Why Your Competition Doesn’t Matter (Much)

Right now, my team and I are working on three different books on work culture.

One project is about creativity at work.

Another is about wonder at work.

And the third is about centering love at work.

When one of these clients found out that we were working on books similar to hers that would be written by competitors, she was understandably upset.

Many authors have a fear of their book being published by someone else, or that their competition will beat them to a goal. Feeling this way is normal; I sometimes get caught up in looking at my competition and worrying too.

But publishing is incredibly broad — and incredibly forgetful.

I’ve worked on at least a dozen personal finance books in my career, most of which said a lot of the same things. But each author had their own unique audience, approach, and way of expressing the content. Their books will reach different readers or maybe even sell to the same reader who is really interested in the topic.

The exception to this (sometimes) is huge, bestselling books. For example, if you choose to write about shame, you are going to have trouble competing with Dr. Brene Brown. But there’s always the chance that you would talk about shame differently than…