Today’s guest post is excerpted from The Complete Expert-to-Author Guide: How to Plan, Write, and Publish Your Nonfiction Book by Marisa Solis and Elizabeth Dougherty, published by The Collective Book Studio.

Like many experts, you may be very practical and methodical about the purpose of your book: There is a fairly obvious problem with a satisfying handful of proven solutions. The end.

However, a foundational step at this stage involves addressing the human component—and the main character of your book—including the emotions fueling the reader’s need for this book. As you know, the reader is the hero. The reader’s emotions matter. They won’t buy a book if they don’t feel validated from the first page.

So not only must you validate the reader’s problem and offer solutions, you must also share the promise you’re making to the reader. Because it’s in this promise that they can picture their improved life in whatever domain you’re writing about.

Initially, some of our clients gently decline to make any such guarantee. As one author declared, “I don’t feel comfortable making a promise to my reader. I simply can’t promise what their outcome will be.” We get that. In certain professional fields, a license could be at stake when you give professional advice. But you can include a disclaimer at the start of your book that protects you by stating the scope and limitations of your advice, and you, as an expert, likely know how to stay within the guidelines of your profession.

Put another way, you need to consider potential effects on the reader from your solutions, because your reader sure as heck is going to be considering them before deciding to buy your book.

Draw upon design thinking

There’s an emotive component that you must tap into when conceptualizing your book—it’s what makes the material feel relatable and relevant to the person considering buying it. The reader wants to be heard, seen, and understood. For instance, Devorah Heitner’s books Growing Up in Public and Screenwise about the challenges of parenting in the digital age (the problem) aren’t just about strategies such as managing privacy settings and talking about cyberbullying (the solutions). They’re about the profound feelings of relief, security, and confidence that come from learning how to protect your kids (the promise).

In other words, readers don’t have just functional needs, they have emotional ones too. Empathizing with people and collecting their feedback in order to deeply understand, prioritize, and effectively meet their needs—before trying to solve their problems—are important steps in design thinking. This human-centered design approach to solving problems is most commonly applied to product development, most famously by IDEO Design. Since cognitive scientist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon first suggested design as a way of thinking in his seminal 1969 AI book The Sciences of the Artificial, design thinking has evolved into a discipline in its own right. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka “d.school”) at Stanford University is the mecca of current design thinking research and applications.

Tapping into design thinking while developing your book, aka your product, can help you remain reader-centric and find compassion for your audience. Addressing both the problem and the resulting emotions, as well as being open to new ideas, can lead to bold innovations rather than simply incremental improvements of the status quo.

Getting curious about a reader’s pain points will help you formulate solutions that address the emotions underlying their challenges. For example, when we surveyed our target audience, we learned that they felt excited to write a manuscript, worried about it being good enough, and frustrated when they stalled. This insight informed our overarching promise: to get readers unstuck and armed with the know-how to finish a high-quality book with more confidence and efficiency, and less stress.

Adopting a human-centered approach can make you a more relatable writer; if you can chart a reader’s emotional journey throughout the book, while providing practical advice, meaningful change is more likely to happen. Explain what the reader will be able to do and how they will feel different. For instance, a book about transitioning careers may make the reader feel more confident about changing jobs. Promising how your reader will be different by the time they finish your book will resonate with their pleasure points.

Imagine a different future

Readers of advice-based nonfiction are interested in some type of personal gain; they are looking to your book for guidance. One direct way to appeal to them is to offer a picture of their transformed future self—whether that self has a stronger body, greater entrepreneurial acumen, or more effective ways to cope with a breakup after they read your book.

As you consider the promise you are willing to make, ask yourself:

• How can the reader expect to be different?
• How will the reader’s life have changed?
• How will they feel if they implement your solution?
• How will their relationships, work life, personal growth, and other dynamics have shifted?
• What will their habits look like in six months and in six years if they implement the solutions?

You can also flip this line of questioning to ask: If the reader doesn’t follow the advice in your book, in what ways will their lives stay the same, or worsen, preventing them from progressing?

To be clear, we aren’t supporting creating inflated or overly optimistic claims. Whatever promise you make, it should be something that, by the end of the book, the reader can accomplish.

