tion in the book makes it harder to position and market. In fact, most positioning issues we see come from the fact that the author is trying to combine two or three different books into one, and thus speak to multiple different audiences. This makes it almost impos- sible to have clear positioning. Most authors try to combine everything they know into one book because they think they don’t have enough information for one book. They’re insecure about the book and try to compensate by cramming it with everything possible. As I’ve said, that’s the worst thing you can do. It results in a bloated, meandering mess that is hard to describe to people and has no natural audience. AN EXAMPLE OF A MEATBALL SUNDAE We worked with a pair of authors, Bryan and Shannon Miles, who together had built the most successful VA company in America (Belay Solutions) by connecting great VAs with a process that works at scale for companies and busy entrepreneurs. They also had built an incredible culture at Belay, being named the #1 Company Cul- ture in America by Entrepreneur Magazine, and has also provided an incredible set of opportunities to mothers who wanted to work from home. They were rightly proud of all three things, and had a vision of a book that talked about how VA will change work, and how to build a great VA culture, and how to use that culture to attract more women. They had a broad, but very vague idea, of how their book could talk about all three things. This was not going to work. These are three different and very dis- tinct ideas. We went around and around with them trying to find a positioning for one book about this, until I finally told them: 422 · ThE SCriBE METhOD