Introduction
Your book’s introduction is a quick way for you, the author, to explain how your book is going to help the reader. This explanation is what will make your introduction a powerful sales tool for you to use to hook the reader into buying your book and reading it. You must understand that buyers of your book don’t care why you wrote this book. They just want to know how your book can help them improve their life. Your book’s introduction gives you an opportunity to convince the buyer that your book is the best one out there that can help them. To do this you should include the following five parts in your book’s introduction.
1. The Hook – Why Should They Buy Your Book?
Answer this question properly, and you will sell more books. Here you must compel your potential buyer to read more of your book, so they will want to buy it. To do this you must grab the reader’s attention. Grab them with a telling snipped from your book, or a shocking news headline, or dramatic facts and statistics, or a famous quote. What are their concerns or challenges that your book will help them solve? Put yourself into their shoes, and explain why they should buy your book.
2. The Connection – Describe Your Reader’s Problem
Here you must make an emotional connection with your reader. You wrote the book, so you must really understand the challenges, problems, and risks, etc., that have caused your audience to seek out your book. Why is your audience having these issues? Why haven’t they been able to solve them? Why are these issues so hard to fix or solve? Explain to your audience why and how you know about these questions. Convince them that you are the one with the answers and that you want to share this information with them.
3. The Benefits – How Will Your Book Help The Reader?
The benefits to the reader are what will sell your book, so include several of your most important benefits. The reader is only considering buying your book and reading it because of the benefits that the reader will gain. Include some general benefits, and several specific benefits to reading your book. Keep explaining why they should buy your book. For example, “You will learn how to . . .”; Discover ways to . . .”; “You will improve your . . .”.
4. The Format – What Will Happen In The Coming Chapters?
Here you will give the reader a quick idea about how your book is arranged. Your book’s table of contents has already given the reader a quick glimpse of how your book is arranged and what it will discuss. But here you will tell the reader about some of the other features that are not reflected in the table of contents. For example, tell the reader about the side-bars, tips, facts, stories, interviews, quotes, pictures, diagrams, appendix, etc., that you use to illustrate or enhance your chapters.
5. The Invitation – Entice The Reader To Read On
This is the conclusion to your introduction. Just like in a standard conclusion to an essay, quickly summarize what you have been saying in your introduction. Then close the paragraph quickly and enthusiastically with a very short invitation to turn the page and keep reading your book. For example, “Turn the page and let’s get started”; “Onto chapter one”; “Let’s get started”; “Turn the page and let our journey begin”.
Conclusion
If you don’t use these simple sections in your book’s introduction, you may never achieve the level of sales that you and your book deserve. On the other hand, write a simple and straight-forward introduction with these five sections, and readers will want to buy your book.
This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com