Don’t Firehose Your Reader: 3 Ways Experts Can Write a Better Book
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As a ghostwriter, book coach, and bestselling self-help author, I’ve seen how subject matter experts can ruin their manuscripts by trying to tell the reader everything they know. This problem most often afflicts first-time authors who see their book as an unlimited opportunity to finally share their entire wealth of information. Freed from the constraints of a keynote speech, a time-limited a coaching session, or a consulting project’s looming deadline, experts-turned-authors often approach their first manuscript as a bottomless vessel into which they can pour out all the wisdom they’ve accumulated from decades of specializing in their chosen field. The result is an overwhelming book that turns off customers, undermines their professional brand, and shrinks their platform.
By slowing down and paring back your manuscript, I argue that you’ll be better able to produce an excellent, advice-driven book that doesn’t drench the reader in a firehose of excess information. It might also save you and your team time during the editing process. Here’s how.
Don’t Be a “Know-It-All”
Most of the expert authors I’ve worked with are very humble. They’re not intentionally trying to show off by demonstrating how much they know. They are usually hoping to impress the reader enough to earn their trust and thus keep them engaged and turning pages — a very worthy goal in this digitally-driven, attention- deficit world.
While you definitely need to establish your authority as the best person to write your particular book, the reader needs a lot less “proof” to accept that authority than you might imagine. I began this post by writing I’m a “ghostwriter, book coach, and bestselling author.” I needed only six words to convince you I know what I’m talking about. A brief nod to your credentials is probably sufficient.
Experts also often overshare their accumulated expertise and understanding of their subject matter. They want to impress the reader and increase their stature within their field or their industry. This approach often backfires because the reader won’t trust you enough to slog through pages of dry information until they connect with you. Don’t deluge them with a torrent of stats, explanations, concepts, theories, research, and case histories.
Instead, tell a story. Set the scene with a simple narrative about yourself and how you found your way into your profession or industry. Tell a story about a challenge you or a client faced and what you learned from that. This is a much faster way to connect with a reader, build a lasting bond, and establish your credentials in a more consumable style of nonfiction prose. Once you’ve secured that connection and trust, you can expand with more technical passages as you get deeper into the book.
Hold Back on the Backstory
In a memoir or a novel, backstory lets the reader understand how the protagonist became who they are, or explains why they ended up in a certain dilemma. Done masterfully, backstory adds depth to the book. Done poorly, it hampers pacing at best and confuses the reader at worst. In a prescriptive nonfiction book, the equivalent of backstory is called “background” and ninety per cent of it is unnecessary.
The problem is that experts always find the nuances of their field far more interesting than the solution-seeking reader so they add thousands of expendable words that only impede or bore their customers. Let me give you an example. My first bestseller, Shifting Sands, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It’s a metaphor driven self-help book for navigating change at work and in your personal life. It’s based on my journey across the Sahara Desert.
I find almost everything about the Sahara utterly fascinating. Did you know that the desert was formed as a result of a planetary “wiggle” that affected the angle of sunlight hitting Africa about 13,000 years ago? Not only that, but this is thought to be a repeating pattern, which means in 5,000 to 10,000 years the desert will turn green again? I didn’t think so. Do you care? Probably not. Will this tidbit of trivia help you cross the shifting sands of change in your own life, such as a job loss or divorce? Absolutely not — which is why that fascinating fact was deleted from my manuscript.
For many subject matter experts, the problem goes deeper than adding slightly interesting but irrelevant trivia. Usually, they believe a concept they’re presenting is indecipherable to the lay reader without a deep dive into the origins and research associated with the main message. But this is not the case. For starters, if you’ve done your job well in the early parts of your book, the reader trusts you. They don’t need the background. If you say it’s true, they will believe you. Secondly, unless your book is about quantum physics, you don’t need to cover a vast ocean of tangential material. Doing so isn’t good writing. The art of prescriptive nonfiction is found in making concepts simple to grasp and solutions easy to apply. This should be your goal.
