Fit, Fandom, and Freshness

Three hurdles your nonfiction book idea needs to clear

If you’re reading this newsletter, I’m guessing you have a book idea. Or three. If so, let me virtually shake your hand. Coming up with a book idea is one of my favorite creative acts, and the process of turning a book idea into an actual real book with dog-eared pages (or an ebook or audiobook! I’m a sucker for print, but I love any format that finds readers) is unbelievably satisfying.

BUT: before any author gets to that highlight-reel moment of opening a box full of copies of their finished book; before they even start writing the manuscript; before they’ve even written out the first draft of their table of contents, they have to take this first creation of their mind, this first version of their book idea, and they have to refine it.

Refining a nonfiction book idea is not particularly fun—it involves market research, an objective appraisal of your talents and expertise, and putting yourself in the shoes of a casual reader who has literally thousands of new books to choose from every week. But if you can successfully shepherd your book idea from the aether of your mind palace into the real world of markets, competitors, and platform fit, that is when the real magic starts to happen.

A quick note on my perspective

I need to mention here that I’m writing all this from my perspective as a literary agent whose primary value comes from helping writers reach as wide an audience as possible while getting paid as much as possible to do so. It’s absolutely true that anyone can write a book about anything they desire, and the success of that book can be measured in all sorts of ways beyond royalties earned, copies sold, or awards garnered. . . . But if you’re here I’m guessing you’re interested in writing a book that would be of interest to commercial publishers, and could potentially reach a wide audience of passionate readers. And to do that, you need more than any ol’ book idea: your book idea needs to be attractive not only to readers, but to the folks in a publisher’s editorial, sales, and publicity departments who will be reading your book proposal. Specifically, that means your nonfiction book idea has three big hurdles to clear: fit, fandom, and freshness.

Fit, fandom, freshness

Let’s take a quick walk through these three hurdles.

Fit is how perfectly your book idea suits your talents and expertise. Are you a systems neuroscientist who wants to write a book about the journey of a single spike throughout the brain? Congratulations—you are Mark Humphries, author of The Spike, and that idea is perfectly tailored to your expertise. Are you a professional bowler who wants to write about the Battle of the Somme? You are going to need to do a bit more work to convince publishers that you are the right author to write that book.

Fandom is a measure of how widespread the appeal might be for your book idea. I know, it’s odd to think of readers as “fans” in nonfiction, especially for gravitas-laden books such as Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. But in my experience publishers and agents always evaluate book ideas in terms of how broad the core readership might be, and how strongly that core readership will be attracted to the idea. In that context, I find “fandom” to be a useful thinking tool. It can be hard to evaluate the fandom of your book idea, since presumably you are incredibly passionate about it and think everyone else should be too. But if you can keep some objective distance, there are always clues around to give you a hint about the appeal of your idea.

For example, I love sumo wrestling. I watch every day of every tournament. But as soon as I take a step back from my own fanaticism, it’s clear that the potential fandom for a sumo book (in the US) is pretty thin: just for a start, try walking into a bookstore and asking where their sumo books are, or walking into a bar and asking them to turn on the sumo tournament. (If you actually find a bar that can do this, let me know.) Of course, sometimes the sheer lack of previous work on the subject can spark intrigue with readers more broadly—Emily Voigt’s The Dragon Behind the Glass, about the world’s most expensive aquarium fish, comes to mind—but to pull that off successfully you need to connect the topic to something more universal among readers. Voigt’s book succeeded not because there were oodles of readers out there obsessed with the arowana, but because there are oodles of readers drawn to true crime and stories about the natural world—in other words, she convincingly plugged the specific book idea into broader fandoms.

Freshness is a measure of how timely your book idea is. In other words, how well can you answer the question “Why does this book need to be published now?” If you want to write a history of the Enron scandal, you’d better have a strong reason why it needs to be published now rather than fifteen years ago. Conversely, if you want to write a book about humanity’s efforts to return to the Moon, you’d better have a strong reason why it needs to be published now rather than five to ten years from now.

