Trends in Business Books: Why It’s Time to Break Away From the Crowd
Business books are subject to trends, to avoid looking like a copycat, focus on providing readers with guidance, wisdom, and clarity.
Books, like clothing, hairstyles, and music, are subject to trends. The problem is that once a trend has been going on for a while, those who follow it look like copycats with nothing original to offer.
With business books, there are three trends I’ve seen over the last five years that you definitely want to be aware of…and avoid if you’re going to write a book or have a book written for you. Otherwise, the book will do you more harm than good because people will ask why they should go to a copycat when the original must be out there somewhere, and they could hire or work with that person.
The first trend is cleverness. Malcolm Gladwell made an art form of telling compelling stories about individuals and then using those stories to introduce the concepts he wanted to teach in his books. As Carly Simon sang decades ago, nobody does it better. But that doesn’t stop everybody else from doing the same thing.
As a book ghostwriter and fairly voracious reader, I am so sick of cleverness. I’m over it. There’s nothing more repetitive or boring than with authors starting chapters with a witty story about someone they had dinner with in a cool restaurant in South Korea or some other witty, instructive story about somebody who did something either very, very well or very, very badly.
Gladwell has effectively preempted other authors from using the approach of a clever story to kick off a chapter, but that doesn’t prevent practically every business author in the English-speaking world from aping him. The problem is that people don’t have time to be clever. Nobody cares that you had dinner in a cool restaurant in South Korea. People really care about the problems they face in their careers, personal lives, health, or what have you. They want answers, not stories.
So stop trying to be the next Malcolm Gladwell. We already have one.
The next trend that’s been done to death is the concept of talking about a subject in terms of X number of songs, guns, or other countable things. The first time somebody did that, it was pretty good. The next time was derivative. And every time since then has been a pointless imitation of something that’s already been done.
So don’t try to tell the history of something in “X” number of items related to that thing. We have seen it too many times, and again, it just makes the author look like a copycat unable to generate new ideas.
The third approach that’s very popular these days is one-word titles. Go to a bookstore and try to find a business book with more than one word in the title. Everybody is trying to be super clever by summarizing their offering in a single word. Grit. Invincible. Power. And so on. Enough already, even though that’s two words and not just one.
The trouble with one-word titles is that we’ve just seen them too many times in the last few years. Initially, whoever had the first book with a one word title had broken new ground and was doing something cool. Everybody else since then is a wannabe, a bandwagon jumper.
There’s nothing wrong with multiple words in a title. A great title stops readers in their tracks and makes them say, “I need to hold off on everything I’m doing and see what this book is about.” You don’t have to summarize your life’s work and try to attract readers with just one word.
I could go on, but you get the point. Whether it’s starting chapters with clever stories about how wonderful your life is, telling the history of something in six or eight or ten whatever, or one-word titles, my advice is to ignore the trends and just give readers what they want.
Guidance. Wisdom. Clarity.
Books are subject to trends like everything else. But giving readers the benefit of your wisdom in a non-trendy way never ever goes out of style.