What 8 months of writing on Medium taught me on testing ideas for my book
By: Irina Damascan
Tags: Writing, Books, Marketing, Data Science, Startup

Finally, some advice for starting writers who want to use Medium to test the hypothesis, here are some of the questions I used for each chapter to test if writing it like that would resonate with the audience or not.

Questions for each chapter:

1. How do I relate the chapter with the type of persona for part 1 or 2 of the book?

Most of my articles are about relationships so far, but I am testing if the persona is the “wounded” one or the one that wants to get away from the relationship because I want to know if I would find more readers for a book that “blames” and accuses the injustice rather than one that helps people who do those things to come back on the right path. Talking about hard topics at a management level and triggering shame and vulnerability is not as sexy as Brene Brown points put herself when she claims the title of researcher on these topics. She also published many books on the topics and it inspired me to try to do the same from a personal development perspective and leadership perspective for companies that want to innovate.

What I found out was that most of my readers were relating to suffering from the situation and very few are ready to take action on their situation and prefer reading relatable stuff rather than take action. So my persona is the wounded and vulnerable, not the “bully” or invulnerable one.

2. How does the emotion of the reader connect to each chapter of the book separately?

Well, this was a tricky one. What I realized is that emotions about relatedness start with a good title. So if they connect with the title of the book, they buy the content. It doesn’t really matter that they don’t even open the book and leave it in their bookcase. What matters is that they feel they’ve done something for themselves when they buy a title of a book that relates to how they feel about the world. What each chapter brings is the opportunity to reiterate their belief about what they think the book is about. I used the impostor syndrome effect reversed to make people believe they know what the article is about from the very first sentences and title so it becomes a “hook”.

3. What is the emotional hook of each chapter to make people share the story like their own? ( relatedness)

If I look at how people clapped, highlighted and responded to my stories, I see that each story itself can be a heavy one in terms of resources people would start sharing with others from my articles. But the role of the book is to make it simple to either go to it as a toolkit of many separate references or to have one theory that people can easily reproduce. Most of the paragraphs highlighted have very personal stories behind. So that makes me feel that the relatedness of each chapter can be done by having a personal component to it while sticking to an easy to explain general framework people can reproduce fast in conversations.

4. What is the main tool/framework/ theory I use to elaborate on how to start discussing about the specific item in future interactions and enable more authenticity to come into the life of the reader?

With this long type of question, I tried to see how simple can it get for someone to pick up what the book is about based on how easy they can navigate articles that have a lot of references to other bits and pieces on similar topics. So for 3 months, I didn’t use that many referencing links in my articles. I didn’t get much traction as I was in the beginning anyway. But as soon as I started referencing previous articles in new ones I noticed how my traffic was increasing and people were checking the other links referenced. That makes me believe that people would be able to follow a book that has a step by step guide with tools and chapters interlaced with one another that allows you to fully practice the method preached only if you go through the entire book.

5. What is the main take-away he will get from reading each chapter?

Each of my articles is like a mini “how-to” on relationships. It doesn’t claim it’s an exhaustive method, yet, it provides clear radiography of what you can do to solve that issue. People respond well to small dosages. As such, each chapter will try to summarize a method from the overall formula. It seems to do the trick quite well.

6. What are the stories I link to this chapter and how do they make sense? What is the angle of the stories? What are the types of stories that make the most sense to captivate the reader and maintain the emotional connection ( sense of belonging to the tribe)

This is by far the trickiest one. I noticed that at the beginning of my writing on the platform, most of my stories had a very strong personal component. The more I switched to an indirect speech, the more likely I was to be curated while keeping an authentic tone of voice and some personal sharing. However, the lesson is that the story needs to be a background rather than the main noise. I “preach” methods and use the personal story as an emotional hook to exemplify, but no more than that. People don’t have time to read too much of your personal sharing unless it creates value to their life. Keeping that in mind will help you write a better book for your audience.