In this episode of Stories of Gold, I talk with author, coach, and course creator, Cheri Merz. Cheri’s mission is to help anyone who wants their message to land with impact not only to achieve their desire, but to do so profitably.
In this conversation, we talk about:
- Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
- The difference between a client-attracting book and, say, a Charles Dickens novel
- How your book can help your audience know, like, and trust you as the author
- How to meet your reader’s expectations
- How the book is the start of the client-author journey
- Why you should think Reader’s Digest version in your book
Finally, I ask Cheri:
- How do you create a richer story?
- How are you stocking up your treasury of stories?
Transcript:
Steve: What does writing a book do for us that other things do not?
Cheri: Creating relationship with your audience. And I think to some extent, it helps create a relationship with yourself as well.
Memoirs, essays, or client-attracting book – any of those types of books will pull something out of you that you didn’t know you had.
I suppressed my desire to write for a good 50 years because of imposter syndrome. And that’s what stops a lot of us. Overcoming imposter syndrome – getting your thoughts down on paper, in order to have other people read them – is a tremendous act of courage. It teaches you things about yourself that you should be proud of.
Steve: Writing for myself the last eight-plus years has enriched my life in ways that I can’t even begin to describe. It’s only been in the last year or so that I really started to make an effort to write in a way that connects with my audience.
Cheri: What caused that transformation?
Steve: I learned people want to hear what I have to say.
Cheri: So you have overcome imposter syndrome. Because part of the imposter syndrome is thinking, Who am I to write a book? Who would even read it? Why would anybody be interested? And now you know, people are interested. People value your insight. You have tremendous insight and wisdom. That’s why, writing coaches say, the world needs your book.
Steve: If every one of us on this planet were to write our own story, write our own book, we would end up with 7 billion different versions of a book.
Cheri: What a rich garden. No one can read 7 billion books.
Steve: What makes a client attracting book different from say Charles Dickens?
Cheri: Charles Dickens books are very long. A client attracting book doesn’t need to be and probably shouldn’t be. Charles Dickens books tell a story, but it’s a fictional story. It’s a made up story. A client attracting book is designed to allow your client to know, like, and trust you.
It’s no longer the days of standing in front of a rented Lear jet and saying look how much success I’ve accumulated. People have gotten more sophisticated than that.
Anyone whose business is creating transformation in other people require even more trust than say a car dealership, people are trusting you with their lives, their inner lives which is even more important to them than their money. If, if they don’t know you, and haven’t determined that they liked you. How in the world will they trust you?
You need to write the book that your client wants to read. No matter how passionate you are about your story, if the story doesn’t meet the readers expectations, it’s not going to sell.
Steve: How do you meet your audience’s expectations with the book you’re writing.
Cheri: Sell them what they want, give them what they need. Therein lies the transformation. If what they want is not going to get them to the goal that they say they want, then you must hold from your expertise, and give them what they need to reach that goal…. When you’re in the transformational industry, you really can’t do it in a book. Probably 1% of the population can read a book and do it for themselves without guidance, without instruction, without encouragement and accountability.
The book is there to transform the audiences belief in what they can do. From, I can’t do this, to, Yes I can. All I need is some guidance.
The book builds the belief that they can with guidance and stories. The book tells your audience, I’ve got you. You can do it because I did it. I may have done it with guidance also. But I’ve got you. Yes, and when, when you have convinced someone within your book that you’ve got them – and you should be, you should be telling the truth – they will work with you.
They’ll put themselves in your hands. And you can then affect the further transformation to get them further along toward their goal or all the way there.
Steve: The book is part of the journey not the whole of the journey, both for the author and for the reader. You start with a book. Then you go from that book to a course, or to coaching, or to consulting. The book is the beginning of the relationship not the end.
You can read all the books in the world, but if you don’t actually start acting on those books, it doesn’t matter how many books you read. You’ve got to take what you’re learning and put it into practice, which is why the next steps in the relationship are important.
Cheri: Books often leave things out because it’s experts who have written the directions. They have what’s called expert blindness.
You really have to have a back and forth, more of a dialogue here, because you may not know what your reader needs to know that you didn’t put in your book.
The book has to be engaging. And that’s to some extent where craft comes in. And that’s where stories come in. The book needs to leave the reader wanting more. And whether that more is working with you, or working with someone else, or reading another book, it’s been said, leave them wanting more, while satisfying what they picked up the book in the first place for.
The one thing you cannot do with the book, is have a dialogue. That’s a one sided conversation, and the dialogue is important.
We tend to want to say everything in one book and make it our Masterpiece, our magnum opus. But these days, people don’t have the time, or the patience, to read a long book. And it’s actually better to make a shorter book.
If I can encourage anybody who is on the brink of wanting to write a book, and being daunted by the task, I would tell them think Reader’s Digest version.
Steve: What makes for a richer story?
Cheri: The technical answer is more sensory detail. In a full length book, it would be more stories with more sensory detail.
If people are skipping long passages because you’re telling long boring stories with no point and no connection to what you were trying to convey, they’re not getting what you intended them to get.
Make the content easier to access, so readers get more value out of it.
Steve: How are you stocking up your treasury of stories?
Cheri: As I come across something in conversation that I think my kids would appreciate, or something that will illustrate a concept within my teaching, I write it down.
I encourage everyone to do that, whether they use a rocket book, or whether they use their phone voice system to create a voice note. Whatever you have at hand, be it a scrap of paper or a napkin or some high tech object, write it down because in our busy world, it will be gone in an hour. You can always flesh it out if you’ve written down a few key words.
Are you getting ready to write your own client-attracting book? Then you may want to attend Cheri’s free training, What to Do Before You Write
to Attract Your Ideal Audience.
Join me each Tuesday at 12pm Eastern in The Art of Entrepreneurship for Transformational Authors and Speakers Facebook group for another Stories of Gold episode, where we learn from another expert how to create a richer story.