Today I want to share an awesome book with you. If you get a chance to read Tell To Win, by Peter Guber, I hope you do. I’ve been skimming it mostly for now until I have more time for an in-depth read. But already it’s helping.

In short, Mr. Guber is one of Hollywood’s elite. Among other things, he’s the Chairman & CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, and has produced Rain Man, The Colour Purple, Missing, to name a few.

Despite his many hats, he decided to write a book on telling purposeful stories. If you follow his techniques, he believes you can land the job, get a promotion, move others to action, and on and on. You can learn more about that at his webpage here.

I’d like to narrow the topic and concentrate on how I took his 5 techniques and incorporated it into a winning book reading.

Back in September, I wrote a post about social anxiety disorder, the fear of public speaking and how it affected me physically for up to 24 hours prior to book readings. Since then I’ve been in search of ways to fight my fear. That’s not to say that my audience isn’t gracious, or that they even noticed my distress; I’d learned to hide it well. But Peter’s Guber’s book has given me the tools to experience a fun-filled evening of book reading & sharing.

When I read his 5 points for telling purposefully stories, I understood immediately that I could take those points and enhance my book reading experience.

Here are his 5 techniques:

• Motivation – Get into the state of an authentic state of mind.
• Audience – Hit them in the groin and the wallet. Move them.
• Goal – Build a relationship with your audience so they own your story. (Make it their story)
• Interactive – Pitch & catch. (Give them the only opportunity to participate.
• Content – Write a purposeful story that moves you so you can move your audience. (reader)

Although he’s using the term audience as in anyone you happen to talk to, I turned it around to include those sitting in the audience at my book readings. I’d already written a compelling story about a character who moved me. Now I want to share my journey from struggling writer to published author with my audience so it becomes their story too. I’ve actually done that in an early post called Accepting The Journey pt.3

Most importantly, I had to present my protagonist in a way that my audience could either see themselves in her place or feel themselves loving her.

Because you see, even if many of you are still unpublished, know that it’s a necessary step to publication. It’s the chicken and the egg. You take all these experiences authors are willing to share, and you make that your story on the road to publication.

Write a purposeful story that will hit your reader in the groin and the wallet. Build a relationship with your reader through your prose so that they believe your story could be their story. They can live it through the pages. Give them a credible story that they believe will change them for the good, leave them feeling better for having read it. And finally give them an experience they’ll not soon forget.