In comedy troupe Monty Python’s skit Spam, a man and his wife sit down in a café and try to order breakfast:

Man: Morning!

Waitress: Morning!

Man: Well, what've you got?

Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam; spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam, baked beans spam spam spam...
...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.

Wife: Have you got anything without spam?

Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

Wife: I don't want ANY spam!

Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?

Wife: THAT'S got spam in it!

As this classic skit demonstrates, ordering breakfast is frustrating when your waitress keeps missing the point. You don’t want any spam!

Wrong understanding, wrong dish.

A similar miscommunication often occurs around books. Readers have an unfortunate tendency to read their own point into a book. (Instead of extracting the author’s point from it like they should.) But even worse: sometimes authors forget to include a point in the first place.

For that reason we now turn to the second of the three “M” questions, What: What is your point? Every book should have a central message, since a book without a point is pointless.

You want your readers to learn something. What should they take away? You want your readers to do something. What is that action? Your writing will only be clear and coherent if it revolves around a unifying theme.

This is why the blog-to-book process is often flawed. In this process, a wannabe author hires an editor to shape miscellaneous blog posts into a book. The resulting book is typically less than excellent. Why? Quite possibly, due to a neglect of this key step. Any good book has one central message—the blog posts likely do not. Unless the editor skillfully creates a main point and ties each post to it, the book will be fragmented.

Identifying Your Message

Determine what the core message of your book is going to be. You need to answer the question, “What message do these people need to hear?”