At the Trailhead for a First Book: Harvesting Your Career
Some first-time authors will have a strong defined sense of their authority, including vast experience, deep technical expertise, or a well-informed unique take on an industry.
The self-assured author may have had this authority reinforced with accolades and awards, magazine and newspaper profiles, leadership in national trade organizations and advisory board appointments. They might have been asked to serve as adjunct faculty at a local university based on their reputation, or recruited to be an expert witness in a trial.
But what if you only have a general sense of your authority in a field?
An ideal source document for focusing your debut business book is your resume. My recommendation is a one-hour exercise culling through your resume, book hunting, mapping your experience to reader interest.
Highlight industries that are in the news and have a built-in readership: politics, science, healthcare, sports or technology.
Highlight those industries that have a significant impact on other fields, for example, in software or technology that enables innovation across the business landscape. I’m currently working with a client now on a book about agile development, which started in IT but infuses just about every department on the org. chart.
Also highlight a business function like marketing or project management that is at the heart of corporate revenue growth and profitability.
The Job Description Book
In 2017, I helped Cisco engineer Marshall Kearney with his first book. The original focus was project management, which is a very general topic. But the potential addressable audience is big. The Project Management Institute has 2.9 million members, numerous local chapters and a built-in certification program.
Look for opportunities where your book could be selected as mandatory reading for a certification, a continuing education credit or a college-level course.
Project management is a fairly low-risk discipline and most projects are internal facing. The worst thing that can happen to a project manager is a missed deadline and a public reprimand in a planning meeting. Okay, maybe a demotion or termination if the project manager is not good at their job. Marshall Kearney’s Cisco router installations projects are different than internal projects. They are customer facing and have huge market and brand implications. If Marshall’s router project fails, it means a major service disruption for Spectrum (formerly Time Warner), AT&T or Verizon, inconveniencing potentially millions of consumers.
We eventually shifted the focus of the book to the customer-facing project manager audience, and also wove in Marshall’s interest in motorcycle riding.
We now had yet another angle of differentiation, it was a Harley-Davidson rider’s edgy take on project management and Marshall developed a motorcyle themed cover and interior illustrations with a designer he found on Fiverr. By working with Marshall’s unique career perspective and personal hobby, we stepped on the gas in terms of appeal and audience interest for his debut book One for the Road.
The Industry Leader Book
Mike Lingo was a lifelong IT executive, and his employer Astadia, a global tech consultancy, was right in the middle of the new trend of cloud computing in 2010. Astadia was a premier strategic partner for emerging cloud companies like Salesforce.com, Eloqua and Informatica. Astadia had run tech darling Zuora’s very first European system integration. This relatively small $30 million company competed head-to-head with consulting giants like Accenture and Cap Gemini, and had earned blue-chip clients like Vodafone, DirecTV, Cablevision and the Canadian telecom provider Telus.
Astadia wanted a thought leadership paper for an Amazon Web Services conference and a paperback book to distribute at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce user conference in San Francisco. We developed “Hey! You! Get Onto my Cloud” based on Mike Lingo’s IT industry knowledge and Astadia’s underdog appeal.
Astadia didn’t want an IT book. They wanted a business book the CIO could give to the CEO that explained the business case for cloud in simple terms. From what we could tell, it was the first business book on the topic of cloud computing and Astadia’s competitors had nothing like it in their marketing arsenal.
The Hot Topic Book
Mike Nguyen (pronounced “win”) was the founder of Silent Partner (now known as Inflect), a San Francisco-based Internet infrastructure service provider. Silent Partner was not very silent. The company worked on big heavy lifting projects. They helped Facebook establish its first presence in Asia, specifically in Indonesia where the project got the attention of the Telecom Minister because turning on Facebook could have taken down the country’s entire telecom infrastructure with surge usage.
Silent Partner was a tiny, three-person company that swam with the huge telecom and web providers, the big players. They’d helped established Twitter’s data center, Center Seven, in Utah. When Twitter went into India, Silent Partner introduced Twitter to Bharti, the largest cell phone provider in India and a major player in India and also the largest provider in North Africa. India was about to enter the 3G era, and Silent Partner was there to facilitate all the activity.
But Mike Nguyen also knew they would soon run the table of major customers, that the Facebooks and Twitters would eventually have a global footprint and limiting needs. What Mike Nguyen wanted to do was use their industry reputation to open up the next level of corporate markets, companies that ran very, very large e-commerce websites that needed custom Internet infrastructure instead of off-the-shelf provisioning from AWS.
