The persuasive pen #1: how to win over your self-help book readers

This is the fourth in a series of posts giving you sneak previews from my forthcoming book: How to Write a Self-Help Book.

In this one, I talk about how to write persuasively for your readers. There’s so much to say about this that I’ve split it into two posts; watch out for the second one in 3–4 weeks.

Why is writing persuasively important?

One of the key weaknesses of some self-help guides is that they tell their readers what to do.

And yet, people only do what they want to do.

That means your challenge as a self-help author is to get your readers to a place of wanting, and it’s why persuasiveness needs to be at the heart of your writing. Persuasiveness is the key to motivating your readers to set off on the journey you want them to take, and to making sure they stay on it to the end.

You may be wondering: is being persuasive just another way of being manipulative? Is it a bit underhand? Why not just be up front about things?

I understand why you might have this concern, because as someone who works with people to improve their lives, it’s important to you to be ethical. But there’s a difference between persuasiveness and manipulation.

Manipulation involves being coercive or deceptive, whereas persuasiveness is about leading people towards a goal in a transparent way. Your readers want to be motivated by you — in fact, they need it. If it was easy for them to change on their own, they wouldn’t be reading your book.

Writing persuasively might seem like a tricky thing to do, but there are some principles and methods that will help you. Once you’ve reached the end of this chapter, you’ll see that it’s not the dark art you might have thought it was.

Remember, this is only the first of two posts about writing persuasively. You’ll learn two key tips here, and more in the second one.

Establish your credibility for persuasion

If you’re going to write a persuasive book, you need to make clear up front what gives you the right to do it.

Think of the last time you spoke at an event or watched someone who was on the stage. You know the formula: before the speaker comes on, a compère introduces them by summarising what qualifies them to be there.

It might go something like this: ‘Susan Wright has been helping people to find their inner spark for 15 years. After gaining a PhD in Psychology, she worked in the mental health system and then launched her own practice. These days, she focuses on bringing more joy into her client’s lives, and she’s here today to share some of her valuable insights with you. Please welcome Susan to the stage!’

Why does the compère do this? Because they know that if the people in the room are to feel motivated to listen to Susan, they first have to believe in her.

If there’s no belief, there’s no trust, and if there’s no trust, nothing that Susan says will make an impact.

Therefore, one of the key ways that Susan can create change in her audience is to ensure that her professional credentials are clear from the start.

If you think about your own experience of people who’ve tried to influence you, I’m sure that one of the first questions you asked yourself was why you should believe them. And yet I’m often surprised by how reluctant some personal development authors are to showcase their expertise in their books.

Maybe it’s because they don’t want to come across as arrogant and complacent. I’d certainly never recommend that, but what they’re missing is the fact that their readers want to know what qualifies them to write about their subject.

There’s a huge difference between reading a book by someone who’s clear about their experience and qualifications, and someone who skirts around the subject. So it’s vital that you make clear — up front and early on — what gives you the right to write your book.

Your credentials can include:

• Your qualifications
• Your experience of working with people using your expertise, both in terms of the number of years and the nature of it
• Any standout accomplishments, either because of the results you achieved or because they were notably exciting or different
• Your own experience of life and how it relates to the topic of your book

Where to talk about your credentials

You should use your book’s ‘Introduction’ chapter to make it clear from the start why you’re qualified to give advice. The other place you can do it is on your ‘The Author’ page.

Your ‘The Author’ page

This tells your readers who you are, why you have the right to write this book, and how they can work with you.

It sounds like a contradiction, but this page isn’t about you, it’s about your readers. What do they want to know about you? What are the key pieces of information which will help them to trust the advice you give?

Qualifications and experience are important, but also what inspires your work. You can include testimonials, other books you’ve written, major talks you’ve delivered, or publicly available media that features you.

Make sure that you include a reference to how people can find out more about you; this could be your website, social media, or an email address if you feel comfortable giving it out.

Write your ‘The Author’ page in the third person (so it’s ‘he’ or ‘she’, not ‘I’), and in a warm and friendly tone. Ideally it will be a bit interesting and fun; it should make your readers want to learn more about your work.

You also want them to feel that they’re in safe hands, so it isn’t the place to hold back on your credentials or get all modest. Go for it!

Seeding

Your Introduction and ‘The Author’ page aren’t the only places that you can talk about your expertise; you can also drop it in throughout the book.

One way of doing this is what I call ‘seeding’, which means inserting mini stories about your work into your narrative.

For instance, if you help people coming up to retirement to create a plan for the rest of their lives, you might say: ‘When I first start working with a client, I always begin by defining their goals for retirement, because I’ve found that retirees with goals are twice as likely to come up with a plan they’re happy with than those who don’t. That’s why I’m starting with goals for you, too.’

As long as you only do this occasionally and it’s relevant to the topic you’re covering, it’s an excellent way of baking your expertise into your book.

Use hard evidence for persuasion in your self-help book

Facts and research can be valuable tools for bringing people over to your way of thinking.

Not only that, but they also give weight to your credibility as an author, because they show that you’ve read widely around your topic and have been exposed to expert opinions.

Here are a couple of ways to use this in your book.

Explain your research

When you quote research by people who have credibility in that area, you’re borrowing some of their credibility for yourself. Instead of it being only you who says that something is true, you’re backing yourself up with findings from others.

If you reference research, credit the researcher and the report; if possible, add a footnote so that your readers can access the full version if they want to.

Quote facts, figures, and statistics

In his book Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Robert B. Cialdini tells a story that has stayed with me ever since I read it. It’s about the problems experienced by the management of the Petrified Forest in Arizona.

Some visitors to the forest had a habit of taking irreplaceable pieces of wood as keepsakes, and the management wanted to prevent it. Cialdini and his team set up three trials. In one, they put up a sign stating that: ‘Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest’. In the second, the sign said: ‘Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest’. The third trial involved no sign at all.

They then placed marked pieces of petrified wood along the visitor pathways to monitor how many were stolen.

The results? In the first trial (‘Many past visitors’), 7.92 percent of the pieces were taken; in the second (‘Please don’t remove’) it was only 1.67 percent, and in the third (no sign) it was 2.92 percent.

The conclusion that Cialdini drew from this was that telling people they’d be part of the ‘many’ if they were to steal wood encouraged them to do just that. In fact, it was worse than saying nothing at all. Therefore, if the forest management wanted to encourage people to leave the wood alone, they should emphasise the fact that this was what the majority of park visitors did.

The reason I mention this story is not to give a lesson in the psychology of herd mentality and its role in persuasion, useful though it is for that. It’s to show you that hard facts, figures, and statistics are hard to ignore.

It’s their irrefutability that does it — they’re not your subjective opinions, but objectively true.

You won’t persuade people using them alone because they’re most powerful when combined with stories and emotion (see the next post in this series for more on that), but you’ll go a long way towards neutralising any scepticism that your readers may have.

In summary, to write a persuasive self-help book, there are two key techniques you can use:

• Make your credentials clear right from the start, so that your readers have a reason to trust you
• Use facts, figures and research to back up your points, so that your advice has weight and authority

In the next post, I’ll explore the power of storytelling and emotion when you want to write persuasively.

If you’d like to be notified when How to Write a Self-Help Book is published, please click here. In the meanwhile, the link above will take you to the pre-order facility.

Happy self-help book writing!