The persuasive pen #2: how to win over your self-help book readers

 

This is the fifth in a series of posts giving you free extracts from my book: How to Write a Self-Help Book.

In this one, I add to my previous post about how to write persuasively for your readers.

Writing persuasively is important because one of the key weaknesses of some self-help guides is that they tell their readers what to do. And yet, people only do what they want to do.

That means your challenge as a self-help author is to get your readers to a place of wanting, and it’s why persuasiveness needs to be at the heart of your writing.

There’s so much to say about writing persuasively that I’ve split it into two posts. This second one focuses on storytelling,  and you can read the first, which focuses on credibility, here.

It’s all about the emotion

We human beings are rational creatures. We weigh up options, consider choices, and steer away from rash decisions that we may later regret.

Or, so we like to think. In reality, our emotions play the primary role in our decision-making. If you don’t believe me, try answering the following questions.

Have you ever made a high-value, high-stakes purchase from a brand that you’ve never heard of, even if was at a great price?

When you go to the supermarket, do you only ever buy the food that’s on your list?

Have you ever bought a car you hated the colour of and been completely okay about it?

If the answer to any or all of these is ‘no’, that’s evidence of emotional decision-making. There’s nothing wrong with it — we all do it. In fact, the only reason that we feel uncomfortable about admitting it is because reason and logic are so prized in Western culture.

That’s why we buy on emotion and justify with logic afterwards: ‘Well, the car would’ve lost a lot of value with that horrible colour — it made sense to buy the silver one, even though it cost more.’

Purchase decisions are no different from other decisions. When your readers look to you for help with making other choices about their lives — ones that have more far-reaching consequences than what to buy for dinner — they’re also making them based on emotion.

Which means that you must make judicious use of emotion-based persuasion in order to nudge them in the right direction.

In a book, there are three key ways that you can make your writing emotionally persuasive, and I’m going to focus on the main one in this post: storytelling.

Tell me more about storytelling

In their book about persuasive communication, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe an exercise that they carry out with their Stanford students each year. They give them some data about crime patterns in the US, after which half the students are asked to make a speech to their peers to convince them that crime is a serious problem. Each speaker is rated by their audience, and unsurprisingly, the most polished speakers tend to receive the highest marks.

But then the audience members are asked to write down, for each speaker, what they remember about the talk that they heard. They’re amazed to discover that, despite only a few minutes having elapsed since hearing the speeches, they can recall virtually none of the facts presented.

What they can remember, though, is the stories that were in the speeches. In fact, 63 percent recall the stories and only five percent the individual statistics.

Who doesn’t love a good story? I don’t know about you, but I spend a fair bit of time and money on consuming stories. I read novels, watch films and TV series’, go to plays, and listen to friends recounting the ups and downs of their lives.

Why do I do that? Because there’s a magnetic field around a story which pulls me in — I can’t help but want to know what happens next.

It’s been discovered that there are scientific reasons for our fascination with stories. Among other things, they stimulate the release of oxytocin, which is a hormone generated when we snuggle up with someone we love or interact with friends. That’s why we feel as if we have a relationship with the characters in a story, even though we know they’re made-up.

Oxytocin is a powerful drug; it’s even been shown that people with high levels of it are 48 percent more likely to donate to charity than those without. If it can do that, then surely it can give someone the motivation to change careers, transform their relationship, or overcome their phobia?

As we saw from the Stanford experiment above, there’s another reason why stories are persuasive, which is that they make the information within them memorable. What sticks in your mind for longer: facts and figures alone, or when they’re embedded in a story?

Suppose you’re a weight loss coach and you have evidence that people who lose only two pounds a week keep the weight off in the long term more successfully than those who lose more. That’s certainly a persuasive statistic. But by the time your readers have finished the final chapter, would they remember it? Probably not.

How much more persuasive would it be to build the statistic into a narrative?

How to tell a story

Here are the five basic elements your story needs to include if it’s to be a great read and convince your readers about the point you want to make.

1. It must be about one significant problem

You’re using your story to persuade your readers to change one thing, so don’t confuse them by adding in lots of problems. Also, the issue should seem difficult or impossible to solve; easy problems aren’t interesting to read about.

2. The problem should come across as unfair to the main character.

All problems are unfair when they happen to us, aren’t they? What’s more, the perceived unfairness of the situation in a story is central to how much we empathise with the main character.

3. The difficulty of solving the problem pushes the main character outside of their comfort zone.

When you’re trying to motivate someone to make a change in their life, there are reasons why they’ve not done it already. Maybe they didn’t know what to do, but it’s just as likely that they had an inkling but lacked the impetus to make the shift.

Change is painful, so your protagonist should also find it hard. What’s the comfort zone that your readers are in, and which your main character could dramatise for them?

4. Trying to solve the problem causes more problems.

Because we don’t like being outside our comfort zone, we’ll do anything to avoid it. But that won’t help us to solve our problem, in fact it often makes it worse. It should be the same for your main character: by trying to find alternative solutions that are easier for them to accept than the dreaded stepping outside of the comfort zone, they only exacerbate the original issue.

5. A final battle resolves the problem.

So strong can be our attachment to our preferred solutions (even if they don’t work) that it usually takes something dramatic to shift them. This is the final battle, after which we’ve ‘won’ and can celebrate our success.

In summary, if you want your self-help book to persuade its readers into a new way of thinking and behaving, you need to get comfortable with telling stories. There are five steps to a great story, so just make sure your stories follow the outline above.

If you’d like to buy a copy of How to Write a Self-Help Book, here’s where to click.