Your reason for wanting to write a book should control how you chose the topic of your book and whether you should write one at all.

If you want to write a book to become famous, you’ll need to write about something that will attract that fame.  Most books about knitting, how to fix clogged drains, or how to spot collectible thimbles are unlikely to draw large audiences.  Without a large audience, it’s unlikely you’ll become famous.  On the other hand if your idea of famous is being well-known to a special group, then a small audience topic could make you famous.  If you wrote a book on thimble collecting for people who collect thimbles, then you may well become a celebrity within that group.

If you want to become famous as in “people gush your name when you pass them on the street” or the lines to meet you at a book-signing snake around the block, then you will need a mass audience.

If you want to write a book to become rich, then you need either a mass audience willing to pay a small amount for each copy of your book or a smaller audience that is willing to pay big bucks for each copy.

You may want to write a book for a reason that is indirectly related to fame and money, but where the fame and money don’t actually come from the sales of the book.  That is to say you want your book to promote your business or to enhance your visibility in a profession. Perhaps you have a solar panel installation business.  If you write a book on solar energy, you could promote your business.  Your book could be part of your sales pitch to prospective customers.  Or maybe you’d give free seminars where you hand out your book.  There are myriad possibilities.

Writing a book for professional visibility works in a similar way. If you run a daycare center, a book on how to pick child care could bolster your reputation and business at the same time.  Every school teacher is an expert in children and related topics. Parents crave books on how to deal with common and not so common issues confronting school children.  I’d rather have my child with a teacher that I know was solving these problems.  Wouldn’t you?  Writing a book will help you stand out from the crowd.

To most of us, professionals and other skilled people such as attorneys, accountants, financial advisers, physician, contractors, florists, and interior decorators all appear the same until something makes one of them stand out from the crowd.  A book is an easy way to obtain that visibility.

Writing a book to promote your business or enhance your professional stature does not require a large audience or a high-spending one.  Yet it does require the right audience and the right topic.

If you want to share your expertise, but the fame, money, or visibility do not matter very much, then the size or spending habits of you potential readers and your topic selection are relatively unimportant.  By the way this is heresy in the writing business.  There are many writing experts who believe that there is no point in writing a book, if it’s not to make you rich or famous, to promote your business, or to enhance your professional stature or visibility. They think that writing a book for any other reason is a waste of time.  I, respectfully, disagree.

A few years ago those experts may have been correct, but no longer.  Their reasoning is grounded in the old model of book publishing.  It used to cost real money to publish a book and unless you wanted to fork over a few thousand of your own greenbacks, you needed a publisher.  That’s no longer true.

Now for less than the cost of a fast food meal for three, you can publish a book; if you’re willing to do most of the grunt work yourself.

So if you have some information to share, you can share it without worrying about the topic or the audience, if your goal is to share the information.  You may find an audience of thousands; you find an audience of one.  It won’t matter, though, because of why you wrote the book.

This reasoning also applies to a book that you write just because you want to write a book. There are many people who do things to prove to themselves (or their loved ones) that they can do it.  Writing a book could be like that for you.

Writing a book for money, fame, or promotion mandates careful selection and analysis of audience or topic.  Writing a book to share information or as a personal accomplishment means that your consideration of audience or topic will be for reasons other than whether you should write the book in the first place.

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