How do you know if your background is vital? Read it out loud to someone. Better yet, land yourself a free speaking gig and bludgeon the audience with your background material. Watch their eyes glaze over and their heads droop as they retreat into the familiar comfort of scrolling on their smartphones. If you haven’t got the stomach for (or your professional ethics refuse) abusing an audience, then record yourself reading your “essential” background passage and play it back. After listening, ask yourself if someone who’s only pursuing answers to a specific problem, like the one your book is supposed to solve, would actually wade into the depths of the subject like you’re asking them to do. In most cases, less is more.
Transform Your “Tried and True” Process
Consultants, speakers, therapists, and coaches often determine, through years of trial and error, a step-by-step methodology for guiding their clients to a desired outcome. Their system works when they’re in the driver’s seat leading the client carefully through all the steps in a project, giving a speech, or doing live coaching.
In the consumption of a book, it’s the reader who is in charge. You can’t expect them to stay engaged during parts that are less relevant to them, or not jump around in search of a quick fix for their problem.
Trying to stick strictly to the order of the author’s standard methodology poses multiple problems in anything like a self-help, personal growth, or leadership process book. The main issue is that the payoff usually happens at the very end of the process which forces the customer to endure less-satisfying parts to get to the good stuff. And, we all know that today’s reader has very little stamina for ploughing through unengaging text.
Another big problem is that many solution-seeking consumers will cherrypick from longform content like a nonfiction book. In other words, if they see two or three chapters that resonate with their needs, they will happily purchase the product. But if — once they start reading — they discover they must read through and master all the other steps or stages that come before the relevant material, they will likely abandon their efforts. If readers find the author’s process too cumbersome or if they cannot cherrypick the parts they like, they’re unlikely to keep reading — or to recommend the book.
When structuring your book, try abandoning your usual process. I know that this will feel sacrilegious. Successful practitioners often have a deep devotion to their methodology because it works so well when it’s done correctly in the prescribed order. But, in our experience of coaching and ghostwriting for dozens of thought leaders and subject experts, we have found that almost every step-by-step process can be reimagined as a series of related principles.
It works like this: you identify a principle that captures the essence of a step in your process. The principle could be something like “innovation,” “trust,” “acceptance,” or “scalability.” You then describe all the things the reader needs to do to cultivate that principle and apply it to solving an aspect of their problem. The massive benefit is that you don’t need to stick to a certain order as required by your process. You can now put the more popular, cutting edge, and exciting material earlier in the book. As well, you can give the reader a unique payoff per chapter and per principle rather than waiting for the big finish at the end of the process and the end of the book. Readers need these regular rewards, like a trail of crumbs leading them through the dark forest, to keep going and stay committed.
The challenge to this approach is that you won’t be transferring your magical methodology into the book exactly as you deliver it in person to clients. But isn’t that the whole point of an expert’s book anyways? The goal of the book is to get the clients to hire you to coach, consult, or speak to them and have the full experience (and pay the full professional fees) associated with the standard method or process. By keeping your full methodology out of your book, you’ll end up driving more revenue into the core purpose of your business, which is to coach, speak, consult, or counsel others, rather than generating your main income from book sales.
Experts are in love with their expertise. Many of them devote their entire working life to this one area of interest. It’s completely natural that you would find it necessary and even appealing to share as much as possible of what you know in your book. But that’s not your job. Your biggest challenge is to get out of the reader’s way in their search to solve their problem. Give them a boost on their quest but don’t be a barrier. Write a book that works for the reader even if it means you have to restrain your natural desire to tell them everything you know. It will pay off in more business, more referrals, higher fees, and a better brand.
Steve Donahue is a bestselling author, book coach, ghostwriter and speaker. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated into multiple foreign editions. Steve is the founder of Storyglu.com, a book coaching and ghostwriting firm that helps nonfiction authors write books readers can’t put down.
