Strategy + Storytelling: Your Fasttrack to Bestseller Status

Everyone who writes a book dreams of making it on the bestseller list. And you should! You likely aren’t writing a book to fulfill a bucket list or only to share with your best friend. After investing your time, heart and resources in writing a book, you deserve to make an impact with your book. You deserve to go big.

There are three key things you need to accomplish to set your book up as a bestseller. 

First, you want to choose a topic within your passion and expertise. The phrase “write what you know” is fundamental here. Think of a topic you love and could think, write, speak about for years without being bored. There’s a saying “no passion in the writer, no passion in the reader.” Passion is contagious and your reader will feel yours through the page. 

Second, you want your book to help a reader solve a problem or achieve a dream. A bestseller is simply determined by volume of books sold. When your book helps a reader solve a challenge or achieve a goal or dream, they’ll tell people about the book. They’ll choose your book for their book club. They’ll nag their sister, mother, friend, co-worker & friends on Facebook until they read your book.

You don’t have to save someone’s entire marriage or transform their health to write a bestseller. Giving them 5  relationship turnarounds or one new decision making framework can make a great book. Think about a challenge your ideal reader or client faces and lead them to a win. They’ll keep reading. They’ll want more.

Third, identify what makes your book relevant NOW. For a book to hit the bestseller list readers need to feel a sense of urgency. To find your “relevancy” hook, open your favorite social platform and review the comments section. Notice what people are complaining about. What are they asking? Scroll the news headlines. Even if your topic is evergreen like fitness or helping entrepreneurs make more money you can find a relevant “hook”. For example during covid, you could do a relationship book with a hook about getting along peacefully during close quartered, high stress situations. The bonus of part three is that your book will already be media and podcast pitch ready. You’ll easily articulate your passion, how it helps people and why it’s important now, the essential ingredients to a bestseller and to you being an irresistible media guest. 

Every one of our clients that have followed our step-by-step roadmap has made it to bestseller!

“Storytelling Success

Once you’ve established your first components of your book, use these 3 storytelling strategies to take your writing from emerging writer to pro.

1. Sensory detail: use sight, smell, taste, touch and sound to “put the reader” in the scene with you. Science has proven that when you give readers sensory detail, readers experience the writing as if it’s actually happening. They will sweat as you run the final mile of marathon, sitting in the pepto bismol pink hospital room, salivate while reading about the glistening folds of fettuccine on the hilltop in Tuscany.

    

2. Specificity: readers zone out with general description and lean in for more when you write with specifics. Take a basic sentence in your book and upgrade it with specific detail. Instead of “tree” try “Spruce”. Instead of “car”, write “Mercedes” or “station wagon.” “Disease” becomes “fibromyalgia.” See how much more you see as the reader, and how much more the reader will know about you, the setting, and the people in your book when they know which kind of tree, car, animal. Specificity conveys so much in just a few words. With it you can be as economical on the page as Joan Didion. As rich as Hemingway.

    

3. Use Dialogue. Instead of summarizing a conversation, let the people in your book speak. Try out the difference between A:“My mother took me outside in the garden and told me she didn’t love my father anymore and that they were going to get a divorce” and B: “My mother walked me past the azalea bush. It was May and the flowers hummed with bees. I saw the Queen leave the hive as my mother said, “I don’t love him anymore. Y- your father. We’re getting divorced.”

For more tips on writing like a pro and hitting the bestseller list, check out The Thought Leader Lounge Mondays 12:00ET.