The Pain Point and the Promise #3: Raising the Stakes

If you’re writing a novel, one common piece of advice is to “raise the stakes” for your story’s characters. What will happen if your main character fails to achieve their goal? Will the world end? Will they lose the love of their life? Will the bad guys win?

Believe it or not, raising the stakes is important in self-help and spirituality writing too. Once you’ve identified your reader’s pain point—or the general neighborhood where this pain point lies—you can refine your book idea even further by asking yourself, “What happens if my reader can’t solve this problem?”

Negative Stakes

Negative stakes are what your reader stands to lose if they don’t resolve the pain point.

For example, maybe your reader will lose his marriage if he doesn’t develop better relationship skills; or they’ll spend their whole life in debt if they don’t repair their relationship with money; or she’ll come to the end of her life and realize she had her priorities entirely wrong.

Knowing the stakes helps you understand the urgency of your reader’s problem, and can also illuminate facets of the pain point that you might have otherwise overlooked.  

Educating Your Reader

In many cases, readers might not even be aware of what they stand to lose by failing to solve their problem, and part of the job of your book is to educate them. For example, readers may not know that people who procrastinate make, on average, 40% less income than people who don’t. By educating them about the stakes, you can give them a chance to correct a problem whose cost they might have been underestimating.

Positive Stakes

Educating your reader about the upside of solving their problem is equally important. What does your reader stand to gain if they kick the pain point to the curb once and for all? A forty-percent boost in income? A longer life? An enduring marriage or relationship? A less anxious mind?

            Although readers may have a general sense that they want to be less anxious, or stop procrastinating, showing them the positive stakes of making these changes can give them the necessary motivation to adopt the techniques in your book.

 Identifying the positive and negative stakes is so helpful that I do it for every self-help and spirituality book I ghostwrite. With a little brainstorming, you can do it too!

Are you writing a self-help, psychology or spirituality book? Schedule a free 30-minute consultation with me, and we'll chat about ways to maximize your book's potential to change readers' lives.