First Business Book: Developing Reader Empathy and Audience Personas
I began teaching writing to business professionals in 1988, when I developed a course for a bank training department, a course certified by our state’s CPA board for continuing education credits. Can you imagine teaching bankers and accountants written communications?
Their careers so far had been highly non-verbal, with more reward (compensation, promotions) for calculating and analytical skill sets.
Empathy for the Reader
One of the main things I taught my banker and CPA students was “editorial empathy,” to get them to imagine the reader of their memo, credit memo, loan decline letter, audit letter actually reading the piece. Who was this reader? What was important to them? Under what conditions were they reading what you have sent them?
The main point: get inside the head of your target reader and plan/compose your written work to make it easy for the reader. For one thing, that meant a limitation on bank jargon and a reduction of any tone that might sound arrogant or condescending.
Practically, it meant shorter sentences (under 25 words), short paragraphs (four sentences or less), anything to aid in the reader’s comprehension.
We were all taught in school to write to length, in our book reports and research papers, so if we came up short to the assigned length, we learned to pad our prose.
Well, you’re not in school anymore. Now is the time to prune your prose, remove the fluff and formal introductory phrases like “pursuant to our conversation of last Thursday….” Make it sound instead like it’s a human speaking and not a litigator.
I recently worked with a software testing company on blog post development. They had a brilliant young man blogging, who was very tech-aware but very unaware about his audience.
He had a habit of writing 1,500-word blogs, filled with clichés and generalities, and buried inside was a beautiful nugget of thought leadership.
I coached him by asking him to imagine his potential blog reader: it’s 6 p.m., at the end of a busy day, and his reader is standing with 80 other people in a crowded BART subway car rolling under the San Francisco Bay, from Embarcadero Station all the way out to Walnut Creek. Your reader is most likely reading the blog on a mobile phone, not on a laptop in the peace and quiet of a suburban study, with kids playing in the backyard.
When you picture your reader persona in the real authentic setting of consuming your ideas, you might want to think about making the look and feel very clean (lots of white space) and shorter paragraphs, even a single-sentence paragraph. Use sectional headers (mini headlines) to organize the flow of the piece for your reader. Extract a key concept into a graphical box, also known as a “pull quote.”
What I’m basically describing here is the UX (user experience) discipline applied to business writing.
Personas
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.
_ Personas, an Introduction, by Rikke Dam
What I’m suggesting is for you to use the persona model (used in software and product development) and apply it to your first book.
Start with a list of three to four actual individuals who might be ideal readers of your book.
Let’s say you want to write to a senior executive audience:
Paul, 49, is the publisher (CEO) of a major U.S. newspaper, which is part of national chain. Paul holds an undergraduate degree and MBA from a Big Ten university. A high achiever in high school, he did not get into Harvard or Wharton, but those are his peers today. He is a local “mover and shaker” with a high community profile. His network includes elected officials, professional sports team owners, and corporate CEO’s.
Paul is highly analytical, but also amicable in temperament. His main charge these days from the corporate parent is finding and developing talent (editors, sales managers, operational managers,) turning a profit in a declining market, and quickly developing revenue from digital and mobile products, which would attract national advertisers. He is at his core an introvert. He will read a business book over the weekend or on vacation, if recommended to him by someone he respects.
Or a Millennial female persona:
Katy, 28, lives in a major Southeastern city and holds season tickets to the local NFL team. She graduated from a mid-tier state university in an outlying small town and went straight into the workforce. She went into sales for a year and did not like the culture of the company. She is now the operations manager of a technology accelerator, and works each day with start-up entrepreneurs, venture fund investors and programmers. She loves her work. Her bosses are thinking of opening a new hub in Denver, and they will probably ask Katy to move there to launch it. She is addicted to social media, will read a business blog if it’s interesting, and will occasionally read a business book if it’s a quick read (under 100 pages) or recommended by a friend. She does like books by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk.
I have based both these 140-word reader personas on actual people and changed their names and few details. It should give you an actual snapshot of an actual person, a tiny slice of a demographic.
The personas above were created as fictional renderings of a real individual. A more sophisticated persona is an amalgam, a synthesis of several individuals. I have seen the term “archetype” used to describe a user persona.
What’s most important is that you develop an accurate and constructive use case, that helps you think about your audience more objectively, and collectively, in terms of a prospective reader’s motivation, acquisition (purchase) and book consuming behavior.
Look at your reader persona and ask:
Why would they even read my business book?
How would they most likely hear about it?
How much would they spend on this book?
Are they buying it online or in an airport concourse bookstore during a long layover or before a flight?
What tremendous value could I add so that this persona might recommend my book to a co-worker, a friend, a subordinate or their boss?
What about the book will get me invited to be a keynote speaker at an off-site retreat or a go-to consultant in my topic area?
Books Remain Essential
Books are social assets and operate on a substrate of shared knowledge.
Books tie deeply into our tribal hardwiring, the way hunter-gathers used to share information for hunting antelope (“try the next valley over, late afternoon is best, with the wind from the west. Use this a bamboo spear, and oh by the way, did you know can use the antlers as skewers for the meat over a fire?”)
Books allow us to have deeper and more extended conversations based on the shared third-party intellect of the author.
Even in our modern digital, transient era, books remain essential. Personas help you discover the deeper value.
Note: This post is a chapter excerpt from my upcoming book “Big Splash: Creating Your First Business Book.”
Photo: Garry Wright
