How to Write a Killer Book Intro
By Don Watkins
Photo by RetroSupply on Unsplash
When you’re writing persuasive non-fiction—particularly anything offering the reader advice—your introductory chapter needs to do at least three things:
Hook the reader
Orient the reader
Establish empathy and authority
Hook the reader
To hook the reader, you need to persuade them your book will be valuable. This should work on two levels.
First, they should be convinced that the content of the book will have a positive impact on their life. It will get them from their current (unsatisfied) state to their desired state.
Second, they should be convinced that the experience of READING the book will be enjoyable in and of itself. You do this mostly through raising questions that evoke curiosity—question the reader desperately wants answered. (And then you must be sure to have satisfying—and ideally surprising—answers.)
(For more see my video on motivation.)
Orient the reader
Imagine you walk into a speech midway and hear the speaker say, "life is sacred." You would have no clue what she means.
Maybe she's an individualist telling you to make the most of your life. Maybe she's an anti-abortionist. You have no idea how to file that statement until you have a sense of where she's coming from.
In order to grasp your individual points, the reader has to have a sense of your overall view. They need to know, at least in general terms, where you're going—what it is you're arguing for.
You don’t need to give away everything. You don’t want one of those academic introductions where you summarize the contents of your book. But you need to make sure the reader has at least a glimpse of your overall point so they can understand how each element fits in that broader vision.
Establish empathy and authority
When the reader picks up your book, you're a stranger, and people don't want to spend hours with a stranger. Especially not when that stranger is going to tell them how to live their lives.
They need to know who you are. And they need to know that you know who THEY are. You need to establish two-way empathy.
The way to do this is to tell your story—in a way that the reader can identify with. You should describe how you went from where they are to where they want to be using the ideas in the book.
In some cases, you won't have such a story. For example, imagine you’re a therapist who has a happy marriage and are writing a book about divorce. In that case, your focus will be establishing authority—how you've helped other people solve this problem.
That said, your intro should contain elements of both empathy and authority. Two examples of how you might do this:
(1) If you're the therapist in my example, you'd have stories of authority (how you've helped people), but you would build empathy by explaining why helping couples through divorce is so important to you. (Maybe you saw your parents go through a messy divorce and you want to spare other families that pain.)
(2) On the other side, if your insights come from your own personal experience, you should be able to share stories of how you've helped or seen other people apply the ideas in your book and achieve success.
When in doubt
In the end, there’s only one rule of writing. Be interesting. So don’t get too hung up on the rules. The purpose of the introduction is to get people to read the rest of your book. It’s your sales pitch.
Make it a good one.