(BTW, I’ve been thinking about these hurdles for years, but hadn’t really crystallized them until I literally began writing this post. Do you find them helpful? Are you having trouble applying them to your book idea? I’m curious to hear how functional this framework is.)

Homework (aka the moment the blog bites back)

Before we wrap things up this week, I’d like to give you an exercise to test your book idea against these hurdles, rather than simply leaving them as concepts to think about. Specifically, I suggest you try to draft four sentences about your book idea: the first to present the idea itself, the second to address fit, the third to address fandom, and the fourth to address freshness.

Here are a handful of examples to get things started (these are all real projects from authors I represent):

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

Idea: The Milky Way is the grand story of our galaxy’s life, told in the imagined voice of the galaxy itself, from its birth 10 billion years ago to its eventual merging with Andromeda 5 billion years from now.

Fit: As an astrophysicist and science communicator who also studied folklore and mythology at Harvard, Dr. McTier is the perfect writer to tackle this galaxy-sized challenge.

Fandom: Humanity’s obsession with the Milky Way, and space in general, goes back thousands of years, and is still going strong today as seen in countless movies and books, as well as in front-page headlines on the latest scientific research and space exploration missions.

Freshness: Others have written about the Milky Way, of course, but never before has our galaxy been given the chance to tell its story in its own words—and the ongoing parade of cutting-edge scientific findings, including Dr. McTier’s own research, means The Milky Way will share new discoveries about our galaxy that previous books have not covered.

Becoming a Changemaker: An Actionable, Inclusive Guide to Leading Positive Change at Any Level by Alex Budak

Idea: Becoming a Changemaker will pull together the most important lessons from the popular Berkeley Haas course “Becoming a Changemaker” to show readers of all backgrounds how to channel a changemaking mindset, how to develop 21st-century leadership skills, and how to make the leap from idea to action.

Fit: As the Berkeley Haas faculty member who created the “Becoming a Changemaker” course, as well as a social entrepreneur for endeavors such as Change.org and StartSomeGood.com, Alex Budak is the perfect author to pen the book version of his changemaking course.

Fandom: Individual-focused professional development is popular enough that it’s sprouted an entire coaching industry, and Budak’s ability to present tools that anyone at any level can use expands the appeal even further.

Freshness: The global pandemic, important social movements like Black Lives Matter, and existential threats like global warming not only present us with unprecedented opportunities for change right now, but have spurred a new wave of activism as well as a hunger for more purpose-driven, fulfilling work.

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

Idea: Liftoff tells the little-known story of SpaceX’s first four rocket launches, and the engineers, mathematicians and visionaries that gave everything they had to usher in a new age of space exploration.

Fit: As Ars Technica’s senior space editor, with access to SpaceX staff and facilities that few other journalists can match, Eric Berger is the perfect author to uncover this hidden narrative and tell it in full.

Fandom: SpaceX is regularly in the news, with millions of viewers for its landmark launches, Elon Musk himself (for better or worse) has over 100 million followers on Twitter, and space exploration in general has always captivated the world’s attention.

Freshness: We are in the midst of a space exploration renaissance—2010 to 2020 was the most successful decade of space exploration since the space race—and with SpaceX currently leading the way to return to the Moon and then aim for Mars, more and more readers will want to know the origin story of the company.

Don’t get too hung up on completeness with these sentences—you are going to have plenty of opportunity to spin these statements into larger sections of your pitch and book proposal as we move ahead. But the more persuasive and vivid you can make these sentences the better—they are the seed from which everything else will grow. (And if you’re having trouble with one or two of these sentences, it might be a sign to spend more time pondering the particular incarnation of your book idea to try to better address the specific hurdle(s) you’re having trouble with.)

Before we can plant that seed, however (I’m running with the garden analogy), we need to prepare the ground. Bring some gloves next week.