Is your category orphaned?

Mar 19, 2026

Hey Revenue Writers,

200 DMs. $200k pipeline. One $9 book.

That’s the result from one week.

Last summer I worked with a consultant named Stuart. Epic guy. He’d written three books but none of them were building his business. He helped companies save expensive, late running projects.

The more he told me about his process the more I realized something. Stuart wasn’t doing what any other consultant did.

He did it different.
Nobody knew.

I read his previous book. It was smart. Too smart.

He’d created an entirely new way to rescue late running projects. A new category. And without realizing it he’d orphaned it. Just left it there lying in the cold. Anyone could pick it up and claim it as their own.

His category had a name buried inside his thinking. It had a process. It had a framework. But his book didn’t make it clear and certainly didn’t claim it.

So we wrote a different one.

Stuart authored Waterfall Project ER.
Project ER became his category.

He is now the emergency room for late running projects. Amazon bestseller. More importantly, clients.

Last week he led with that book in a DM sequence. 200 people. 35 downloaded the book. Two said yes to a $6,000 assessment call in the first week. Typically each of those converts to a $50-100k engagement.

One book. One week. $200k pipeline.

I know this works because I lived it too.

When I wrote the Mini Book Model I knew Mini Books were the right category for me. I’d used small books to grow my business for seven years. I just hadn’t named it yet. Category Pirates had coined the term but told me to run with it. So I did. I wrote the book on it. Now people call me the Mini Book Guy. Not because I invented the term. Because I claimed it… with a book.

That’s the pattern.

You can’t be the authority on a category you haven’t authored.

Stuart named his category inside a book nobody remembered. He framed it with a process nobody could repeat. But he never claimed it. That’s Category Abandonment. And Category Abandonment creates orphans, categories lying in the cold waiting for someone else to pick them up.

Category Publishing is the discipline of finishing what category design starts.

You name your category. You frame it with language. You claim the category by writing the freaking book on it.