Targeting your Audience - 24:00 minutes Verbatim Transcript

(Note: as I speak, not as I write)

Keywords: Book, People, Write, Story, Learn, Talking, Autobiography, Biography, Self-Help Book, Targeting, Audience, Structuring, Subject, Dyslexia, Teach, Thinking, Develop

Hello there, welcome. Thank you very much for joining me, my name is Amina Chitembo, and I am going to be your trainer on this course.

By the end of this course, you should be able to realise that you can get your book published and that you can write, and you too can find an audience. It's not that complicated. And the good thing about it as well is you can keep your copyright for your book, your intellectual property, which when you work with massive companies when you work with big publishing houses, they will take away that they will give you some royalties, which vary, which are very small amounts of money. But for you to be able to do anything with your book, you have to seek permission from them. But it's your story. It was when I wanted to write my own book when I wanted to write my books, but I realised that this was a problem. And I thought, okay, if I can't get to them, what if I stopped myself? With everything that I've learned? I've been, I've been lucky enough to travel a lot to the US, where we know that it's the epicentre of a lot of self-help stuff, learn from people that have been writing, people that have written bestsellers, people that run publishing companies. My first three chapters, I wrote in three books with an independent publishing company in the US are run by a lady called Linda Ellis Eastman. And through working with Linda, I realised that actually, even if at that point in 2010 2011 2012, when I did that, it wasn't because I wanted to become a publisher. It wasn't because I wanted to become a writer. But through working with that process, I learned a lot from that process. And over the years, I learned more.

Later on, in 2016, when I wanted to start running my own business, again, from living my work, I wanted to learn how to sell stuff. I wanted to learn how to be good at my business. So again, I registered with a guy called Brendon Burchard, I learned how to sell anything, I learned, I learned a lot about marketing and launching things. I may not have used everything that I learned, because I've had a job on the side and things like that. But I believe I have picked up enough to be able to share with you as a way of giving back. So sit back and relax. So with the question that I asked people, what are the top three things that you would have wanted to learn that you don't like to learn for you to be able to write your book, I had some really interesting responses. And they were in three different sections. The first thing is targeting your audience. The second thing is, how to start and finish. When do you know when to start and when to finish? When you know, this is good enough? When do you go beyond? And then the last thing the last category was selling and diversifying. So a lot of people, there's no point in writing a book, you spend so much time writing it, only to get it to gather dust on your shelf, you want to learn how to diversify your income, you want to learn how to use that book for other things as well. So those are the three things that I'm going to teach you over the next few days.

I'll be sending an email, open it, and then learn. And then start thinking about how you can use that knowledge. And I can assure you very soon, your story will be different, you will add author to your credentials. Now, just a bit of a disclaimer, before we start, I don't know you, I don't know where you are taking this course. So what I'm not promising is that you write a book and you sell millions. Because I can't dictate that your book your audience in a country where you are. And you and the story that you're going to tell are what are going to determine whether that book sells or not. And the most important thing is to get it interesting enough so that people want to buy it, what's in it for your client. And that's why the first thing that we're going to start with on this course is targeting your audience, choosing your audience, planning for your audience. Structuring your book so that your story flows so that somebody can read from beginning to the end, as opposed to just jumping into things. Before we go into that, let me tell you just a few points. From the latest survey that I took from targeting your audience. I'm going to read some of the things that people wanted to learn. People wanted to know how to choose their audience. How do you choose your audience for your book? How do you decide what type of book to write? How do you understand your potential readers? How do you meet the expectations of the cold target group that you're going for? How do you develop the writing? If you've been writing journals, and diaries and knots, and here and there? How do you collect those? To turn them into a manuscript? And then finally, how do you write a book? As straightforward as that? How do you write a book?

How do you choose what type of book to write? I think that's a good point. There are three types of books that I normally work with, with my clients in diverse cultures publishing, I've worked on over 30 books. In the first three years, those books have fallen into three different categories. The first category is Autobiography. So an autobiography is a book that you write about yourself, your journey, thoughts in things that have happened to you, maybe in chronological order, or maybe, through themes of things that have happened, and how you've come from one side to the other side. The second type of book is a biography, in a biography, you are writing about other people. So it could be that you're writing about your family situation. It could be about somebody who did something you found extraordinary. You talk to them, and you write about their story. For instance, a lot of celebrities, a lot of activists have had biographies written about them. One of the most famous ones that I can tell you about is the road to freedom, which is about Nelson Mandela. He didn't write that book himself. Somebody wrote that book for him. And also things like the royal families and things like that. People write books for them. So those are biographies around other people. The third type is a self-help book. A self-help book is where you teach somebody, you teach something, maybe you've gone through a situation. And maybe you want to help other people experiencing something that you have experienced, you found it easier.

