Nonfiction
A business book needs one argument, not forty tips
Most professional books fail the same way: the author knows a great deal and tries to include all of it. What survives is a list. The books that work make one contestable argument and spend two hundred pages earning it, which usually means cutting the four other books hiding inside the draft.
Where business & professional books usually goes wrong
- One argument, stated early enough that a reader can disagree with it
- Stories carry the evidence; frameworks and diagrams rarely do the work people hope
- The expertise that makes you credible also makes you assume too much
- It has to stop sounding like marketing, which is the hardest note to give a founder
If nobody could disagree, it is not an argument
The fastest test on a professional manuscript is to state its thesis in one sentence and ask whether a smart person in the same field could reasonably argue the opposite. If they could not, the book has a topic rather than an argument, and no amount of editing at the sentence level will fix that. Better to find out in week one.
What I have edited in business & professional books
Founder memoirs, category books, and professional guides, both edited and ghostwritten.
Every service, for business & professional books
From business & professional books clients
★★★★★
Copy Editing“She sent back a style sheet with forty entries I did not know I had opinions about. I have used it on everything since.”
★★★★★
Developmental Edit“The question she asked in week one was whether a smart person in my industry could argue the opposite of my thesis. They could not. We rebuilt the whole book around a real argument.”
★★★★★
Developmental Edit“Flat price, one date, and neither moved. After two years of freelancers that alone was worth the fee.”
See the edit before you buy the edit
Send your first ten pages and I will edit them properly and send the notes back, free. Not a summary of what I would do, the actual marked-up pages. If those notes are not worth having, we both learned something cheaply and you owe me nothing.
Other genres
Writing business & professional books?
Send the first ten pages. I will edit them properly and send the marked pages back within a week, free.