The mistake business authors make with their story, and how to fix it

Have you been through a personal experience which you’d love to share with the world, through a book? Maybe you could help other people who’ve been in the same situation; they’d be able to put the insights you’ve gained into practice in their own lives. How rewarding would that be!

Your experiences need to resonate with your readers, so they can easily make sense of them and take action as a result. And this is where some authors get it wrong – they get so caught up in their story they forget to make it work for others too. It’s an easy mistake to make.

You don’t want your book just to be a memoir, with no real practical value for your readers. So how do you tell your story in such a way as it’s relevant to them? What do you include? What do you omit? Do you start at the beginning and work your way to the end, or do you take it in chunks and move the timeline around?

Plot your story out

The best way to start is to take a sheet of paper and divide it lengthwise. Write the main points of your story in a list on the left hand side – just the critical elements of it. Then on the right, put the points you want to get across to your readers. After that, you can see how they match up, which will give you a great starting point for outlining your book.

Here’s an example. Jean was writing a book about weight loss. She’d tried every diet under the sun, but none of them worked. After several years of yo-yo dieting, the penny dropped that she needed to combine foods in certain ways, in order to lose weight permanently. Now she’s a fraction of her previous weight and wants to help others in her situation.

Her story timeline might look like this (this is a simplified version, in reality it would be more detailed):

1) How the weight crept on

2) Diet no. 1

3) Diet no. 2 (and so on)

4) Her lowest point – feeling overweight and in despair

5) How she realised where she’d been going wrong, and why

6) The steps she took to put it right

7) The present day

Then plot out your book learning points beside it

So how would she link the learning points for her reader to her story? She’d match each point to a moment in her story, with the numbers correlating with each other:

1) Bad eating habits and how they are formed

2) Why diet no. 1 didn’t work – what the reader can learn from this

3) Why diet no. 2 didn’t work (and so on)

4) Empathy with the reader so they feel understood

5) The science bit – educating the reader so they understand why all the previous diets didn’t work

6) How the reader can emulate her success

7) Inspiration for the reader – what they can achieve

By matching your story to your points, you’ll see which bits of your story are superfluous; interesting to you maybe, but not necessary for the book. Or you may identify some areas which need extra stories to give your book variety and extra credibility; people you’ve interviewed or helped outside of  your book, for instance.

So how do I tell my story in my business book?

There are various options, and they will depend on your personal preference as well as the nature of your story. The  main thing is to think of it from the your reader’s viewpoint, rather than from your own.

One great way to start is at the end; here you are, out at the other end of your story, and wouldn’t your readers love to know how you got there? Then start at the beginning.

Or you could start at your lowest point; after all is presumably where your reader is at, and they’ll want to know you understand their problem. After that you could go back to the beginning, giving them the ‘back story’, and take them through your solution so they end up in the same happy place as you.

Just remember to make sure that every moment in your story has a corresponding learning point (or points) for your readers, so they can benefit from the journey you’ve undertaken. And if you’d like a useful book about how to write great stories in your business/self-help book, try this: Storytelling Toolkit: How to Write Stories that Get the Results You Want from All Your Business Communications.

So over to you: have you got a story you’re burning to tell in a book? If you’ve started, which format did you choose, and would you do it differently after reading this?