The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book
Fear: “I’m afraid my book isn’t original enough.” Alternate Expressions of This Fear “I don’t think I have anything new to say.” “Everything I have to say is stuff everyone already knows.” “I’m afraid this has already been said.” “My book won’t be any different from other books on this topic.”
Zach Obront • The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book
Picture the exact person who you can help most. What would you say to them? How would you teach them what you know? How would that help them? Where would they be after they learned what you knew and applied it?
Zach Obront • The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book
The fear of judgment is crippling to many authors, and prevents them from either writing their book, or from writing the book that they really want to write, or telling the stories they want to tell in their book. Here’s the simple fact about books: if no one at all disagrees with what you are saying, then you aren’t saying anything worth putting i
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This sort of thing happens because when an author knows their subject so well, they often think it’s obvious or easy, and so they discount their knowledge. They forget that the exact people they’re writing for do not have this knowledge—and are often desperate for it.
Zach Obront • The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book
Now that you have “seen” the benefits you can get from writing a book, picturing yourself quitting will trigger one of the strongest psychological reactions in humans: loss aversion. Once you imagine yourself with all these benefits, and then you imagine yourself losing them—things shift in your brain. Your fear doesn’t necessarily go away. It just
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fears often partly originate from a subconscious reaction to a poor plan, or a lack of a plan (this is also where procrastination comes from).
Zach Obront • The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book
You are not there as an author to just give the facts. Facts are great. Facts are important, facts are the bedrock of your book—but people don’t learn through facts and people don’t engage through facts. People learn through story and example. They make decisions about how to change their life with emotion. And that’s what you need to do to have a
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People read books in order to get expert knowledge that will help them solve a specific problem they have. No one reads books to get a firehose of unconnected information.
Zach Obront • The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book
Your book should have enough of your story to help the reader get what they want out of the book, but nothing more.
Zach Obront • The Scribe Method: The Best Way to Write and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book
Digital media has exploded consumer options, and made demographics less predictive of human behavior. Now, psychographics work better. The differences between how people think are now more important in (most) marketing than who they appear to be.