What Do These Five Books Have In Common? (Part 2)
Practicing The Write Stuff Issue #32
At the end of Issue #31 I asked the question What Do These Five Books Have In Common? The five books in question were:
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler
The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza
Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin
The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k by Mark Manson
I opened up Perplexity.AI and asked it to find a common theme….here’s the answer it gave:
At some stage I’ll talk about AI for writers and possible uses and the limitations. For now though let’s move on and find out what these books have in common. And how you can leverage this as a writer.
#1 The Common Theme - All These Books Started Life As Shorter Form Content
None of these books were first published in their current form. All of them were published first in shorter versions. What is interesting, as we will see shortly, is that some of these books are still iterating.
Here’s a a sketch of how each of these books started out and developed.
1.1 Ender’s Game
Ender’s Game started out as a 100 or so page novella published in 1977. The author expanded it into a novel that was published in 1985 and won the two most prestigious awards in the science fiction community in 1985 and 86.
1.2 The Writers Journey
The writers journey by Christopher Vogler started out as a seven page memo. You can read that memo here:
If you own a copy of the book, you’ll find the memo within.
The original memo was copied and faxed around Hollywood in the 80s, and Vogler leveraged the memo to get a job at Disney, which led to him working on films like The Lion King and others.
In the early 90s, the seven page memo was expanded into book form and that was published as The Writer’s Journey in 1992. In 2020, the 25th Anniversay edition of the book was published - this is the 4th edition of the book. (See below for more on this).
1.3 The Brain Audit
The Brain Audit by Sean D‘ Souza started out as a short workshop. One of the attendees asked if there were any notes. At that point, there weren’t, but Sean created a short booklet/book which, with title pages, and the like, runs to around 20 pages.
Some years later, Sean turned that 20 page, booklet into an 150 page e-book, with audio versions, which he sold in lieu of conducting workshops.
Sidebar: Sean also made The Brain Audit an entry point into his business by making it the bible of his business. If you hadn’t purchased and read the book, you were barred from purchasing courses or joining his membership. If you are using books as part of a business strategy, you should dive deeper into this.
1.4 Talent Is Overrated
Talent Is Overrated started out as a long form magazine article published in Fortune Magazine in 2008. The magazine article was expanded into a book that was published in 2010. In 2019, an expanded, second edition was released. (Again, more on this below.)
1.5 The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fu*k
This is the one I know the least about, and if you have more info, please feel free to comment below.
My understanding is that Mark Manson had built a great following via his blog, was offered a publishing deal (predominantly due to the size of his audience), wasn’t sure what to write and decided to base the concept of his book around his most popular blog post.
So to summarise this mini section:
The five books listed all started out as shorter pieces of content.
Only when the concept had been proved were they expanded to longer form content. I.e. books.
So….
#2 How You Can Leverage This Idea? Throw More Logs On The Fire
Logs on the fire is a metaphor I got from my first mentor Sean D’Souza. (The same Sean D’Souza who wrote The Brain Audit mentioned in this list.)
The metaphor goes like this:
Picture your business as a fireplace.
You need to keep the fire going.
To do that, your pieces of content and books and so on are logs.
When you throw those logs on the fire, some of them sputter and burn slowly. Some burn hot. And the occasional one goes off like it’s made of Magnesium.
Problem is: you don’t know how a log is going to burn until it’s thrown on the fire.
So imagine you were writing a book? Even a short book is 150 to 200 pages long. That’s a decent chunk of time invested - and if it doesn’t light up when it’s thrown on the fire, then you’ll feel like you’ve wasted some time.
Sidebar: this assumes you’re measuring a book’s success by how well it sells. There are other measures of success that this metaphor doesn’t measure. So if you have different goals when writing a book
One way to mitigate wasting that time is to model what the authors of the five books mentioned at the start of the Issue did - and that’s to write a short form version. My advice - and something I’m working on at the moment - is to create a short book version. Maybe 30 pages to 50 pages long. (That’s approx 9000 to 15000 words.)
And put it up for sale.
And see what happens.
If things go well, then you can move to the next step….
#3 More Leverage (1) - Full Version 1.0
When you’ve written a mini book and had proof of concept - which could be book sales, feedback, reviews, follow sales, or all of these - the next step is to expand the book from 30 to 50 pages to 150 to 200 pages. This could be several months or several years later.
The feedback, reviews and questions you get will help you identify where to add content and where to make ideas and sections more precise.
The advantages of a more traditional length book are:
Other versions of the book are now possible - e.g. print, audio, translations. This potentially puts your book in front of a wider audience.
