What to write about
I’ve already talked about why you should write a business book and the need to work out your motivation for writing it.
Let’s now look in a bit more detail about what to write about.
We’ve already narrowed it down that it needs to be a showcase for your expertise. And that within that it needs to be an aspect of that which you are passionate about conveying to other people, as that will give you the ultimate motivation for writing it.
Narrow things down further by working out the purpose of your book. Is it a self-help manual? Is it a guide to all the information you need to acquire a particular business skill or technique? Is it a description of your idea for fixing some specific (or general) business issues? Is it a work-book for people to write in and test their own progress? Is it an autobiographical journey through your business experiences and what you’ve learned along the way?
What category of book will it fit into? Like it or not, Amazon is probably going to be the primary distribution route for your book. Amazon has a clearly defined set of categories in which all business books are placed. Amazon’s umbrella heading is Business, Finance & Law.
It’s instructive to go to this page and see how they present books in this section and which categories are then available within it. There are these headings, listed in alphabetical order:
- Accounting
- Biographies & Histories
- Careers
- E-Commerce
- Economics
- Law
- Management
- Personal Finance
- Professional Finance
- Reference & Education
- Sales & Marketing
- Small Business & Entrepreneurship
Keep drilling down under each of these headings and you find sub-headings. For example, in the area where I have worked on various books, Small Business & Entrepreneurship, you then find these sections:
- Accounting & Finance
- Business Plans
- Entrepreneurship
- Home-Based Businesses
- Law for Small Businesses
- Sales & Marketing
- Starting a Business
Your book needs to find a home in one (or more) of these sections, so take a look at the section where you would love your book to appear as a number one bestseller. Your book needs to find an audience and Amazon have been in the game of finding readers for every type of book for a long time. So, use their experience to help to focus your ideas to a point where you can start to come up with a title, a sub-title and a category for your book.
Creating these and then even visualising some sort of cover for your book is a great motivator to get you started.
Keep all that in mind as you develop the theme and framework for your Amazon bestseller.