I tend to work with self-help authors a lot. Many of my indie author clients come to me via referral, so it only makes sense that a lot of them are interested in writing about similar types of things. Last year I edited 11 books of various lengths, and 9 of them were self-help books or memoirs. Phew.
From repetition comes familiarity, and so it is that I have come to recognize a lot of trends in self-help writing. There are certain mistakes, in particular, that are common to this genre.
I’ve condensed my list down to the 3 most common mistakes I tend to see. With some attention on these things, you can finesse your manuscript so that it’s both more polished and easier to edit. And easier to edit, of course, means less cash out the door for you.
Mistake #1: Refusing to Narrow Your Target Audience
This is a typical conversation I have when embarking on a book-editing project with a new self-help author:
Me: “Who is your audience?”
Author: “Oh, everyone can use this book!”
While this might be true in theory, and while I want everyone in the world to buy your book so you will be a huge success and get very rich, the reality is that narrowing your audience down to a specific niche can only help you sell more books.
For instance, last year I helped a client finesse a book that has since been published: Later Is Too Late: Hard Conversations That Can’t Wait. This lovely book is about getting prepared for death and other types of profound loss—your own or a loved one’s. It’s part true story, part hands-on tool, and it’s definitely a great resource for anyone who wants to get their affairs organized, including financial documents, a will, etc.
When Susan and I first started talking about this book, she insisted that we write it for men and women, young and old, rich and poor. In theory, every first-world human alive could benefit from the information. But the reality is that the actual potent audience for this book is aging married women—which happens to be the population that Susan interviewed for the book. By honing in on that audience, she could give them exactly what they needed in terms of emotional support and logistical information. By trying to keep the audience too broad, it was not possible to be specific and personal.
Mistake #2: Capitalizing Common Nouns
There is a powerful fascination in the self-help world with capitalizing common nouns. It’s almost as strong as every yoga studio’s yearning to use Papyrus in their logo.
Of course, we all know the rule:
Capitalize proper nouns like Eliza, Phoebe, Cuba, Subaru, God.
Do not capitalize common nouns like daughters, island, station wagon, a god.
But it can be tempting to capitalize common nouns when their meaning is very, very important to us. And so it is that I often see the following words, among others, capitalized:
Yoga
Divine
Spirit
Mindfulness
I am not averse to breaking the capitalization rule for certain common nouns in order to create an effect, but it’s an effect that must be used sparingly and wisely. If you capitalize everything, no one takes any of your nouns seriously.
Often, when working with self-help authors, we’ll have to strike a bargain about which common nouns we’re going to capitalize. Last year, I edited a book for the wonderful writer Ilana Kristeva called Birth of a Self-Care Vigilante (Tap into the Universe for Recovery, Book 1. It shares personal insight into Ilana’s own story along with her methods for tapping into mindfulness and well-being—literally, with EFT tapping techniques. Good stuff.
During this process, Ilana and I had several conversations about which words were okay to capitalize in the spiritual context she was using them. We landed on a few, including the word Universe, the logic being that in the context Ilana was writing about it, the universe was not a mere concept, but a live, pulsing, breathing entity.
Mistake #3: Redundant Metaphors, Doubled-Up Synonyms
In junior high English class, we were all taught that descriptive prose is best. We were encouraged to use colorful adjectives and lend lots of flourish to our narration. While in theory this is a great way to live, in practice it can be tedious for the reader.
Something I often see in self-help manuscripts is repetition in metaphors and the use of like synonyms in a row. Consider:
He was a lone wolf and a solitary soldier.
When you strip away the layers of artifice surrounding your being, you peel your onion and take the mask off.
That last sentence, which I just wrote off the top of my head, is very much like many of the sentences I get from clients. Consider peeling your manuscript’s onion: get rid of everything extraneous so that only the raw, juicy, sharp, pungent heart of it remains.
Also, that metaphor, in particularly, is overused. If anyone can come up with a good replacement, I will nominate that person for the self-help-originality medal of the year!
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I’m a diehard self-help helper. That is, I love helping self-help authors help themselves.
I’m currently working on edits for three such authors—two brilliant old friends from the yoga world sharing their unique expertise, and one business duo with a great spin on product development. If you have a book idea you’d like to run by me, email me! Always happy to chat.
