Is It A Book, or Is It A Powerpoint?

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Business owners and consultants frequently solicit our services for turning their content into a book. Niche business books can do excellent work in the world, but they often don’t because business-owning writers habitually mistake their primary audience.

A primary audience is the audience most likely to receive value from reading your book. These readers need your book because it has answers to their most-frequently-asked questions and offers them relevant and usable information.

Primary readers are not just inherently attracted to your book’s title; they also intuitively know where in the bookstore your book is likely to be shelved—usually because they read (or know the titles of) the other books with which your book is in conversation.

This means that your primary audience never has to work too hard to find and make use of your book’s value: Your book is written for—and to—them. You determine your book’s content, but your primary audience determines everything else, from the voice and style you adopt, to the types of evidence you use for support and persuasion.

Because the primary audience determines so much, correctly identifying it is crucial to your book’s success and should be completed in the foundational stages of strategizing your work.

This is not always easy to do. In fact, business owners often misidentify their primary audience as prospective rather than current clients. The difference may sound irrelevant, but the designation results in two very different books.

Books written for prospective clients have value, of course, but the value is usually narrowed to sales. Perhaps surprisingly, “capturing sales” is too-general a foundation: It may require comprehensive knowledge of your pitch, but it requires little to no knowledge of real readers. Without understanding them, writers will find it painfully difficult to meaningfully answer questions related to argument, voice, style, and even design and publication strategy. 

Mistaking prospective clients as a book’s primary audience will result in a bad book. But it’s a hard mistake to avoid because prospective clients are precisely the audience to whom business presentations are pitched.

In a follow-up post, I’ll discuss how to specifically identify your book’s primary audience so as to safeguard yourself from negative reactions, like, “This could’ve been a PowerPoint.” I’ll also show you how early identification of your audience makes the work of developing every other element of the book easier and more clear.

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Take Tiny Breaks

Most of us intuitively welcome sleep as one of the best and most important things in life. Its depth and duration redound not just in the quantity of our years but in the quality of those years, too. When National Geographic took an in-depth look at the benefits of sleep, it found that during sleep, spindles stimulate the cortex and help categorize new info according to the old info we’ve already acquired. And in episode two of its third season, Radio Lab showed how certain tasks can be better completed (or completed in the first place) after a good night’s—or even a good nap’s—sleep.

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Old research has frequently spoken to the brain benefits of this kind of “offline learning,” but new research argues that even tiny breaks are important to achieving new tasks. When we combine the ameliorating effects of resting and the incremental achievements gained through micro-ambition, we gain a better picture of “micro-offline gains”: the very small but very necessary work that enables skill acquisition.

Micro-offline gains suggest that skill acquisition depends not (or not just) on the active effort to learn a new skill or to complete a task but in the periods of rest we offer our brain to consolidate the information it’s working so hard to acquire. Ultimately, when we tax our brains with learning a new skill or staying focused on a big, integrated project, we accomplish more when we offer our brain more, very short, breaks.

Even when they’re just seconds long, these tiny breaks can aid our completion of the task at hand (or at least can aid our accomplishment in the steepest part of the learning curve). Unfortunately, the breaks aren’t the kind that include Instagram or other semi-conscious scrolling; rather, they’re micro-moments that mimic the consolidating effects of sleep.

Summer is a time for downshifting. Although I’ve already contributed to this cause by advocating for aiming lower, I’m now also arguing for interrupting your project with more guiltfree breaktime. This is especially true for my clients who struggle to make summer the most productive season of writing. It turns out that scheduling many opportunities for micro-offline gains can help with making connections and building arguments. The season requires it, and your brain will thank you by becoming smarter, faster.

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Lower Your Standards, or, the Case for Micro-Ambition

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Tiny award available from Tokens and Trophies on Etsy

Micro-ambition, or “the passionate pursuit of short-term goals” is generally attributed to Tim Minchin, an Australian comedian and somewhat of a renaissance man, who advocated for the term in a 2013 commencement address (which offers other truisms that I passionately endorse, including, “There is an inverse correlation between depression and exercise. Do it. Run, my beautiful intellectuals, run”).

Whereas macro-ambition refers to the passionate pursuit of The Dream, micro-ambition refers to the work in front of you. Macro-ambition sometimes works for those with A Dream, but it doesn’t always lead to success, and the cost of pushing achievement into an indeterminate future can be high.*

That’s why while most of our clients procure our services in the pursuit of macro-ambition, we try to structure our offerings according to short-term goals and the work that needs to be done today. This sort of micro-ambition too neatly dovetails with the uniquely American dedication to life-hacking productivity, but micro-ambition does not advocate for productivity for its own sake. After all, there’s nothing either particularly ambitious or necessarily fulfilling about simply being “productive.”

Rather, we offer micro-ambitious services that we’ve typically described as “strategic.” For example, for an author working on a first draft of a memoir, we offer strategic prompts soliciting tiny stories that contribute to the memoir’s theme. Or, for an author testing out curriculum guidelines for inclusion in a guidebook, we help create smaller strategic publications to determine reader engagement and guideline efficacy.

Strategy has become too encompassing a word, though, probably because it has been just about fully pushed into the land of useless jargon (from which words rarely return). Micro-ambition, though at first glance just as useless, captures for the moment the very small achievements that can elicit the engaged work that ultimately adds up to A Dream, even if it’s not the dream the author first had in mind.

*Minchin’s existential takedown of the lifetime pursuit of A Dream: “[I]t’ll take you most of your life to achieve, so by the time you get to it and are staring into the abyss of the meaninglessness of your achievement, you’ll be almost dead so it won’t matter.”

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