Publishing is full of old rules. They are unspoken and exclusive. The kind that makes it harder for first-time authors like me, especially if you’re not based in London, didn’t go to a fancy university and don’t have wealthy husbands and parents backing you.

I’m proud of how I showed up for my new book, Be UPFRONT: 24 Rules for Life Changing Confidence. The principles in this book aren’t just ideas. They’re the reason I was able to do this at all. To keep showing up. To keep backing myself. To keep going when it felt uncomfortable. But there’s one core truth about this whole publishing-a-book journey that I wish someone had told me 20 years ago: writing a non-fiction book is not that hard.

The story I have heard my whole life about writing a book goes a little something like this: it will take over your life; you’ll be left breathless, bloody and poor; only the elite with the correct academic qualifications and upper echelon networks should even attempt such a feat.

I now know this story exists by design. It’s a story that keeps women out of pocket and power. The question I want us to ask ourselves is: who benefits from that story being the one that’s told? This story is one of a myriad of reasons the non-fiction charts are still dominated by men. It’s one reason why my book cover sticks out like a gorgeous outlier on the bestseller shelf at WH Smith, because she’s one of a minority on the shelf written by a woman.

It took me nine months to write my book. I did it alongside running my global business, leading a team and caring for my seven-year-old son. It did not consume my days and it did not disrupt my life. It was challenging at times, but I was not tormented.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for 17 years. I’ve been building in public and working in the open for a long time. This meant I had mountains of podcast scripts, interview scripts and social media posts to draw upon for my manuscript. The part that was actually hard had nothing to do with the writing. It was the hustle, the constant selling and promoting.

If you grow up believing that writing a book is impossibly hard, reserved for the elite and only something you do after you’re already wildly successful, you opt out before you even begin.

Non-fiction voices and ideas shape culture, business and politics, and men still dominate entire categories: 82% of politics books, 90% of sport titles and 93% of business books. Yet you and I both know that non-fiction goes far beyond the books themselves. It defines expertise, shapes narratives and influences how we work, lead and live. And that story doesn’t affect us all equally.

If you grow up believing that writing a book is impossibly hard, reserved for the elite and only something you do after you’re already wildly successful, you opt out before you even begin.

Writing a non-fiction book should feel as doable as launching a podcast. Especially if you choose to self-publish. Yet the rate at which women choose to take up this mantle is dire because the story we are told is one steeped in gatekeeping. Why does this story of writing a book being a task of extreme difficulty affect women disproportionately? The stats tell us that women are not starting from the same place. Women do significantly more unpaid work than men, around 60% more overall. In the UK alone, women spend almost an hour more every day on unpaid labour like childcare and housework.

This has consequences. One in three women have given up work to care, and many more reduce hours or turn down opportunities. This is double the number of men who do the same. So, when we say “writing a non-fiction book is hard”, the people who simply have less time, less energy and fewer uninterrupted hours to think clearly are going to run in the opposite direction.

But this is not just about time. Remember, the stat is 93% of business books are written by men. That’s much more than double the number of women. This is about who believes they’re allowed to be an expert. This feels like a good point for me to remind you that this particular cultural narrative is what I am an expert in and what my book is about. Research shows women are significantly less comfortable putting their voice into the world. Studies in organisational psychology show that women rate their own performance significantly lower than men do, even when their actual performance is the same or higher. And we’ve all heard the classic story that men apply for a job when they meet just 60% of the qualifications, while women tend to apply only if they meet 100%. Women are less likely to describe themselves as experts, and this really matters because writing a non-fiction book is, at its core, an act of saying: “I have expertise here.”

So, when you bring all this together, the picture is clear – women are swimming in a soup of less time, more responsibility and a higher psychological barrier to owning their expertise. Now, it’s no surprise that the story of “this is hard” lands harder on women. And what happens when women don’t write books? Society’s canon is male-centred and we lose entire ways of seeing the world.

It’s time to tell the truth. The difficulty of writing a non-fiction book has been grossly overstated, and the longer we keep telling that story, the more voices we lose.