The hard truth is that, with the exception of your mom, other family members, and a few friends, no one wants to read about you. At least not at first. Your potential readers and clients won’t initially care about you—unless there’s something in it for them.
Most readers seeking information are looking to solve a problem in their lives. Finance. Health. Relationships. Self-esteem. The list goes on and on, and so do the sales of self-help books. That’s your cue to tap into those pain points that relate to what you do or what you sell, and present the kind of information that will help your prospects.
Along the way, you also have to convince those readers that you’re the person they want to trust. As I mentioned in last week’s article about authenticity, that’s not going to happen with a slick sales pitch. And, as we saw in the article about the need for an entertaining read, it’s not going to happen if you bore them since they’ll just put down your book.
But it’s not enough to be authentic and entertaining. You have to connect all that to what brought them to you—or at least to your book—in the first place.
Ask yourself: What are these people looking for? Or even what are they afraid of? Then balance that angle with personal, professional, and client stories.
If I was going to write a book to promote my writing coach services, for example, I would focus all too often, hiring a writing coach to help with the very personal and vulnerable process of writing a book winds up being a leap of faith. Instead, I would want people to know what kind of coach they would get should they decide to work with me.
So, on the professional side, I would tell the story of helping a very successful couple write a book designed to promote their business. Both individuals are highly driven A-types, which explains how they’ve done so well in building a dynamite enterprise that melds their passions with excellence. It also makes for a certain amount of headbutting, especially when writing a book that relies on memory. My role, in part, was to help them figure out what their story was and elicit the anecdotes that would bring that to life. But I also had to mediate their disagreements and help them find common ground. A year or two after their book, which became a national bestseller, had been published, I met them for lunch to discuss another project they had in mind. “Thank God our marriage counselor is back,” joked the woman.
I might also tell the story about how I fell into being a writing coach more than 25 years ago after an agent needed help with the book she was writing. She then referred me to one of her associates with a client who wasn’t getting her book written. And that person happened to belong to a writing coach group which brought me my third writing coach client before I knew that writing coaches were even a thing.
Both stories give you of my professional achievements without my focusing on–or boasting about–those.
I would also home in on how would-be authors often hesitate to ask for help by telling the story about moving to a tiny ski resort where I taught in a one-room schoolhouse after college. Over the course of two very snowy winters, I learned the hard way that sometimes insisting on doing something by yourself—like repeatedly digging out a snowmobile, a car, or anything else for that matter—is not always the smartest way to go.
I might even write about how close I was to my parents, and how while caretaking them at the end of their respective lives, I made sure that they got what they needed regardless of the procedural rules and despite being super non-confrontational. While that doesn’t directly speak to writing, it does show that I’m caring and willing to fight for what I believe in even if that means venturing out of my comfort zone.
Figuring out which stories fit in a book isn’t the easiest thing. That’s why in my interactive e-course Boost Your Business with a Book, you’ll write sloppy copy about yourself, your business, and your clients. Then we’ll talk about the themes that emerge and figure out which stories will best help you make the case that you’re the person the reader wants to buy from or work with.
Bolstering that argument with convincing data will seal the deal. That’s why we’ll talk about research in the next article in this series.
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