4 Steps to Writing a Book About Your Life

Welcome to the Bestseller Secrets Podcast, where experts and entrepreneurs learn how to make an income and an impact with their bestselling books. I’m your host, Rob Kosberg, and today we’re going to talk about four steps to writing a book about your life or a part of your life, perhaps as it relates to your business or to some thing that you’re looking to be seen as an expert in, perhaps for speaking engagements or lead generation or PR and media. Thousands of people come to bestseller publishing every year. I mean, literally, thousands of people have come with their story and with their passion and with their desire to write a book about their life. Perhaps that is you. Well, number one, you absolutely must determine what the purpose is in you writing your book. That’s the number one thing that you have to start with. Why are you writing it? There are two primary tracks, honestly, in writing your book. One track is you want to write it because this is a burning passion within you and perhaps you’re writing for future generations, or you’re writing for your children or your grandchildren or great great grandchildren, or you just want to tell the story that was your life or a part of your life. Fantastic. Nothing wrong with that.That is a great reason and motivation to do it.The other track is that this is some type of business project. You want to write about a part of your life as it will lead to perhaps the next iteration of your life, maybe into a consulting career, maybe into speaking, maybe into media, or perhaps generating more leads for your business or a new part of your business. I think about a client of ours, US ambassador Delano Lewis. He was a very, very successful lawyer. He rose to the ranks of CEO of NPR, National Public Radio. He was appointed in the Clinton administration as the ambassador to South Africa, worked directly with Nelson Mandela, and when he came to us, he was in his seventy s and he was looking to share his wisdom, share his knowledge, and become a speaker, almost embark on a third iteration of his business. So he wanted to write something that was going to lead to opportunities for speaking engagements. Currently we’re helping a very famous Beverly Hills dermatologist to write his life story and business story. And that is much more a passion project. He’s 80years old. He wants to pass on that knowledge and that wisdom to future generations and make an impact as well as telling the story to family members that may come on after him that would be very interested in learning what his story is. So number one, why do you want to write your book? If you’re writing something for the focus of a business or a new iteration of your life, speaking, consulting,et cetera, then you have to keep that in mind. That needs to be a primary focus when it comes to creating a hook, creating a title, figuring out who your audience is. Now, that is number two. You need to determine who the audience is based on the very purpose of you writing this book. And if you say, Well, I want everybody to know my story, I want everybody to hear it, then just understand. Not knowing who your audience means that you’re probably not going to be able to reach them. And thinking that everybody is in your audience also means that nobody is in your audience. You need to be specific about that because you need to craft a hook and a title that is going to generate interest from that ideal audience. You have to speak to them, and you have to say things about them, not about you. One of the challenges that often authors will come to us with is they have perhaps acute phrase from a family member that made an impact or something that they were called, or they want to write about their life story, the lessons that they learned.And as much as I understand that, and I want you to be able to do that if you’re writing to an audience, to be known by that audience, but you’re not known by them right now. Right.So we’re not talking about your family or friends or sphere of influence.We’re talking about where you’re unknown. Then if you write The Life and Times of Rob Kosberg and no one knows who Rob Kosberg is, then is anyone really going to be interested in that? No. I wrote, publish, promote,profit, because I want those that are want to be authors or current authors that want help with marketing and making money with a book to be interested in the content. Are my stories in it? Of course. Are my client examples in it? Absolutely. But nobody cares about my life and times, and I’m okay with that,except perhaps my family. Hopefully they do.And perhaps down the road as I age, I will write a book that is very specific to my family and my friends. So don’t title your book. Don’t create a hook that nobody else in your audience is going to get. Speak about them and their needs rather than speaking about you and your particular story. Next step number three, you want to create a great flow to your book. First of all, understand that your book doesn’t have to be about your entire life. Now,if you are writing something as a passion project and you want to share about your life, fantastic, I understand about that.But perhaps you could consider taking the most interesting parts of your life and writing about those things, rather than writing about what happened to you from ages three to seven, eight to 1112 to1516 to 18, et cetera, et cetera. Again,that may be interesting to a family member, but it probably isn’t going to be interesting to somebody that is just in a general audience that doesn’t know who you are, you can be more creative than that, right? So think about what part of your life really teaches some concepts or teaches some ideas and write about that. In fact, you can even skip around based on creating a flow of how you have grown as a person, the ups and downs that you’ve experienced. Again, if you’re writing for a particular business focus, then you’re probably just going to take the parts of your life that relate directly to your business experience.If I were writing a book about entrepreneurship, then I would talk about my various entrepreneurship activities and what was happening to me when I was involved in those entrepreneurship activities, from real estate to financial services to publishing, ghost writing and our current business bestseller Publishing right now. So make it interesting and think in terms of it. Aligning directly with who your ideal audience is and knowing that it doesn’t have to be simply this linear progression through your life. Rather, take the things that are most interesting about your life that even if you’re writing a book just as a passion project,those interesting things will keep your family, your friends and others absolutely engaged and perhaps even gripped with attention.Number four and lastly, I’m just taking the part about you writing the book. We’re not going to talk about editing and proofreading and all of that. You can watch another episode about book marketing and publishing, but number four and lastly, you want to craft chapters that are absolutely compelling. How do you craft a compelling chapter? Well, you need great story.Stories are what make it compelling. But the story also needs to be told well. There needs to be content and context. Context is your story. Context is speaking in a way that people understand that there’s more to this than just I started here and I ended here. Right? There were points of drama, there were points of difficulty and pain. There were outside forces acting upon you and stifling your creativity or your opportunities or whatever it is that you were faced with. The best way to tell a great story is to find the points of drama and leave what we call an open loop.An open loop is where you bring it to a crescendo and you don’t culminate the story. For example, if you’re writing something that is business related from your life, or you’re writing something about your wisdom and what you’ve learned and you’ve learned through difficulties and challenges and hard times, then you’re going to take that story to the point of greatest conflict or challenge or difficulty and you’re going to leave it right there. And then you’re going to teach from it. This is what we learned, this is what transpired,this is how we developed our systems or our processes. You’re going to help them from the point of crescendo, the point of most or of greatest difficulty. Now, you’re going to come in afterwards and you’re going to close that loop because they’re going to want to know what happened. They’re going to want to know, were you okay, what happened with your business or what happened with your relationships or whatever. But you want to teach from your story and then come in and culminate that afterwards. If you do this, if you craft your book in such a way, thinking in terms of who is my audience and how can I speak to this audience so I get them interested, knowing that they don’t know who I am? More than likely because you’re probably going to want to write to more than just your immediate family. So they don’t know who I am. So writing about my life and times is not what is ideal. What is ideal is speaking about the wisdom within my story, the things that they can learn from my story, and speaking to your audience,then developing your table of contents so there’s a great flow. Developing the chapters so each chapter has a great story with moments of great conflict and challenge and then teaching points and great content. And then from there, obviously, you’re going to have to edit it and proofread it and design it and launch it. But there are other podcast episodes about that that will help you with that. This is the four steps to write a great book about your life and about your story.Also, remembering you don’t have to write your entire story in one book, you can take the things and the areas that you feel like would be most interesting and compelling for your particular audience. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can publish, promote, and profit with your own best selling book, you can get a copy of mine for free. Just go to publishpromoteprofit.com. All we ask is that you pay a shipping charge and we will send it right to you. You don’t have to go on Amazon and spend $20 for it. We’ll get it to you for free. Just pay shipping.