If you’re writing a book to help boost your business, you might not immediately think about writing about yourself. I’m betting the idea of opening up and adding a dash or six of vulnerability in those pages is even further from your mind.
I have two words for you: Big mistake.
Google “how to breed customer loyalty” and one of the top pointers you’ll find is allowing people to get to know you and your values. Brand transparency–consistent openness and honesty related to your values and how you do business–follows closely behind.
With the right approach, a book can provide this critical competitive differentiator. If people feel they know you, trust you and your expertise, and like you, they’re quite likely to want to do business with you. But that doesn’t mean that you can write an all-about-me book because, let’s face it, all those prospective readers and clients aren’t automatically going to care about you. At all. So, you have to write a book geared to your prospects’ needs, and then find a way to weave in elements of your life that, hopefully, reflect a splash of telling vulnerability.
To be hyper clear, this is not a license to boast. I could tell you, for example, that I ghostwrote Julia “Butterfly” Hill’s The Legacy of Luna about her two-plus-year tree-sit to save a redwood, and that the book went on to become a New York Times bestseller. You might be vaguely impressed, but that would be the end of it.
Or I could tell you about visiting the tree and all the people who kept insisting that I had to climb up one hundred feet to the lower of the redwood’s two platforms to visit face-to-face with Julia. Not an appealing prospect to someone who doesn’t react well to heights. So I just said no over and over and over again.
At the time, I was helping to caretake my mom, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. I figured that gave me the right to set some pretty firm boundaries.
“You have to climb the tree,” my HarperSanFrancisco book editor and longtime friend Liz Perle insisted.
“You didn’t,” I countered.
Finally, after days of everyone voicing their opinion, my dad weighed in. “I’d really rather you not climb the tree,” he said. And for the first time, I entertained the idea that maybe I could get over my fear and go up into Luna’s branches.
If I was writing a book, the rest of this story would talk about:
- Sneaking in past the lumber company guards who were trying to seal off the area
- Checking out the ancient redwood only to realize that since it was perched at the edge of a ravine, I’d be dangling a lot further from the ground than I had even imagined
- And how, when I finally had donned the climbing harness and cinched up my knees for the frog extension maneuver that would propel me up the rope, I finally asked, “If this doesn’t work out, I can always just come back down, right?”
“No. At that point, we’ll have to rescue you,” my guide replied.
His answer threw me so much that I forgot to ask perhaps the most pertinent question. If I couldn’t slide back down the rope once I’d really gotten going, how was I going to get back down to the ground once in the tree? Good thing I didn’t know that I’d have to jump off the platform and repel down. I’m pretty sure that would have been a dealbreaker.
Okay, back to the importance of vulnerability. Did you notice what I just did in this blog post? I took a topic geared around your interest in potentially boosting your business with a book, and I added a story that demonstrated my vulnerability as well as my determination to go above and beyond, even if that means pushing aside my own fears or self-imposed limitations. Hopefully, you’ve now got a better sense of who I am and how I live and work. I’m guessing if you’re looking to hire a writer or a writing coach, that sense of personal connection will stand me in good stead.
I want you to establish the same kind of connection with the readers of your book by sharing an intimate view of your most precious commodity: you. That’s going to take you a lot further than listing your credentials or writing a book where you’re not a player at all.
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