Is Now a Good Time to Write Your Book?

You’ve got a great idea for a nonfiction book. Maybe it’s a breakthrough insight that’s helping your students or clients make big leaps in their spiritual practice or therapy. Or it’s a lecture or workshop topic that draws in twice as many attendees as your other topics, a research synthesis that sheds a whole new light on your field, or a heart-rending memoir that you can just picture in Oprah’s Book Club.

The energy is there, and when you think about the components of the proposal, the ideas just start flowing out. But . . . you’ve got a career, family and friends, obligations, and it’s not exactly clear how writing a book would come together, time-wise.

In this blog post, I offer four areas to consider in relation to the question, “Is now a good time for you to write your book?” If you think through your career trajectory, your money situation, your time situation, and whether it’s likely to ever be easier than now, it should become much clearer whether now is the right time for you to try to make your idea into a book—or shelve it for the time being.

Your career trajectory

Unless you are famous or have an outstanding author platform—and, good news for the non-famous, these two have less overlap than you might think—the benefit of publishing a book is more about long term career dividends than short term financial benefit.

From a career development standpoint, it’s best to think about a book as a potent device to magnetize attention to what you’re already doing. If your book gets some decent publicity and has good word of mouth, it will draw people to your website, events, and the services you offer. So, if the way you make money in your career is decently well established, publishing a book can result in a quantum leap—more traffic, more attendees, more clients, and new opportunities.

On the other hand, if the way you make money from your career is still in a nascent or experimental phase, it might be too soon for you to publish a book. Let’s imagine a couple of examples to make this clearer.

Michelle is a successful organizational coach who, after years of building her brand, is meeting all of her income goals. Her social media presence is also strong, with thousands of followers and more all the time. Michelle’s coaching has focused primarily on executive time management, and that’s what most of her clients still book her for. But she’s really excited to pivot to DEI work with whole organizations, and that’s what her book idea is about.

In Michelle’s case, she’s more likely to receive an offer for a book on the area where she has demonstrated strength—executive coaching—than in the area that’s newer. She might want to spend six months or longer developing momentum toward her new direction before going for the book deal. Publishing a book could give her pivot the momentum it needs to succeed, so it’s wise to take it at a slow enough pace that she can create the biggest version of that book.

Darren is a therapist who’s finding his feet in private practice. He has a passion for the modality he uses in one-on-one sessions, and he’s been having impressive breakthroughs with clients based on an innovation he’s made. The content for the book, centered on that innovation, seems like it’s there, but most of Darren’s professional time is going to attracting new clients to sustain his practice. Also, he makes more money administering groups for the clinic where he did his internship than in the private sessions.

In Darren’s case, it might make more sense for him to spend another year or more stabilizing his private practice before committing himself to the book publishing process. It’d be a shame for him to publish a great book on his therapeutic intervention only to find that he has no time to promote it because he’s so financially strapped.

In sum, an effective nonfiction book will be like a turbo boost to push your career in the direction it’s already pointed, so it’s worth taking the time to get your career pointed more-or-less in the direction you want to go before publishing. 

Your money situation

Getting a publication offer for a book project is well worth celebrating. It means you’re through the door to traditional publishing, and you can start to sense that your idea is going to materialize as a book in readers’ hands. And, how nice that the first chunk of your author advance will be on its way as soon as the contract is signed! But . . . how much money are we talking about here?

Again, unless someone is famous or has a really top-notch author platform—and thus their agent can trigger a bidding war between several publishers—author advances tend to be pretty modest. It’s not possible to determine a precise average because there are so many variables and because not all book deals are public info, but $5,000 to $20,000 is a commonly stated range, and many books fall below the $5,000 line. (When I published a chapter in a book, I was offered either $100 or a few free copies.)

The modesty of such a range becomes especially clear when you spread the lump sum across the length of time you’ll need to be working on your book. Advances are typically split into thirds (sometimes halves, sometimes other fractions). When I worked at Shambhala Publications, they were most often given as one-third on contract signature, one-third on manuscript acceptance (which means after you’ve gone through the developmental editing process and your editor has approved the complete draft manuscript), and one-third on publication.