Exercise: The Promise My Book Is Making

1. Create a document titled “The Promise My Book Is Making,” or download the free template here.
2. On the first line of text, type “Ten words to describe how the reader will feel after reading my book,” then follow that prompt with ten adjectives or terms.
3. Insert a one-column table with at least fifteen rows.
4. List at least fifteen promises. Use the questions under “Imagine a Different Future” (above) to help you home in on tangible, realistic guarantees. If you need more lines, add them.

Here’s a shortened version of what your table can look like, with two examples:

5. Give yourself a few days or up to a week. Have any other promises come to mind? As you’ve thought about your promises, have any more problems or solutions come to mind? If so, add them to the table.
6. Review the list of promises. Look for themes and other similarities. Are the promises realistic? Do they speak to the reader’s emotions? Take time to identify a thread that all the promises have in common.
7. At the top of the document, above the ten words, add one sentence that states the overarching promise you’re making to the reader. Refer to the ten words to help you set the tone and inspire your writing.

Today’s post is by SaaS copywriter Alexander Lewis (@alexander-j-lewis).

I must have been 11. I sat alone on our upstairs couch reading a thriller novel. In it, a kid my age wandered through a dark forest. Something, some nameless creature, stalked him in the night. Noises fluttered from the surrounding brush. Shadows moved in the corner of his eye. I found myself wishing that these sounds and motions would relent and that the boy’s father would emerge from the darkness.

I turned the page. The gothic scene continued. I pulled my feet onto the couch, and then I noticed I’d done so. I looked up from the book and turned it over in my hand. I laughed at myself for being afraid. How did the author do that?

Ever since I was a child, I couldn’t just read a book for the story within. I interrogated the page for clues about how to tell stories. No one taught me to read this way, paying attention to syntax and word choices. I paid attention because I loved writing and wanted to improve.

I aspired to do good work.

The shortcut

My niece loves to write. She’s written many stories and is always devouring new books. Writing has become a subject we bond over almost every time we’re together.

A few times, our conversations about writing have been interrupted by conversations about AI. Like many writers working in tech, I’m split here. AI for me can be both magical and a buzzkill all at once.

But in the context of talking to children who love writing as much as I did at their age, the topic of AI makes me sad and angry. Maybe irrationally so, even if I never show it.

I know the boring effort it takes to learn this craft. How many hours you can spend fiddling with a single paragraph before it clicks like a puzzle into place. How you don’t know or care because you’ve been lost in the creative process.

I grew up in the nineties and wrote from a computer that wasn’t connected to the internet. There was a forced focus: Me and the Word doc. If AI had been in the next tab, how many times as a child would I have fallen for the shortcut? It scares me even to imagine.

I don’t relay this to my niece. I don’t have to. Because she has another quality that I think is stronger than the temptations: The fun of learning writing trumps the ease of shortcutting it.

Inner fire

David Perell asked the author Yann Martel if he’d experimented with AI in his writing process.

“No. Why would I? It’d be like hiring someone to have sex for you.”

It’s easy to get nihilistic and pessimistic when thinking about the arts and AI. What snaps me back to my natural, optimistic disposition is the simple idea of play. Writing has been a business for me for ten years. But the only reason I can make a living today is that writing has been a hobby since childhood.

The people who are inclined to write will continue writing. Because writing is fun.

In recent years, the career advice “follow your passion” has been dragged through the mud. Careerists love to point out that people aren’t passionate about practical things. Most of us have no passions at all. So “follow your passion” is just advice from people who have already made their fortune.

Maybe that’s true in broad terms. I call bullshit on the writing front. Writing is the exception. In writing, passion results in practice, which produces quality, which bolsters your passion, and eventually, you become good enough to make a decent living.

The ceiling and the floor

One of the lucky breaks of my life was having parents and teachers who actively encouraged me to write. It’s rare to have so many people cheer for you as you try new things.

But I think the superpower of writers is their own inner critic. If you aspire to develop a craft, no one will hold you to a higher standard than yourself. Even great teachers and bosses will only provide feedback to the point of being good enough. They don’t want to hurt your feelings or waste their time.

The same is true of AI. The best way to describe what AI has done for writing is that it has raised the floor. The minimum acceptable threshold for decent prose is higher today than at any time before in history. And that’s largely thanks to AI tools.

