9.7 DON’T PUT EvEryThiNg yOU kNOW iN ONE BOOk Meatballs are delicious. Ice cream is delicious. But when you combine them into a “meatball sundae”…that’s disgusting. Even though they’re great separately, they don’t go together. This is what many authors try to do with their book: create a meat- ball sundae. They do this by mashing several distinct ideas into one book. This never works. First of all, it creates a bad reader experience. People read books in order to get expert knowledge that will help them solve a specific problem they have. No one reads books to get a firehose of uncon- nected information. Second, having too many different angles and too much informa- DON’T PUT EvEryThiNg yOU kNOW iN ONE BOOk · 421