Mike and I spent a Friday running audiotape, and two weeks later I had a first draft of Rule the Internet: How to Conquer and Expand on Your Terms, a 77-page manuscript that I was prepared to expand by 50 pages, with additional interview sessions with Mike and his two other employees, the technical layer to support Mike’s strategic thought leadership.
Mike is an imposing guy with an array of tattoos, not your typical CEO “suit.” In our first interview, he was confident and assertive. After a day of taping, we unwound at nearby pool hall near the Powell Street cable car turnaround.
Unfortunately, we hit a dead end and the book project stalled. I had captured Mike in the narrative authentically in the full force of his swagger, but he did not like how he came across. He did not like what he saw in the mirror.
The manuscript represented him accurately, but that was not how he wanted to be seen by his prospective audience, the large company IT executives. I think it had to do with the swashbuckling launch it and fix it later bravado at Facebook and Twitter, where a Pirate personality like Mike Nguyen was welcomed and celebrated. He was about to go corporate, and I think the book exercise made him see that what had worked previously would not work again. In paying me my “kill fee” to halt the project, I believe Mike saw the value and a confirmation that things would need to change at Silent Partner, despite their stellar reputation and track record.
The “Here’s What Happened to Me” Book
Keno Vigil was only forty years old, but had already experienced six buy-outs in his two-decade career as a technologist. When the private equity firm KKR bought out Keno’s employer WebMD in late 2017, he was motivated and curious. Why had so few books been written on mergers & acquisitions (M&A) since 2010, when the pace of M&A activity was steady, if not increasing, fueled by the “acqui-hire” and the “buy don’t build” trends? And why were all the M&A books written from the perspective of the buyers?
Keno decided to write a book titled Acquired — Now What? from the selling company side, the side that usually suffered from job cuts and at the very least chaos and uncertainty.
Keno took the bold move and asked, what if an acquisition was the best thing for your career advancement, versus the dreaded loss of your job. Acquired became a navigational tool, helping a middle manager to optimize the opportunities represented by the new owners and new management.
Keno knew this counter-intuitive approach had merit and truth to it. It was right there on his resume; it had already happened to him six times, and he was way ahead of where he might be if he’d been working for the same employer, stuck in a job rut.
Beyond Resume Research
It’s possible you have combed through your resume or C.V. and exhausted any possibilities for a compelling book subject.
Another approach is look at the careers of others (colleagues, co-workers, friends, family) for a clue.
Pay attention to how often people ask for your input or advice on a subject? Often we miss the book topic right under our noses. Others realize it but we don’t.
It’s very possible you have a skill or competency that could have value to others. These are subtle, under-radar skills that you think are not very noteworthy, but could be hugely valuable to a larger audience.
For example, take the field non-profit management. Many non-profits are not run professionally and they get into trouble with their boards, with funders and the IRS. An experienced business manager can make all the difference. Consider my four years of managing a bank training center and a bank retail branch in my 30’s. While completely underwhelming to an audience of corporate readers expecting Wharton M.B.A. wisdom, my limited bank management experience could be hugely insightful to someone with zero business background who is charged with running a non-profit organization, or supervising for the first time.
I spent a year recently making my living as a grant-writing consultant. Did I have vast experience as a grant writer? No, but I did have experience in a small 125-person company, assembling and writing proposals in response to large telecom companies RFP’s. A grant is essential the same as an RFP response, the main discipline being project management, information gathering and cross-department collaboration. My client was based in California, and I ran all the grant proposal projects long-distance from North Carolina, and it was in a field (social services) where I had no experience at all.
Grants and RFP’s are two minor strains from my resume but they could both be book topics. There’s also a book probably in running projects remotely. See, three possible books out of one minor footnote in my resume?
Pay attention to trends.
I just turned sixty and I am at the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation. I have always been intrigued by what I will do in my seventh decade professionally. A friend and I have a site called Boomer Biz, which was originally designed for helping retirees launch small businesses, so called “second act” careers. We haven’t done that much with the site. Maybe we need a book. It’s a huge audience: there are roughly 72 million baby boomers in the United States and I’m conservatively estimating about 16–20 million of them (the ones born 1958–1964) are still in the workforce and wondering what to do next. There are very few books available to help them.
Keep turning over rocks and looking for book ideas. It may end up being a pearl-from-a-grain-of-sand exercise, taking something small obscure idea and teasing it out into a larger complex work. Or it may be obvious, right in front of you and ripe for the picking.
Note: This post is a chapter excerpt from my forthcoming book “Big Splash: Creating Your First Business Book in Less Than Six Months”
