How to Start a Revolution: 3 Steps to Making Your Book Resonate
Visionaries and change makers have tons of great ideas—but often have a tough time getting people excited about them, especially when trying to put them in writing. This is especially true if their world-changing ideas are highly technical or abstract—how do you get people charged up about your mission if they can’t understand it?
And this leads to the real question: What’s the best way to get people to understand and connect with your great idea?
An old principle of journalism holds the answer: If it bleeds, it leads.
I know—this saying reflects the absolute worst values of market-driven journalism. But it captures a truth that can be harnessed as a force for good: People are drawn to people, not ideas.
What does this mean in practice? I’ll share some examples from The Case for Masks, one of my favorite book projects from last year.
The author—a faculty member at Harvard Medical School—could have written a technical study for a professional readership on COVID transmission and how to control it. But instead, he was asked by Simon and Schuster to produce an informative, practical, and engaging book about COVID and mask wearing for a general audience—an audience that was already tired of hearing about COVID and confused by contradictory information.
How could he make these readers connect with—and act upon—technical information about everyone’s least-favorite topic?
Here are some of the techniques we used.
Paint a picture with personal stories. Just under 3000 people died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But over 500,000 have died of COVID in the US alone—so why does 9/11 still resonate as a major threat to our way of life, while COVID still strikes many as distant abstraction?
The answer is we know the stories of the victims of 9/11. Today’s adults have all heard recordings of the tearful final phone calls and seen the terrifying videos of the planes hitting the towers and doomed office workers trapped in the towers. Knowing their experience, we can connect and empathize with their terror.
COVID victims, on the other hand, die off-camera, silently and alone. We don’t hear their stories, so we can’t connect to the fact that they too were parents or grandparents or young people whose hopes and plans for the future were tragically derailed.
But a few compelling stories about COVID have been publicized—and The Case for Masks opens with one of them: the story of an ordinary choir practice that became one of the first super-spreader events in the US. By the end of the story, readers know the groups of friends who joined the choir together, the songs they practiced that evening, and the snacks they shared during break—and that within weeks, several of them were dead.
The story made the risks of COVID real and relatable. Lay readers don’t care how COVID bacteria attach to one’s nasal passages, but they do care about people like themselves getting killed. Attaching names, faces, and personalities to the victims made the gravity of the disease—and the urgency of mask-wearing—far more compelling than a recitation of statistics on transmission and mortality.
Share news they can use. In every reader’s mind is a voice asking “What’s in this for me?” This means authors who want their messages to resonate should frame them from the reader’s perspective. In The Case for Masks, this was fairly straightforward—the narrative focused on practical tips for when and how to wear masks and practice social distancing, backed up with credible, easy-to-understand data about why these practices work. The content was also organized into practical themes—such as safety tips to follow in the home, outside the home, and when caring for children—making it easy for readers to find the exact information they’re looking for.
Of course, not all books feature subjects this directly relevant to readers’ lives—but no matter what your subject matter, it’s a smart strategy to make it personally relatable. Another project I worked on, for instance, was a book on rural education and the low rates of college-going among rural youth—and a central message was this was not just a problem for rural high school graduates themselves, but for everyone: When thousands of people who could potentially cure cancer or spearhead new industries are stuck waiting tables, we all lose out.
Show transformation. If you want readers to act on the information you share in your book, you have to give them a good reason to—and an impactful way to do this is by showing them concrete examples of how your ideas transform—or save—lives. Here are some examples:
Rural America’s Pathways to College and Careers not only contains detailed information on how to organize and fund programs to increase rural college-going—but shares first-person stories from disadvantaged kids who successfully completed college and launched rewarding careers because of these programs. These stories turn the book’s recommendations for educational reform from “nice to have” to urgent calls to action.
The Case for Masks shared a powerful story of how two hairdressers infected with COVID transmitted the disease to several colleagues and family members—but not to a single one of the 100-plus hairdressing clients they worked with while ill. The difference? The hairdressers spent time with family and colleagues unmasked. But when working with clients, both they and their clients always wore masks. The transformation in this case was modest—a safe resumption of normal, everyday activities. But the takeaway was powerful: Simply wearing a mask can help make it happen.
Behind all these strategies is a focus on human factors: Abstract ideas can be truly revolutionary—but unless you’re writing for theoretical mathematicians or physicists, you’ll have a hard time getting others excited about them without an emotional connection.
How will you get your audience to champion your next big idea?
Are you ready to share your big idea with the world? Whether you envision a full-length book, an article or essay, or something else, I can help. Contact me for a free, no-obligation conversation—I’m happy to answer your questions.