It’s My Book, So How Much Should I Talk About Myself?Explore how first-time authors can balance personal anecdotes and professional insights to engage readers effectively.
Explore how first-time authors can balance personal anecdotes and professional insights to engage readers effectively.
One of the biggest challenges first time authors face is the question of just how much they should talk about themselves in their own book. So let’s talk about the common pitfalls that many first-time authors run into, so that you can avoid them.
First you have got Mr. Bloated Ego. He finds himself so fascinating that he can’t imagine a paragraph of the book failing to remind the reader of how smart, successful, and good looking he is. Bor-ing!
Then you have got Mr. Reticent, whose genuine humility prevents him from saying even a few words about who he is or what he does. Bewildering!
Then you have got folks who don’t have swollen egos or overarching humility. They simply aren’t sure how much they should say about themselves. The uncertainty about this issue can be so crippling that they give up on the idea of having their own book.
What’s a First-Time Author to Do?
Let’s take a step back and think about what books are for. They are primarily tools of influence. They educate, they entertain, but above all, they affect the way readers think. One of my mentors, the novelist Erica Jong, once told an Authors Guild event that “the writers job is to rearrange the molecules in the reader’s brain.”
In other words, either people weren’t thinking about a given topic at all, and you want them to think about it, or they were thinking about it differently from the way you want them to think about it. In either case, your job is to make a case so that they come away realizing that what you are writing about is super important to them. The way you think about that topic, moreover, is the right way to think about it, and it is how they should think about it, as well.
So how do you accomplish that seemingly difficult feat?
Think About Your Book in Two Ways
First, instead of being a speech or YouTube video in print, a book is essentially a one-on-one conversation with another person in a Starbucks. This person needs your wisdom and guidance. You are sharing it one-on-one.
That is how people experience books, as if the author were speaking to them individually, in a private conversation. Ideally, hundreds of thousands or millions of people will have that one-on-one conversation with you as the author. But for each of them, it is a unique, personal experience. How much would you talk about yourself if you were helping someone solve a problem, sitting at a table in a Starbucks? Probably not that much.
Here’s the second way to think about a book. It has to do with the way people use books.
People don’t read books. Instead, they use a book as a screenplay for a movie that is going to play in their heads. In that movie, there will be two characters—themselves, playing the role of student, and you, the author, playing the role of teacher.
It Is a Two-Person Movie. You and the Reader.
So in this screenplay, you need to talk about yourself just enough so that the reader knows who you are, so they can play you in the movie that is playing in their heads.
If there is too much about you, they are bored because it feels egotistical. If there is too little, then they don’t know who they are when they are being you. They cannot fully “inhabit” the role, as they say in Hollywood. Confusion leads to putting down the book and doing something else.
So as an author, you are looking for that Goldilocks zone of saying just enough about yourself so that the reader knows who you are, without saying so much that you are becoming boring or overbearing. You can’t get away with saying nothing about yourself, and the reader won’t let you get away with saying too much.
This is why it is very helpful to work with a ghostwriter or some professional, who can either draft it for you or who can review your work and let you know if you have hit that sweet spot of just enough material about you to fill the bill.
Another mistake many first-time authors make is that chapter 1 is all about them.
They use the first chapter to establish their bona fides, to talk about their accomplishments, to tell war stories, to describe cool trips they have taken, to tell clever anecdotes about themselves…and it all makes me want to throw up.
Remember that the reader doesn’t care about you as the author until you have demonstrated that you understand what the reader is going through. People have problems. Depending on the problem, people pay big money to have those problems solved. You solve problems for your readers. So your first chapter best serves the reader if it demonstrates your deep, compassionate knowledge of the problems your readers face.
This gives readers confidence that the book is worth reading, that the book can help them, that you can help them, and that there is no better investment of their time right now than to sit down and read what you have written.
So, if your first chapter is all about the problems your readers face, which happen to be the problems that you enjoy solving the most for people, by the end of the chapter you will have the reader wondering, “Who is exactly is this person? And how does he or she know so much about me?”
That’s why it is wisest to save the autobiographical material for chapter 2. Chapter 1 is all about the reader and the reader’s problems. Chapter 2…is all about you. How did you come to be so knowledgeable about what the reader faces? How did you become so experienced in handling their problems?
That is what they want to know, and that is what you will tell them in this chapter. The third chapter can be an overview of the process by which you solve the problems in chapter 1. And the remaining chapters can each be a step in your process, explained in detail, or an additional aspect of how you think about and solve problems generally for your clients. And it all comes down to knowing just how much to say about yourself…and knowing when to say it.
The most successful authors—those who attract the most clients and the best clients for their businesses or services—are the ones who avoid excessive ego and excessive humility and steer a middle course between those two extremes. They talk just enough about themselves so that the reader knows who they are when they are “being” the author in that imaginary movie that is playing in their heads.
And they typically don’t start talking too much about themselves until they have established the fact that they understand the problems the reader faces and they have created an empathetic bond with the readers.
So now you know just how much to say about yourself, and you know where to put it. Just enough so that they’re convinced that you are the authority you claim to be, and in chapter 2. That’s what successful authors do, and that is what I recommend to you.