You found some good coping mechanisms, you found good ways of dealing with that thing that you went through, or you know, something, you're a subject matter expert in something. And you want to teach people about that. So one would say textbooks fall into that, yeah, in a way, they are self-help books, course/module textbooks, but also, you find a lot right now, a lot of books right now, how to be a better parent, how to be a better partner, how to coach other people. So there are lots of how-to books out there. But you can find your own niche, something that is special, something that is unique to you, it doesn't have to be completely new, but it's just your way of doing things. There are more than 6 billion people in the world. And there will be enough people to read that thing that you're going to write. Okay. So those are the three types that we work with. And those are the three types that I'm going to focus on. Because you can write a novel if you want to, you can write fiction. And maybe you can use some of these things that I'm talking about here in a fictional book. But what I'm talking about is leaving a legacy as in what is happening right now, or something that has happened in your life that you want to share with other people. So we're talking about nonfiction books, we're talking about self-help books. We're talking about autobiographies, we're talking about biographies. And within biographies, we're talking about family Chronicles. Maybe you want to tell people about your village where you grew up, maybe you want to tell people how your people in your community did certain things.

If I give you a chance to write down three possible topics that you can write about, that will help you actually start thinking, in the mind of which way are you turning?

 There are no hard and fast rules in terms of falling. Which category Do I have to go into and things like that?

It's what you feel now that you've learnt about the different types of books that you can write, you might want to start looking at your target audience, who are you targeting?

 Your type of book will be very much dependent on that. So the first thing is, what is it that you want to do? Do you want to teach people? Do you want to write about yourself?

Do you want to write about your area of work, or your expertise, whichever one of those three you pick?

the working title might end up changing by the time you finish writing. But what's important is to think, what is it that you want to get out of your book? Is it just you telling your story so that people can know about it? Because it's that it's very important to you, or you think it's something that's very prevalent nowadays. Then people can learn something about it? Is it that you want to just document what you're going through different during a certain period of your life. If you're a woman, maybe you had a very difficult time with menopause. And it's a subject that a lot of people didn't talk about before. And now you found techniques, you found ways of coping with it, that you then want to teach other people?

Is that what you want to write about?

Or maybe you want to tell a story about this interesting area?

That you have learned? Areas of work that you think other people should learn about? Is it about your past?

Is it about your community where you come from the current community?

We leave the community that may be experienced something. For example, somebody might write a book about living and managing with dyslexia. That might be a very broad topic, but what is it about that niche that is going to be special that is going to be new, that you're going to add to the subject to all the material that's already there, about dyslexia, that you are going to tell in your own words, or maybe it's around mental health issues. Specific communities don't even want to hear about mental health, they don't even want to talk about it. Maybe you want to educate the communities around how to deal with it, around it, raise awareness, all those things are very important things to satisfy the audience that you're going to choose. Now, the best way of looking at an audience I have found, and that may not be the most used way. But what I've found is to think about, look around you and think about that story that you want to share, which is yours. And then what is the current situation? What is the prevailing environment in the world? What's that big Eight World issue that you can link to your subject, that together when you put them together, you come up with steps that can help other people to move forward? Okay. For instance, when I wrote my second book, my first book was about Just, it was just a guide that was just trying out, and it was just a guide about setting up businesses. My second book, which I consider my main first book, which wasn't the best work, but it, it's sold a lot of copies. So it must have done something right. But that book was about pushing through fear, stereotypes and imperfections. So the reason I chose that topic is because I have grown up with dyslexia and have grown up with possibly attention deficit disorder. I found it really difficult to maintain friends, I found it really difficult to do a lot of things that other people would find easy. And yes, I do fake it. So people might not know that about me. But because of that, I'm always questioning myself, and I've always had this anxiety within me.

And then, with my dyslexia, it came to a head when I got a job where my boss was very particular about spellings, and it was a high-level job. It's a very senior management job. But the fact that I did very good work, I could write very good reports, but they have typos in them. And I'm always from being a child and always being told, you need to check your work. And trust me, I can check it 10 times out, you still find a typo in my work. I didn't know what was causing that. So that killed my self-esteem. That just ate me slowly inside. And as I grew, older, it even got worse. And I felt so stupid. I thought, what why can't I read? When can't I? Why can't I present myself as eloquently and as fluently as other people do? So all those things together, they really gave me this anxiety and fear. And then obviously, I have the stereotype of who I am. Living, running away from presenting to people because I felt like it was going to come out, everybody was going to just judge me for what it was. So I wrote a book about dealing with those fears. The stereotype that comes with people like me, and then the imperfections that I knew I had, and I'll never change. So I wrote a book, in, in my mind, I had somebody who was sitting there, locked up in their house and going through the things that I had gone through this, they reaching the point where I had reached, where I left the job, which I really loved because I just it was hit hurting my mental health until I got a diagnosis. And then I realised what I was dealing with. And I started to rebuild my life. And I got to a point where I rebuilt my life so severely. So well.