You already have a potential built in audience of buyers to make sales from Day 1 (or even use Amazon’s pre-sale function) to trigger Amazon’s algorithm.
There are marketing tasks you can do with a print book that are less effective with eBook only. Plus sending someone a 200 page physical book has more perceived authority than sending an eBook.
That’s not the only leverage available to you though.
#4 More Leverage (2) - Version 2.0/3.0 And/Or Special Editions
Just as reviews, questions, feedback etc helped shape the transition from a short 50 page eBook to a more comprehensive 200 page book….you can use the same mechanisms to help shape Version 2 of your book. Or Version 3.
Of the original 5 books I listed, The Writer’s Journey is on its fourth edition, Talent Is Overrated is on its second edition and The Brain Audit got to Version 3.2 in book form before Sean turned it into a series of on demand webinars. (See Training below.)
Updated versions won’t happen overnight, but if you write a book that’s evergreen (and you learn more over the years) there’s no reason you can’t write and publish a Version 2. Or 3.
The other option is to create special editions of your book. If you' don’t know fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson you should check out info on the Kickstarter projects he’s done. Now he has a large and loyal fanbase…but the idea behind what he’s done is the thing to focus on. He’s taken existing books, created unique leather bound signed and numbered versions, and sold them via Kickstarter. The numbers are staggering (I think the last crowd funding project topped 23 million with over 100,000 backers) but it’s the principle that matters.
You’ve got a book. You control the IP. There are other ways to leverage it than just selling it.
#5 More Leverage (3) - Training (And World Building)
I mentioned above that The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza started as an in person seminar and someone asked for notes. Those notes were expanded to become an eBook. And by Version 3.2 of the book, physical and audio copies were available on Amazon.
Last time I checked, Sean had gone almost full circle and the latest version of The Brain Audit is now a self study webinar series. (I think this is The Brain Audit Version 4.0.)
For years Chris Vogler did two day Hero’s Journey/Writer’s Journey seminars teaching that material to screenwriters and novelists. (Sidebar: one of my biggest ever regrets is that I was booked to attend one of Chris’s seminars in London in 2007 but couldn’t go as one of my kids was pretty poorly. )
So a book can be a gateway to creating more intensive training.
I wanted to mention Ender’s Game and how that has developed too. Yes it’s a fiction project, but you may be able to look at what Orson Scott Card has done and work out ways this can apply to your book.
So the first thing that Orson did was to write sequels about the main character, Ender Wiggins.
Orson is also a playwright and he also created a ‘radio play’ version of Ender’s Game were each character was voiced by a separate voice actor. I’ve got that…it’s cool…I wish more books were done like this.
Orson also created a series of books about some of the principle supporting characters from Ender’s Game and what happens to them after the conclusion of the book. The main character - Ender Wiggins - takes an intersellar spaceship and disappears from their timeline, but they still have lives to lead and Orson gives them big problems to solve.
There have been graphic novels and a film too.
The loyal fans refer to this as the ‘Ender Verse’ - which was why I used the term ‘world building.’ This kind of expansion is harder to do with non-fiction…that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thinking about it from Day 1 though.
#5 TL:DR:
There’s a lot to unpack in this issue - so make sure you re-read, take notes and journal about these ideas:
You can take your best performing short form content and turn that into longer form content.
Writing multiple short eBooks requires much less of an investment in time (or emotional investment) and are a great way to test the market. Or test for whatever results you are looking for.
A short eBook that performs well (sales, reviews, post-book sales etc) can be expanded into a longer book. Which can then be released as a print book, an audio book, translations and so on.
Longer books don’t have to stay the same forever. In the future you can do Version 2. Or Version 3. And don’t forget special editions for the ‘true fans.’
Books can be turned into more intensive content like seminars and workshops. With an appropriate price tag.
World Building.
The Ride Out
In Issue 29 I talked about How To Write In Your Dead Time and my experience doing this with dictation. In the last 10 days I’ve experienced some high word count writing sessions using dictation….last Friday for example I got nearly 1800 first draft words on paper without ever sitting down at my computer. And while I’ve got reservations about dictating whilst driving….I’ve worked out a way to try it out that I think will be safe and will explore that in the next few weeks. If it works….I’ll be driving to Paris in the autumn - five hours of driving plus an hour in the Eurotunnel each way - and I’ll be aiming to get 10,000 words dictated each way.
Issue 33
In Issue 33 we’re going to look at another 5 books that seem to have nothing in common….and focus on what they do have in common. Those 5 books are:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Green Mile by Stephen King
50 Shades Of Grey by EL James
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Although 4 of the 5 books are fiction, there are still lessons non-fiction writers can learn from this.
This was great. Like the equivalent of a book MVP.