Writing Tips from Bestsellers Got Me 44,000 Reads in Jan’24. Steal Them [from Me].
You can do well, too
Want to captivate readers with your words?
Go beyond words.
Craft a storyline.
And then some.
It need not be complex. Yes. I promise you. Not at all.
Think about the materials you [actually] read from start to finish
Are they,
- Textbooks?
- Guidebooks?
- ‘A Guide to the Stock Market’?
- Encyclopedia [gosh, I betrayed my age]?
- ‘How to build a 6-pack in 3 days’?
- Research papers on psychology?
- Harvard Business Review?
Nay. None of the above.
Why?
- They are boring.
- They are factual.
- They throw in statistics to freeze your brain.
- They present themselves in a straightforward structure.
- What else? You tell me.
And then… there are bestsellers, chair-grippers, and nail-biter materials.
They grip our attention from the get-go. Some heroes go to hell, villains who refuse to perish, and bad times that compound.
Okay. Let us avoid the complex.
Forget ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Forget ‘Harry Potter’.
Just think about ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’.
You kept flipping… right?
The ultimate super simple kickass story of a stupid kid
Okay, okay, I get it.
You hate this guy.
You thought, Denis Gorbunov thought, and I thought he would teach us how to get rich. You surrendered $12. And.
You did not get what you wanted.
Instead, you got catchy soundbites.
- “Rich people don’t work for money”.
- “Your house is not an asset”.
- “Savers are losers”.
Take a pause. Take a step back.
Look at his writing, per se.
What is he trying to do?
Easy. Robert is trying to play with our emotions. These are emotionally charged phrases. Every single one of them [on its own] makes us angry.
Why? Again, that is easy.
It violates the principles we lead our lives by.
We spent our entire lives working for money, buying a shelter over our heads, and saving money for a rainy day. Or retirement. And here comes Mr. Rich Guy throwing us under a bus.
It annoys us.
And that said.
We continued to read the book.
And that is because he wove in a super simple storyline.
A young kid, clueless about money, got stuck between a poor and a rich man.
The poor man says A and the rich guy says B
Once again, take a step back.
Think about the storyline.
A young chap growing up in a middle-class family. His Poor Dad wants him to study. His Rich Dad teaches him how to make money by working for no money.
His poor head cracked in half.
And he did not stop going back to these 2 dads. The poor man tells him to go get an MBA. The rich one says an MBA is useless.
Of course, there is more.
But I’ll stop here.
Let us think about the storyline.
- Is there resonance? Yes, there is. Everyone has been that dumb kid.
- Is there a good guy and a bad one? Yes. They have been packaged into a poor man and a rich.
- Are there good times and bad? Of course. The clueless boy quarreled with his biological father and got spanked by his Rich Dad for being financially stupid.
And, and, and.
Did Robert Kiyosaki include stories of him going through hell, deep and deeper, and [then] rising from the ashes like the Red Phoenix?
He did.
That Velcro wallet business, remember?
This is why he is a bestselling author, not the best writing one. He routinely wraps his life stories into [seemingly] nuggets of wisdom to magnify a point. Like if you are stupid, you get no money. Blar blar.
You get the drift.
That is not it, of course.
The storyline alone does not get the job done.
We need leverage.
His is money.
And money is a natural attention grabber. No one wants less. They tell you that. But people never say no to more. Dangle a $100 note in front of them and watch what happens.
Money creates the tailwind for his book.
There is another reason for it.
Many money books do not come with a personal touch. There is no demonstration of struggle. To us, the readers, we [instinctively] know that is not real life. We struggle with money. We all do.
And that is why his book sold like pancakes.
He is not trying to teach you to get rich.
He is just trying to share his life with you.
That is [pretty much] it.
And maybe, maybe…
You can get the following results if you do the same.
Article inspired by Denis Gorbunov, Matt | Financial Imagineer, and Sarina Chiu
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