Now I help people to write books. Now I can write, I'm still not very good at reading, I use audio a lot. I'm still not very good at proofreading. I don't proofread my own work. So when I write a book, somebody else will do that, which is another thing that will go into as you write a book, no matter how good you are, you can never find out, do final proofreading for yourself. You need to let somebody else have a different look at it. Okay, because our minds, that's the way they work. So for me, that was my subject. So I knew I had people like that in mind. But the people that ended up reading my book went way beyond that. The people that I thought would buy my book, I thought the people around me would buy my book, but very few of those people that are close to me bought my book. But when I look at my account for my royalties, I see that people in Brazil bought my book, I see that people in Japan bought my book, I see that people in Canada bought my book. So you will spread people, you will teach people that you don't even know. But what you have to know is what is your subject and staying true to your subject. Also, staying true to your story. If you go out there and just say mee, mee, mee mee mee people will not be interested, because of what's in it for the reader. So you have to really think about, this is a situation, this is what I've gone through, this is how I managed to come through it. This is how I can help you go through it. And here, here's a challenge, try it, see what you can do about it.

Right, I will share with you a short, a small, a basic framework that you can look at, it will be the in the workbook that I will send you in this course that you can write through and see how you can manage to structure your story. Okay. Now another way is how do you then develop the writing? Well, the first thing is you start writing. So we'll cover that in the second module. All I can say is to develop your writing because you have to decide to start. It's a very, very important thing. Because there are many, many people living today who say every day are you meet them, they'll tell you, I think I should write a book. I think I'll write a book one day, but they never start. The first thing that you do, to develop to start developing your book is to start writing, whether you're going to start writing on paper, which I totally discouraged because these days we have computers. If you're going to write start typing on a computer, start making a Word document. Don't worry about structuring the chapters first. There's no way you're telling a story in a book, you're telling a story.

The best way you can tell your story is just tell it, tell your story. And then after you're finished, you can then see the different sections. I worked with a client, their story the way it went, was this happened, and then, that happened, and then that similar thing that linked to the first thing happened, and then another thing happened. So by the time we finished going through the story, there were so many similar and different things, but doing different types of times of their life. If somebody says you write it in a book in chronological order, that will not work, because then you keep coming back to similar subjects, and then over different types of your life. So what we did was, we took two hours on zoom, and we restructured the story. So I was talking to the person, and we were going through together and restructuring the story so that it flows, then we came up with sections. Right? So the section about relationships, there was a section about loss, there was a section about dealing with business. And that brought the book to six different sections. Within those sections, there was now a journey of how things moved, which brought it down into chapters. And then within the chapters, there were little sections, which now were the subheadings. So that's how you develop your book.

In the next module, we're going to look at, how do you start and and how do you finish? And I'm just going to continue talking about what I've just said here at the end. But I want you to go.

Now, the assignment that I'm going to give you is going now, right, three topics that you can write about in each of the types of books we talked about. So you're going to come up with nine. So if you're thinking of an autobiography, what sort of things can you talk about? If you're thinking of a biography?

What sort of things can you talk about?

So that with a biography, think about family Chronicles, think about the area, maybe where you were born?

Or anything else that you want to put?

Was it your education? Was it what you didn't have growing up what you have now? Was it how you built something?

And then with the self-help?

Maybe you went through a difficult breakup?

What did you learn from it?

Maybe you dealt with a child with a disability? How did you deal with that?

How did you come through the other side, maybe it's an illness, or maybe it's something really good that happened to you how you found yourself, doing that thing that you really love. Then, once you've had those three topics, look about which one of those three topics really speaks to you. First, before you start thinking about other people, it's about you and your writing. And then you can think about how it links to the world problems. That is where your target audience will lie. That is where you start you developing your story from. From there, then we can move on to how do you start? And how are you going to know that you're finished? So that's all for now. If you have any questions, please, please leave a comment or send me an email. I'll be able to answer as much as I can. And if I don't know we can always research together. Okay.

Thank you. Bye.