Write This, Not That! Making the Most of Your Materials
As a self-help and spirituality ghostwriter, I often encounter authors who have literal mountains of material for their book: research, stories, exercises, case studies, you name it.
Yet when I ask them what they intend to do with all this great material, their answers give me a heart attack.
The psychotherapist with an excellent framework for treating eating disorders tells me she plans to turn her book into a memoir featuring excerpts from her dream journal. The spiritual seeker who spent three years at a silent meditation retreat tells me she wants her book to include chapters on aromatherapy and training service dogs.
As I listen to these highly experienced and skilled individuals describe their vision for their books, my internal pressure builds until I can’t stand it anymore. “You have excellent material,” I’ll tell them. “But you haven’t yet hit on the right book.”
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about Joseph Goldstein’s classic meditation manual The Experience of Insight, which has helped thousands of people progress through the stages of insight meditation.
Now, imagine if Goldstein had taken the exact same experience and knowledge, but used it to write a book called My Incredible Experiences with Meditation, featuring stories of his most amazing moments of transcendence.
Perhaps die-hard Joseph Goldstein fans would still pick this imaginary book up, but the average reader looking for practical advice would pass it over, and Goldstein’s wisdom and experience would not have the impact it does today.
Similarly, imagine if instead of writing her classic spiritual memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert had written a self-help book complete with recipes for baking thin-crust pizza and journal prompts to fill out while traveling in foreign countries. It might have been an OK book, but surely not hold the place in readers’ hearts that Eat, Pray, Love does today.
My point is that you can use the exact same raw materials to write an international bestseller or a book few people ever read. The key is to use your materials to write the right book.
Knowing when you’ve hit on the right book for your materials requires a bit of a sixth sense, and if you haven’t worked in publishing this can be a tricky sense to develop. However, you can get a start by looking at your favorite self-help and spirituality books and asking yourself, What book didn’t the author write? And why did they write this one instead?
Asking yourself these questions and paying careful attention to the answers will reveal a goldmine of wisdom you can use when narrowing down the structure and focus of your own book.
Want to learn more about writing self-help and spirituality books? Sign up for my live, online 4-week class, Words that Teach, Words that Heal: Secrets of Self-Help and Spirituality Writing, beginning April 8th, 2025, and sign up for my newsletter.
