Bring Your Business Book to Life With Drama
There is a whole globe full of people who could learn from your experience. Your book could help to change lives for the better everywhere.
Where is the drama within the nuts and bolts of your everyday business activity? Find it, focus on it and bring it to life in your writing.
Without it, you will lose your reader within the first couple of chapters. Readers need as much help to stay engaged with a good book as possible; it’s your job to help them stay on the page.
You know what your selling points are and (more importantly) what your USP is. You know that you’d like to be the author of a good book and you have an idea of the points you need to cover … but how do you make a non-fiction book interesting?
Entrepreneurs and business owners run into this snag very early in their book-writing mission unless they have had previous writing experience and publishing success. It is not enough to know your facts: you need to know where to find the story within what you do, too.
As the saying goes, “Easy reading is damned hard writing.” Writing well is trickier than it looks; you might have already discovered that for yourself.
Drama Makes the Story
The business world is never a dull place. The people who drive it are bumping together all the time – bargaining and competing with each other, swindling and negotiating, winning and losing, having affairs and court cases … let’s face it, wherever there are people there is drama!
Although you might be tempted to write about how long your ‘family business’ has been going, how many awards it’s won and what the press says about its top-selling product, you need to resist the urge. It makes for dull reading and comes across as shamefully self-focused.
The best advertisers focus on their target market rather than the advertised product or service. Your main focus should be on your reader – not you. This is the person, after all, for whom you conduct your business.
Who does your target reader service or supply? Why does he need to know what you know? If you have the answer to that, you can figure out the one, big emotion that drives him to take action. That’s what you need to appeal to – from start to finish, like a golden thread running all the way through the book … as though it were a novel.
Quite simply, your reader has picked up your book because he needs the information that he thinks you can give him. Until he has that need fulfilled, he is living with a painful emotion. Therein lies the drama. What could be the emotional relief that you can give this individual?
When you focus on the ‘people’ that make up your world as you write your book, you’ll uncover the drama …. which gives rise to the storyline.
As John le Carre said, “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat – now, that’s a story.”
Make your next book a real page-turner and find the drama – not another half-baked business book! You can find out more about how to create drama in non-fiction (clue … it involves contrast and conflict!) on the Authorship Mentor Programme – a six month mentoring programme that equips you with a whole new writing skillset as you write and FINISH your manuscript. More details on the website, or drop me a line here on LinkedIn to chat about your book idea.
Till then – keep scribbling!
Jo C