Let’s take a number in the middle of the range given above—$12,500. Three advance payments of over $4,000 each is nothing to scoff at, but when you’re putting in dozens of hours a month over the course of a year or two, it’s also nothing to retire on. I’ve seen plenty of cases where, if we’d done the math, the author’s advance would have boiled down to $8.50 an hour or something like that.

Likewise, make sure you understand that the advance is called an advance because the publisher is advancing you money against your future royalties. Though authors almost never have to pay back their advances if their books don’t sell (never at all that I’ve personally seen), they also don’t see any additional money until their advance “earns out,” in the industry parlance. So, if your book takes, say, ten years to earn out that $12,500 advance, you won’t see a royalty check till year eleven. And, quite a few books never earn out, meaning the advance is all the money you’ll ever see from it—except in terms of how it boosts your career.

Publishing a nonfiction book certainly can provide financial support, but it typically does so in an indirect way. Unless your book happens to be a breakout hit, or you develop such a robust author platform that publishers start competing for your next book, the book will be a vehicle for making money, not a significant direct money maker.

So, if you’re not on basically sound financial footing from your other sources of income, it might make more sense to focus on those for now, then turn to your book idea when your financial life is a bit more stable.

Your time situation

Anyone who’s educated knows how to write . . . sort of. I mean, we can all put words on a page and make ourselves more or less understood. So anyone can write a book, right?

Let’s imagine that, instead of wanting to write a book, you wanted to make a beautiful end table, bake a perfectly caramelized pear galette, or sing a gorgeous solo in a choir. You’ve made things and baked things and sung songs—so, just dive in, right?!? Of course not. Unless you happen to have a great deal of experience with woodworking, baking, or choral singing, you would start these projects from a clear understanding that you’ll need to learn a lot and make a lot of mistakes along the way.

By contrast, the ubiquity of the written word tends to obscure just how difficult it is to write well, much less to write well for the length of an entire book. If you don’t believe me, have a listen to National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Since, if you’re pursuing traditional publishing, you’ll need to draft a polished, succinct proposal including a sample chapter or two, it’s great to take the proposal writing process as a test case. If you can find a way to carve out enough time in your schedule over the course of a number of months to write a great proposal, you’ll already have established a writing habit that could carry you through writing the book itself.

Different writers find different ways of working that fit for them. For some folks, it’s critical to carve out time every day, or four days a week, or twice a week all day. For others, it works to write in more of a retreat style—taking out a week, a few weeks, or a few months at a time—and not trying to cram writing time into their normal routine. Some benefit from having a writing group, accountability partner, or coach, while others thrive on solo time.

If you’re new to writing, try out a few ways and see what feels better to you. In the end, the proof is on the page. If you find yourself taking shortcuts on the proposal and sample material, that’s a red flag that you might be trying to cram your book writing process into a schedule that doesn’t accommodate it. The result will likely either be that you’ll have to abandon the project later or that the final product will not be what you’d hoped. 

Will it ever be easier than now?

If any or all of the above three topics have been a downer for you, this one will be cheerier. I’ll put it bluntly:

-       your career trajectory might never be totally clear

-       you’ll probably always have money concerns

-       you’ll never have enough time

So, why not write your book now?

For many aspiring first-time authors, to publish a book would be the fulfillment of a dream. And for those who have real passion for their topic, it can feel like a necessity to get that book out there to do its work in the world.

In the face of dreams and passion, who am I—who is anyone—to say that now isn’t the right time for you to start your book? It might never be easier than now. Hell, your life might change in totally unexpected ways that make it tougher to write than it is now. It’s good not to postpone one’s dreams for too long.

If your inner sense is that now is the time, maybe it is. If so, I wish you all the best, and I’d be happy to talk to you about your next steps.