From the previous module you know that transformation idea comes from your personal deep understanding of the topic. That is why we have been building based on your experience. But the book is not an Essay that you can write with little or no supportive evidence or examples. The book requires extended research, interviews, stories, case studies, data to make your point convincing.

In this video we are going to talk about these elements that help make your ideas convincing enough for a reader to make a decision to follow you and transform. And which materials will help us make your book more entertaining, so that it is not boring like textbooks.

Now we need to collect materials to invite our reader on the journey to explore the topic from different perspectives.

What materials do we need:

• Facts
• Opinions/POVs
• Illustrations

v Facts

Facts include:

• Studies
• Research
• Statistics
• Official Documents
  (Government, International Organizations)
• Scientific Articles
• Academic Books

Facts give to your book the depth and authority. How many facts you will provide, how deep you will analyze them depends on your Audience and the book Style you want to have.

§  How to decide what the depth of the book you should have

I prefer to have a lot of evidence to confirm my points. Few reasons are behind it.

Firstly, I feel like my book is incomplete or does not have an authoritative voice, if it is just my opinion. It is connected to the negative experience I had in the past, that created a trauma response, where I always need to back up my words with some evidence, like if they don’t matter when I don’t. That is something you can decide for yourself and based on the audience needs.

Secondly, I have trained the Ghost writers in the past. When you are a ghost writer it is your direct responsibility to take this part of evidence seriously, because the book is not yours. Your job is to support the words of the author with the most strong arguments. In some sense ghost writer for self-help book author is the lawyer for author’s ideas, that has to defend them in the court of readers world.

v Opinions/POVs

Opinions and Point of Views (POVs)

• Other authors
• Interviews
• Quotes
• Proverbs (Traditional Thinking)
• Journalistic Investigations (can be also included as facts depending on the type)
• Articles (blogs, posts)

This type of material works well on human psyche.

If you remember the book we have read by Robert Cialdini (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion), he describes the way authority figures, or what is perceived as an authority, influence people’s decisions.

Do you remember the example with crossing the street on the red lights? A dozen of people are waiting for the green light to start crossing the street in the middle of the busy city morning hours, when everyone rushes somewhere. Despite the red-light signaling pedestrians that they are not allowed to cross, when people see a person in a suit with the suit case (the attributes of an authority figure), they ignore the rules and start crossing. Even if he was not the first to initiate movement, it starts with the man in suit.

What worked: his suit and a suit case trigger automatic response: suit – authority – follow.

People we see public figures and assume that they are successful in everything. Thus, an actor who shares his opinion on a life style and relationships is immediately quoted, as if he would be a professor of behavioral psychology. Why? Because his opinion will be valued more than an opinion of an unknown professor who spends his life researching and learning. That is how our brain is wired.

That is why we are going to use this peculiarity of human mind in our transformational books, pointing to people successful in their industries, sports, politics, religious cycles and to what they have said related to our point. You understand that it is just an opinion or a POV. The reader might not even question it, unfortunately. But it matters for them.

v Illustrations

Illustrations include:

• Your stories & Experience
• Illustrative Stories (created)
• Stories from Internet (borrowed)
• Folklore
• Allegories
• Movie or Literature Figures
• Celebrity Stories
• Historical Examples
• Biographies
• Bible Stories

Stories obviously illustrate your point; they make it memorable and readers can resonate with it. If you are able to make people resonate with your hero’s story, people with sympathize and become more opened to the lessons you will draw from the story. Or opposite, they can despise the actions of the story’s hero if the example is negative. In any case they should not stay neutral, we need emotions.

You can see the power of stories from Jesus’ preaching. His stories resonated with people then more than they resonate now. For example, now just 28% of human population can understand what He meant to say: “who among you will abandon the donkey who fell into the hole?”.  Or imagine the size of mustard seed. Because although we have the knowledge, we don’t have the experience and feelings connected to it like people in agriculture might have. Approximately 28% of the global employed population works in the agricultural sector, representing around 1 billion people. That is why we have teachers in churches who have to explain the relevance and it still does not relate enough. People need the real-life examples that they can recall as similar experience and connect emotionally.

As we say in Ukraine the well-fed can’t understand the hungry one. There is a similar expression in English language “A full belly doesn’t know what hunger is” – but even here I think when we talk about people who are fed-up or hungry, and not abstract belly – it resonates more.

I think we have to talk about the art of storytelling for the self-help book separately.

Let’s see on the screen the full picture of the materials we need to look for. You don’t have to include every type of material, but they should be from each of the 3 categories.

One more material Category I would add is Tools. But it plays different role in the book. We don’t need to focus on it right now. However, before I go into research, I ask ChatGPT to work on the Toolkit (if this is a part of your book idea) so that I get it out of my way.

Now when you know what materials we are going to collect, let me guide you through this process in the next video.