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Persuasive writing focuses on your reader more than your book topic. It is a mindset that reminds you that writing to persuade your reader is your goal.

This is a perspective that will keep you from falling into the “topic trap” that affects so many writers. The topic trap is the tendency to pay so much attention to the topic of your book that you don’t pay enough attention to your potential reader. The topic trap mindset fails to identify why any potential reader would be interested in buying and reading your book.

You might not realize how much a book is an interaction between the writer and the reader. In fact, a book is an interactive medium. You might not think so when you spend so many hours working by yourself to write it, facing the blank page or the empty screen.

The process of writing can be very lonely and it is easy to forget that your ultimate goal is to have someone buy and read your book. Your primary objective is to persuade book buyers to buy what you have written. This means that your potential reader needs to be part of the process from the very beginning.

When writers start their books from the “topic trap” perspective, the first question they ask is: What is the book about? In contrast, when writers start their books with a persuasive writing mindset, they ask a different first question: Who would want to read this book? An even better question is to ask: Who would actually pay to read this book?

Consider what happens when your book is published and available in the bookstores. Typically, a bookstore browser will look at a book for a few seconds before deciding whether or not to buy it. This means that you have only a few seconds to persuade the book browser to buy your book.

The persuasive writing mindset knows the difference between providing information and providing the solution to a problem. We might be living in the Information Age, but most of us are already swamped with information. Many book buyers don’t want more information. They want a solution to some sort of problem.

The tried-and-true way to make sure that your book solves a problem for your readers is to write the book with a clear thesis that identifies and solves a problem for a particular type of reader.

The most basic requirement of writing to persuade is that your book solves the reader’s problem.

This means that the more you can persuade a potential reader that your book is the solution to a problem the reader wants to solve, the more likely the reader will buy and read your book. A persuasive writing mindset is your best strategy to sell more books.

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