How to win over your readers when they don’t believe you

If you’re a speaker, coach or expert who loves working with people face to face, you’ll naturally be adept at dealing with your clients’ feedback on the spot and adapting your style to suit. You can probably tell from their body language or the questions they ask whether your message is getting across, so it’s relatively easy to answer their questions, allay their fears and help them come to the conclusions that you know will serve them well.

But if you’re writing a book (or even a blog post) about your methods, how do you do this then? You can’t see or hear what your readers are thinking, so you’ve no way of knowing what objections they’re mentally coming up with. After all, it’s normal for us to have questions when our long held beliefs are being challenged.

You’ll know that for your book to be really effective, you need to find a way to predict – and deal with – your readers’ most likely concerns and questions. If you don’t do this, your book runs the risk of being one of those that we read, think ‘yeah, sounds great in theory, but what happens when ….’, and then put back on our shelf never to pick up again. Ouch!

So how to solve this problem? There are two stages to this:

1) Come up with your readers’ list of likely concerns, questions and issues 

These are the objections that your readers may be having to what you are telling them in your book. I know we don’t like to think of our readers being sceptical about what we have to say, but you KNOW that your readers need to be 100% on board with your big message. How else will they make the improvements to their lives and businesses that you’re telling them about?

• Cast your mind back over your last few client sessions and write down all the questions and concerns that came up from each one in turn. You’ll probably find some themes emerging, so group them together.
• Run your book’s central theme past some people whom you know are broadly in your target readership. Ask them what problems they could foresee with what you’re writing about (and tell them they can be as honest as they like).

2) Develop ways of addressing these concerns within your book

Here are some suggested ways of doing this, but you may think of  more depending on how you work with your clients:

• Tell it straight: if your readers need to devote x amount of hours to doing what you are asking them to do, be honest and tell them. And give them ways to break the work down into mangeable chunks.
• Highlight the objections you assume they may be thinking of and empathise with how new it’s feeling for them. Make it clear that you’re putting yourself in their shoes, and then tell them the story of how you were once new at this and how far you’ve come now. Give examples of clients or friends of yours who were also beginners once, and explain how by keeping on the right track and overcoming their fears, they made massive improvements to their lives. Be specific so that your stories are believable.
• Develop some exercises that your readers could do to prove to themselves – in a small way – that your advice works. For example, if you are wanting your readers to embrace the concept of speaking to their loved ones in a different way in order to get a better response, give them one simple exercise to do. It could be, for example, to ask their partner one question that evening using your advised approach; if they get a positive response, that proves that it works and they’ll be more likely to absorb the rest of what you have to say. If they get a negative response, tell them in advance what that might be due to, eg their partner ‘hearing’ what they would normally say.
• Think about the ways you tackle these objections in your face to face work, and ask yourself whether the same approach could work in your book. For example, if you tend to throw back the question to your client (eg, ‘That’s an interesting problem, can you think of who you could ask for help to solve it?’) then try the same in your book (eg, ‘You may find that x problem comes up when you try this. If that happens, who could you ask for help?’).

Working with feedback and objections face to face can be a very different experience to doing it in writing, but developing the habit of thinking ahead like this is a really useful tool. And it’s not just for book writing – you can use it in your blog posts as well as any other writing you do.

Let me know what you think in the comments below!