What AI has failed to do is push the boundaries of writing quality.

That’s the point of this, isn’t it? Most of my friends hate writing. ChatGPT is good for them because it reduces the work they hate.

My writing friends aren’t driven merely by the end product of completed prose. We’re motivated by a carefully built high standard of excellence. We want to push the bounds and see the limits of our own abilities.

This morning, I read a few pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel. I finished a page and then returned to the top of it again. I just wanted to admire for a moment what I’d just read. How did he do that?

I put the book down and began to write.

• Your book’s metadata is increasingly for machines, not readers. What that means for authors is that everything about your book’s description and metadata should be in alignment and send a strong signal about what the book is and who it is for. Gaming the system will be, theoretically, more difficult. If this brings an end to choosing categories based on bestseller rank (or long, sales-y subtitles), this will be a great development. Read James Blatch.

Traditional Publishing

• What counts as a small press? The creator of Small Press Insights discusses the evolution of his ranking system and who’s eligible to be included. Read at Lou Reed’s Nephew.
• A publishing industry vet encourages consolidation among trade organizations. He believes the current organizations serve institutional preservation rather than advancement of the industry. Read Michael Cairns at Publishing Perspectives.
• An agent comments on the current nonfiction decline and how it might be reversed. Anna Sproul-Latimer writes, “One reason readers have drifted away from nonfiction might involve the fact that many books are riddled with errors. Who wants to spend time and money on a big wad of ‘truth’ if it’s less accurate than Wikipedia and contains AI-hallucinated quotes? Here’s a thought: One great way to create brand differentiation, audience enthusiasm, and value for published books in this benighted era might involve assurances that a publisher’s imprimatur equals work that is true, well researched, and original.” She also believes that readers want to “know and like” the people who create the media they consume and are more likely to trust personality-driven nonfiction (e.g., Heather Cox Richardson or Neil DeGrasse Tyson). Read at How to Glow in the Dark (paid subscription required).

AI

• The comics industry deals with AI entries in the Eisner Awards. An anthology with AI-generated material was nominated but then pulled from consideration after backlash. The awards currently have no official policy on AI but plan to announce one soon. Read Zach Rabiroff at Publishers Weekly.
• New York magazine reports “nonfiction book publishers aren’t remotely ready for AI.” Industry professionals believe AI use is “rampant,” but few people admit to its use. There seems to be little or no progress in addressing the issue, at least on the part of publishers. No editors quoted in the article were willing to be named, only agents. Read Charlotte Klein (paid sub may be required).
• LinkedIn is cracking down on AI posts and comments on the platform. One of their executives says they are using technology systems that have been trained to recognize AI-generated material. She writes, “When content appears to be generated by AI and lacks clear perspective, it is less likely to be widely distributed beyond a person’s immediate network, which helps keep space for more thoughtful contributions. Early results are encouraging. In our initial testing, we’re correctly identifying generic content 94 percent of the time.” Read Laura Lorenzetti at LinkedIn.

Culture & Politics

• The synergy between audio erotica and TV and book fandoms. Quinn was founded in 2019 and has picked up steam lately (pun intended) by partnering with celebrities associated with established fandoms. Read Charles Pulliam-Moore at The Verge.

As with other panels I’ve attended on TikTok that involved company reps from TikTok and successful creators, the questions and discussion remained sunny and optimistic, focused on the opportunity the platform presents and positive qualities of social media and community engagement. You won’t hear questions or rumors that BookTok is in decline and certainly not any intellectual critique (e.g., as a writer and critic recently wrote, often the stronger the reader’s therapeutic identification with the protagonist, the more recommendable the book on BookTok). And at TikTok-related panels over the years, the core guidance hasn’t really changed: TikTok values authenticity, and no one likes the hard sell.

Nevertheless, the two panelists offered insightful perspectives from both sides of the publishing spectrum: Felicity Vallence, director of digital marketing at Penguin Young Readers (Penguin Teen joined BookTok in October 2019), representing a publisher engaging on the platform with both readers and BookTok influencers; and Steph Pilavin (@starrysteph), a BookTok influencer engaging with readers and collaborating with publishers.

