Thanks for joining me in my series of videos about the things you need to know when you’re publishing your first book as a speaker.
In this third of four points, I’m going to talk about how to make your ideas interactive and why that matters.
When you’re learning something, it’s really important, nice and it feels good to get feedback on how you’re doing. Readers often ask themselves
- am I mastering this
- is this done to the right standard
- am I okay here
- have I got this
Unfortunately, when it comes to learning, if you are just relying on the book, can can feel like you’re doing it on your own, a bit lost and you feel a bit cast adrift, can’t you?
Always think when you’re writing your book how can you reinforce that student-and-teacher mentoring relationship within your writing.
How can you give people feedback?
Simple things like giving people multiple choice quizzes or asking questions like “I’ve given you three ways you can make sure you don’t get greenfly on roses in your garden. List the three ways.” If your readers can’t list the three ways they know they go back to reading that section in the book. They canrevisit that information until they are confident they can answer all 3 ways from memory.
If they’ve got gaps in their knowledge they can identify the weakness, then they can relearn that. This is a great way to reassure them they have mastered what they need to.
Readers can feel confident they know subject better
- when they know the subject better they can apply it better
- when they apply it better, they get better results
- when they get better results, they think of you as a better teacher
and they tell their friends. Simple. It’s a great win win situation.
Always give people some sort of feedback and a way of ensuring they know they’ve mastered the material because it gives them confidence and when they’re confident about something they’ll talk about something, they’ll do something. It will make a difference. Writing your book becomes worthwhile.
Other things you could do are giving people checklists or exercises to fill out.
Also you could give them role playing situations – perhaps if you were doing a book on sales you might put in some dialogue and people could role play the dialogue with colleagues and things like that.
There’s lots of different ways you can bring your material to life even if it isn’t necessarily with you popping out of the book like some sort of “Harry Potter newspaper” style animation.
You can still make it fun and you can still mentor people even with a written word.
Remember, it is worth including because it makes your book just so much nicer for the reader.
