I’ve put together this set of training videos and they’re all about book publishing success for speakers. This is one in a series of eight videos. I’m going to give you three tips during this session.
My second point for speakers who want to write a book is to write clear, inspiring content.
What do I mean by that? You’ve probably seen speakers that are not at the “top of their game”. They’ve got really, really, really wordy slides. They’re reading word for word off the slide and they’re not really looking at the audience. They haven’t got rapport. You don’t want to be doing that with the book.
You want to be clear and concise.
Everything should be short and sweet, well organized, easy to follow.
If there’s instructions they should be repeatable and give consistent results and so on. Make sure what you’re saying is easy to follow. The easiest way to do that is to always use short words and always use short sentences when you’re explaining something. The longer multi-syllabic words that you choose above and beyond a simpler word that you could choose instead, you get the point. You don’t want to be using really long sentences, long words because people switch off whether it’s speaking or written words so short and sweet.
If you’re going to add steps into your book make sure they’re complete, follow the steps. Say you were writing a recipe, you’re making omelets and you forget to include a frying pan in a list of equipment that you need, nobody is going to able to make the omelet. You need to test the instructions, test the set up, test the process to make sure when somebody is following it at home they can do it safely and consistently.
Another good thing to do with a book is to provide feedback.
You can provide feedback by perhaps what I mean let’s explain. If you’ve ever read something and your mind has drifted off and you think I flipped through two pages there but I’m not sure any of it’s gone in. I’m a bit distracted. I’m a bit hungry. I thought somebody was coming to the door. I didn’t read what the author was telling me.
To counteract that and help people know they’ve actually mastered the material, you can put things like little quizzes or soundbites in the margin of your book. You could have exercises at the end so people can test their knowledge. You can give them a template to fill out that’s part of process so that they don’t miss out any of the steps and they know that they’re doing it properly. You can give them a checklist of things that they need to follow before they start doing something.
This way you can make the book slightly interactive, slightly more like a teacher and student relationship in printed form and give people some support and confidence that they’re actually doing things correctly. That helps make your book be inspiring because people think yeah I’ve looked the answers up and I got that right. I got that right. I can do this. This person is a great teacher and I love learning from them. Perfect.