A publisher on BookTok is not there to contribute as a reader and shouldn’t behave as one, Vallence said. Rather, a publisher should offer entertainment or helpful information that doesn’t interrupt conversations already taking place. The cardinal rule is to be in conversation and not behave as a catalog of books; otherwise, people will just scroll past your account as if it were an ad. Vallence discussed the publisher as having a three-pronged approach: to post content to their own channel, to help authors with their channels, and to work with creators like Pilavin, to get the right books into their hands.

Penguin’s commitment to producing original content is significant. Vallence says even videos that look the most “dumb or stupid” can take an hour of thoughtful strategic planning; people underestimate that it’s real work. (She added that blooper reels—which they always keep—outperform the polished planned video every time.) Their north star: Is this actually good content, or am I trying to sell a book? Hard selling is off-putting; again, audiences want to be informed and entertained and have conversations in the comments with their friends. When authors visit Penguin’s offices, they try to do some TikTok content together in-house, and the best ones are typically unexpected skits (like throwing water in someone’s face—a staged drama) and not a straight pitch.

Comments are everything on TikTok—a sign of life. Vallence actively fosters reaction (but not rage-baiting, she emphasized) and feels sad when the comments section is quiet. Pilavin believes comments have become quieter in recent years—she described people as getting shyer—but saves and shares remain a strong, intentional signal. Also, negative or quiet responses are useful data; Pilavin reads a quiet response to a single review as a sign “that the [book] hook was not quite right.”

When approaching BookTok creators or influencers about a book, it’s imperative for publishers (or authors) to match the book to the right creator based on genuine interest. Meaning: Do not pick influencers based on follower count, but choose someone who is most likely to be passionate, not indifferent, about the book. In fact, Vallence rejects follower-count minimums for Penguin Teen’s program; “I don’t want that,” she says—quality of content over quantity of followers is key. Her goal is genuine relationships and trust, and that means a recommendation from her Penguin team carries weight with a creator like Pilavin. For her part, Pilavin says her hard rule on paid partnerships is to never promote a book she wouldn’t pick up to read herself or didn’t enjoy—the partnership has to work for both sides. Pilavin also advised against publishers or authors giving BookTok creators a rigid script (e.g., “say this in the first three seconds”) because it won’t work; any creator’s videos have to feel like their own organic content.

What are the ingredients right now for making a book take off on BookTok? Vallence says the formula has shifted from focusing on comparable titles or media toward going straight to plot and character. (“It’s a book about this with this and this.”) That said, comps can still matter, depending on the cultural moment. Pilavin gave the example of a new novel, Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim, about immigration as splitting or leaving a copy of yourself behind, comped to the Apple TV series Severance. Either way, the first five seconds of a video are decisive; distilling a book into one powerful sentence matters enormously, she says.

Vallence’s example of a book that took off because of TikTok was Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a historical-fiction queer novel. Penguin Teen found the right BookTok creator, an Asian American who felt a connection to the book and the author. The way she spoke about the book was authentic and real; she in fact said in her video, “This book is me.” Before that point, Telegraph Club had a good start with strong critical reception inside industry, but the general consumer hadn’t really discovered it yet. Then the TikTok video made it fly, and Penguin struggled to keep the book in print.

If you’re new to TikTok, how should you begin? Vallence suggested that the first three months should be experimentation. Then evaluate what’s working and what you enjoy producing. (Kang offered an 80/20 rule no matter how experienced you are: 80 percent conversation-driving content, 20 percent experimentation.) Pilavin started on TikTok by discussing what brings her joy, but later, a series that gained her 100,000 followers in a week got “put to bed” because the conversations it produced weren’t ones she wanted to have. She advised that no one should let “the serotonin of a viral moment” drive them, and she ultimately found a more authentic replacement series that performed just as well.

Bottom line: If you’re not making use of TikTok already, should you start now? These panelists offered an unqualified yes for the most part. (If you’re an author who dislikes the format to the point your videos make it look like you’re being held hostage or forced to be there, don’t bother.) Vallence said, “It’s where your readers are,” and even an account to lurk is “an infinite learning lesson, like a consumer insight survey at your door for free all the time.” Pilavin said starting from scratch is freeing because there are no expectations and you can just experiment—until the day that one video changes your life because it takes off. She made it sound like it’s only a matter of time if you just keep at it: “It’s so much fun.”