What if your book could start a movement?

On a call with a brilliant future author on Friday, she said two things that struck me.

“What an amazingly cool job you have, you must learn so much, you get to dig into people’s ideas!”

I do! And I am so very fortunate to have built this business that feels like joy much of the time. It’s good to be reminded of how much I love what I do.

“Wow, I never thought of it like that. I can see how you’ve just taken my little overview and gone “poof” and drawn a line from it out into the universe.” [I paraphrase slightly]

And this was a fantastic reminder of what I am brilliant at.

When someone has an idea for a book, it’s very personal to them. It’s important to them on their individual level.

And that is enough.

BUT. That can also stop people from putting their ideas out there in book form, because they think, “Oh well, who would be interested in my little book? In my ideas? They’re important to ME, but why would anyone else care?”

I get it, because each of us is the main character in our own lives. Each of us inhabits the centre of our own universe.

Here’s something else that’s true: every idea exists because of the world we move through and affects it in some way.

Not every book will become a movement. Not every book should! Sometimes it’s enough to write a silly little profound book about not eating frogs, or a comedy interlude about corgis.

But some will.

Sometimes it takes someone else, someone outside of us, to hear our ideas and say, “Wait. I love it — because here’s how it connects to this and this and this. Here’s why it matters right now and here’s who it will matter to, and here’s how it can become a goddam movement.”