books

Write a Bestseller! 7 Places to Find Great Story Illustrations

The stories you tell in your self-help book must have meaning to your audience. What kind of stories will interest them, provide them with hope and motivate them to move forward in their lives? The answer is “stories about people like them.”

Think about what your audience looks like, believes, rejects, and values. Remember their age, gender, and other relevant characteristics. Most importantly, get in touch with their more difficult emotions: discouragement, frustration, guilt, shame and so forth. Then concentrate on the feelings you want them to feel: hope, competency, success and pride in a job well done. The more you understand your audience, how they think, what moves and motivates them, the better you will be at selecting most compelling stories.

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Write a Bestseller! How Many Stories Do You Need in Your Book?

As you might suspect, there are no hard and fast rules about how many stories to include, what length they should be or who tells them. A book can include long and short stories, told by you or others. Some authors set up a standardized way their chapters will be structured, and place their stories at regular intervals. Others allow themselves a lot of latitude by using different chapter structures with un-standardized need for stories. We’ll take a look at two books that illustrate the difference between these styles:

Take the U Out of Clutter

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How To Keep Your Writing Simple

As a writer, be it an author, a blogger, or a journalist you want to attract people to your texts, you want them to read what you are writing. That is pretty simple logic. What is not necessarily as easy is to get them to actually do the reading. Keeping your writing simple is how you can get readers attracted to your texts. That is if you want to reach many readers. If you want to reach a certain, smaller, group you might need to use other tactics.

There are some writers who are masters at catching their readers attention, but there are also many writers who tend to make things unnecessarily complex. How then can you keep your writing simple?

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