Three Books or Three Anything

On containers and the forces they hold.

You obviously don’t need three books to have a viable business.

You don’t even need one book, really. The trilogy structure I keep exploring is about providing different ways someone can engage with what you’re sharing.

Maybe that’s a book, a workbook, and workshops. Maybe it’s a mini book, a Discord community, and one-on-one coaching work. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Books work really well for this because they’re solid, shareable things. But we have much more at our disposal.

If you only have one book, or even zero books, the trilogy is already there underneath. It just hasn’t surfaced yet in recognizable forms. Or maybe it has, in smaller ways, like your newsletter or social media content.

When talking about trilogies, I see three containers: your books, a community space, and your services. Three different temperatures of the same thing. These containers hold the forces. They give them somewhere to live and move between.

This gives room for what I’m calling the six forces. Direct dialogue, natural mention, easy discovery, facilitated finding, gentle collaboration, and fictive branding.

The forces seem to need different containers. Without them, everything tries to happen in one place and nothing quite works.