Write the Business Book Your Expertise Deserves

Business books live or die on a single idea that can be said in a sentence. The structure follows from it. The opening chapters show the problem and why the usual answers fail. The middle introduces the model or framework and walks through it with cases, usually one or two per chapter. The end turns the idea into decisions a reader can make on Monday. A reader who picks the book up in an airport or skims it before a meeting should find the argument in the chapter titles alone.

Cases are the evidence, and they carry obligations. A named company or person needs permission, a public source, or both. Anything learned under a confidentiality agreement stays out or is disguised past recognition. Numbers need a source a fact-checker can find. Many business books are written with a ghostwriter or collaborator, which means drafts, interviews and comments pass between two or more people for months.

Most business books also start life as something else: a proposal for an agent, a keynote, a set of articles. Traditional publishers of non-fiction usually buy on a proposal and sample chapters, so the first two chapters often get written, rewritten and pitched long before the rest exists.

1. Create the book as Non-fiction with Business & Economics as the main genre.
2. Import your keynote script or articles as a Word document, Google Doc or Notion page. Each Heading 1 becomes a chapter to reorganise.
3. Title the chapters so the table of contents states the argument in order. Put the case each chapter uses in its subtitle.
4. For every case, add the company to Places or Story World and the people to Characters, with the facts you have confirmed and where you confirmed them. The Timeline holds the sequence of events in a case, ordered on a grid.
5. If a ghostwriter is drafting, create a shared workspace and invite them as an Editor. Co-authors and your agent can be Commenters or Viewers.
6. Write the proposal chapters first. Save a version of each draft you send out, so you can show exactly what the agent saw.
7. Ask Robin which chapters never mention the core idea by name, or where a case is described twice. Robin answers from the whole manuscript.
8. Run the Proofing Pass from your book's Edit page, apply the fixes you agree with, then export a Word document for your editor's tracked changes.

• No charts, tables or images in the manuscript. Figures are prepared separately and placed at layout.
• No footnotes or reference manager. Keep a Notes section per chapter as plain text and style the notes in editing.
• There is no fact-checking feature; checking numbers and claims is your job. Premium and Pro include a monthly allowance of web searches from the editor chat (10 on Premium, 50 on Pro), with sources listed.
• Shared workspaces are on the Team, Business and Enterprise workspace plans, not the personal Free, Premium and Pro plans.