Want to Write a Book? Here's Surprising Advice.

One of the best pieces of advice my editor at Penguin ever told me about writing a book were these 7 words:

Make 50% of the population hate it.

What!

Are you screaming into a paper bag?!

Are you like, what in the absolute knob fossil, here I am spending all this time painstakingly on Instagram trying to make EVERYBODY LIKE ME, and now the strategy is…make ‘em…not????????

Yes, captain. Yes.

And here’s why:

Every book needs an idea.

Most people, when writing a book, haven’t yet figured out their idea.

They know their topic—for example, a book about your travel adventures around Europe—but a topic isn’t an idea.

Here’s the difference:

Topic: A book about your travel adventures around Europe

Idea: A man goes undercover and takes minimum wage jobs in seven countries across Europe to report on what it’s really like for the everyday immigrant.

It’s a specific lens.

And in the end, we should be able to make an argument: what’s the discovery? The big takeaway? The thing this book is really about???

If, in the end, your argument is that life in Europe isn’t actually sustainable for the people whose labor supports it, you better believe that’s going to make 50% of the population mad.

And therein, we find a book worth reading.

We want books that make us think.

And this, dear lovely, is the real key to getting an agent’s attention—and subsequently a book deal at a publishing house, too.

Here’s another example:

Topic: A book about everyone’s favorite food, bread

Idea: A woman visits the countries that consume the most bread—Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, The Netherlands, France, and Germany—and examines the different ways this household staple has shaped everyday life for us all.

Now, in both of these made-up examples I have you gallivanting across the globe, AND YOU OBVIOUSLY DO NOT NEED TO DO THAT FOR A BOOK DEAL. 😂 However, I thought these examples might be most relatable, because who, um, wouldn’t love to go abroad on a professional mission to eat bread?????

Maybe this is a more realistic example. (Harumph.)

Topic: A coming-of-age book about growing up in New York City

Idea: A New York City writer examines her deepest failures in life, and how each one ultimately led to big success

See how I’m viewing a topic through a specific lens in each one of these examples?

That last example, by the way, happens to describe the actual book of my actual biz bestie, Laura.

Her book is called, hilariously, Tough Titties.

And even though her book is a collection of essays????? It still makes an argument: that it’s okay to be a late bloomer.

In the book, she takes aim at hustle culture and the dipshittery that is giving 110% at all times, for everyone—and the subtitle is, brilliantly: “On Living Your Best Life When You’re the F-ing Worst.”

That’s the lens, being the worst. All the failures. And how it can all add up to something BIG—even if it’s on a different timeline than you’d imagined.

Her book did SUPER well, getting shout-outs from Kelly Ripa on national TV and getting tons of press and being a Goodreads finalist, and what made this great was…it wasn’t a traditional non-fiction book. She insisted on not writing a traditional self-help book. She wanted to write a book of essays, and still have it sell MEAT TONS.

And, she pulled it off!

Want to write a book proposal agents can’t resist?

When I sold THE MIDDLE FINGER PROJECT to Portfolio / Penguin Random House for $200,000, it wasn’t because I had a huge platform. (One publisher told me their own staff had more Instagram followers than I did.) It was because the proposal had a real idea, seen through a real lens.

So I put everything I learned into The Meaty, Hairy Book Proposal Kit: a 90-page insider guide to how advances actually work, the formula publishers use to decide how big yours will be, how the whole book-deal process goes from start to finish, and exactly what your proposal needs, section by section.

Including the test that separates a topic from an idea: if nobody would disagree with it, it’s not the book’s idea.

Go make 50% of the population hate your book. I’ll be over here cheering for the other half.

Ash