When writing a book to boost your business, you may think your mission is to sell, sell, sell yourself, your service(s), and/or your product(s).
Wrong.
Your mission, first, is to home in on the readers’ pain points in a way that demonstrates how clearly you understand and relate to what they’re focused on. Next, you want to tie your story, and eventually your clients’ stories, into that narrative. And, as we saw in the preceding article in this series, you’ll need to judiciously incorporate supporting data. But none of this will keep your readers reading.
No matter how on-point your focus or research or how riveting or revealing your stories, if you don’t launch them with one heck of a hook, your fishies (otherwise known as readers and prospects) are going to swim on by. You don’t just need to hook them with the first sentence or two of every story in your book. You also need to hook them at the start and the end of every chapter.
Remember that in most cases, what’s going to grab and keep your readers’ attention is the sense that you—and the information in your book—can help them. As we saw in secret #3 about balance, while you’re busy being entertaining, authentic, and convincing in order to persuade prospects that they want to become clients, you’ll also want to make sure your readers see themselves in all those chapter and story hooks.
Of course, a lot of terrific beginnings don’t add up to much if the rest of the book doesn’t deliver. A strategic content mix will help hold the readers’ attention as well. As I discuss in my interactive e-course Boost Your Business with a Book, I like each chapter to present a mix of personal and professional stories, along with client stories and pertinent facts that engage your readers, support your thesis, and irresistibly present you and your values.
But that’s not enough. For readers to really get a sense of who you are, your book needs to reveal your individual writer’s voice. I’ll talk about that in the next article, which will be published in two weeks.
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