible, so it is nice if you can get a runway and practice some of that visibility before the book comes out.
But at the same time, something here raised a red flag for me: She had not yet worked with any clients.
As I said before, your own experience is a very, very helpful way to find the uniqueness in your concept. But if you have not yet practiced that concept in the wild—which she hadn’t, because she had not launched the podcast or worked with any clients—we do not have any validation that your audience will resonate with what you want to say.
Even more importantly, we do not know that, once you start sharing the concept, you will actually like talking about it.
We need to make sure you feel really comfortable with the topic you are introducing in your book because, y’all, it’s in your book. You’re going to be talking about it for a while.
That is why I always recommend that, rather than asking, “Am I competent?” or even “Am I confident?” you ask, “Am I committed?”
Do I know enough about this space, this topic, this context, and this angle to know I want to stay here for at least a couple of years, if not forever?
If you do feel that way, one thing I can tell you for certain is that the book is going to help you hone it. The book is going to help you really dial in what that particular angle means, and that will be so, so, so helpful.
But if you are not quite ready, what you will often find instead is that you are changing your mind about the content of the book almost every single week.
We really do want to make sure you are fully committed before you start the process, just so you know the direction you are going and you are ready for it.
3. Do You Know What You Want the Book to Do?
The third and final question is: Do you know clearly what you want that book to do?
This is a really easy question to ask yourself because you will have an immediate gut check on the answer.
When I ask folks who are not quite ready what they want their book to do for them, the answer is almost always, “I want it to sell some books. I want some passive income.”
There is no shame in wanting to sell books, and there is no shame in wanting passive income. But what I will tell you is that it is very, very rare in the nonfiction space for book sales to be the primary way you benefit from your book.
Let me say that one more time because it is a tough truth: It is very uncommon in the nonfiction space for book sales to be the primary way you benefit from your book.
So how do expert authors benefit from their books if it is not primarily through book sales?
Often, it is through the authority the book creates.
I said earlier that there are lots and lots of things your book will do for you in terms of authority and credibility. One of them is helping you get better-paying, better-focused, more visible placement in whatever kind of visibility you are looking for.
I work with many, many people who want to start speaking careers. Of course, in 2026, we have so many options. We can do the old-fashioned speaker circuit, but we also have all kinds of digital speaking opportunities. I am going to put all those things together under expert-author speaking.
Books are such a key to this. There is nothing like a book to help you get better-paid speaking gigs and easier access to podcast guest spots, panel talks, highly coveted positions, keynote addresses, and other opportunities like that.
When you have the book, it really is a stamp of authority. Thinking about how you can use the book to leverage that authority is often a much, much more valuable way to think about the book than simply focusing on book sales.
But speaking is not the only way you can leverage and benefit from a book.
Even if you are not a small business owner, a book can help you within a more typical career or industry track. It might help you get a promotion. The entire purpose of my first book was to get a promotion at work, and I got it. In that case, the book sales mattered so much less.
If you are building a business, trying to reach more people through a nonprofit or some other philanthropic effort, trying to get access to opportunities that allow you to travel, or trying to get in front of groups you want to reach, all the things authority can get you, the book can get you.
But it is so important that you think about the book in that way.
Almost across the board, when I speak to folks who are rushing the process—people who want to start writing before I necessarily think they are ready—and I ask what they want the book to do for them, the answer is: sell.
They want their book to sell.
Unfortunately, when that is the main thing you are thinking about, it often tells us a lot about how developed the roots, structure, and grounding of your thought leadership really are.
When we are thinking holistically about using our expertise and stories to help other people, it often doesn’t have that much to do with people buying individual books. It has much, much more to do with changing the conversation in our industry, our topic, or our sphere of influence.
And while, yes, books will sell as that is happening, book sales are not the eventual goal that will really drive us forward. The goal that will drive us forward is influence.
So the third question I want you to ask yourself is: Do you know what you want this book to do for you? Do you have a really clear sense of where you would like it to take you beyond simply a number of books sold?
When you have that, you will start to think so much bigger. And you know what? The book sales are going to be better because you are thinking like that.
So think about how you can build this out. What do you want the book to do for you? If you dreamed really, really big, what would that look like?
Once you have that answer, I almost always find that you are pretty much ready to write a book—and ready to enter the arena of actually doing it.
Ready to Write Your Book?
If writing your book is something you would like help with, I want to invite you to check out our brand-new freebie, the Expert Author Quiz.
In this quiz, we ask you a series of questions to really dial in on what type of expert author you are. I created it by thinking about what the authors I work with have in common, particularly those writing story-based nonfiction.
The quiz takes about three to five minutes. Once you finish, you will get a report that shows you other successful authors who are similar to you, your likely strengths, the things that might trip you up during the process, and an analysis of how best to move forward from wherever you are right now.
If you have not taken it yet, bop over to pageandpodium.com/quiz and give it a shot.
And once you have answered the questions in this article, if it would be helpful to get an outside perspective on whether you are ready—whether your book seems unique, whether your commitment is on the right track, and whether your goals align with the process—head over to pageandpodium.com/contact. You can fill out a form to get a response from me directly.
I would really love to support you as you move forward, not only as the aspiring writer you are, but also as the expert author I know you can step into and claim.
You can do this, friends. I cannot wait to read your book. And until then, happy writing.
