Thanks for joining me on a series of eight videos about questions to ask yourself as a speaker before you write your own book.
My first major point to make is you need to ask the question who is this book for? You must focus on the reader.
You must know the reader and their situation inside out if you’re going to offer them a really good quality book they can learn from and apply in their lives. A book that’s going to be a treasure to own.
- what matters to the reader
- what do they want to achieve
- why do they want to achieve it
- what stops them from achieving that sort of thing
- what other successes they had in their life that they could draw on that would perhaps help them in this situation
- why do they need to know this
- how are they going to apply it
- are they going to help somebody else with their knowledge
- are they just wanting to help themselves with this knowledge
- who are they going to help with this? Why
You really need to dig deeply into that to make sure that you create what’s called the persona. Used to do this a lot when we were putting information on websites, we would imagine people at work and what they were doing, what their situation was like, was the phone ringing and a customer at the front desk while they’re trying to answer emails and everything. We used to think about their situation in immense detail, so that we could then make the information on the website easy for people to use.
You need to do the same thing with your book and really think about user and their constraints in order for it to be successful. Don’t pad your book out with stuff to make it longer. There’s a bit of a misconception I think that the longer the book “the cleverer” you are. No, it just shows you’re a better rambler.
I’ve mentioned in other videos the MVP, the minimum viable product which is a technique that’s used in software. It’s like what’s the bare minimum we can give people for them to have a great experience and achieve what they want to do. Your book is exactly the same thing, keep it short, sweet, lean and mean, get it done, get them helped, move on.
