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Every writer has a unique writing style. While some are aware of theirs, others are not. If you fall into the latter category, this article is your guide to discovering your writing style.

What is your writing style?

Your writing style is your writing identity. It is your distinct writing voice that makes people recognise your writing at a glance. Having a writing style helps you stay true to your art while conveying your message.

So, how do you discover your writing style?

Here are some practical tips to help you discover yours:

• Let someone review your previous writings

The first step to discovering your writing style is to identify what your style is. To achieve this, you should have a friend, a professional editor, or a more experienced writer review your writing and tell you what they notice.

You can also review your previous writings and notice the things that stand out – your tone, favourite words, and others.

This helps you identify your style.

• Sharpen your writing style

After identifying your writing style, you should hone it.

However, ensure your style doesn’t become so personalised that it no longer fits in the genre you write in. This is because writing professionally also requires that your writing serves the target audience and satisfies the requirements of the genre. And sometimes, your writing style might contradict what is required.

You can achieve a balance by infusing bits of your writing style into your professional writing while avoiding passive words and self-references.

• Trim the fat

Once your writing style is clear, you want to be rid of the bad writing habits that may affect your style and overall writing. This requires that you know general writing rules as well as rules specific to the genres or fields you write in.

Things to avoid in general writing include filler words, typos, grammatical errors, etc. To do this efficiently, you can use free tools like Grammarly to check for spelling and grammar errors. It also has a paid version that does an in-depth review of your writing.

• Keep writing

You don’t want to lose your writing style right after you discover it. So, you should keep writing, but with the awareness of your style.

However, bear in mind that while your writing style is unique to you, you should make it adapt in appropriate situations. For instance, a technical article and a social media post cannot be written in the same tone. The former requires in-depth research and analysis, and has a more serious tone, unlike the latter, which can be fun and casual.

Your writing style shouldn’t be rigid but flexible enough to adapt to relevant scenarios. This also improves your overall writing skills.

Discovering and owning your writing style is a gradual process but with the tips highlighted above, you should master your writing in no time.

Did you know that most readers make the decision to read your article based on its topic and the introduction?

That is why you need to write introductions that will have them glued till the last word in the article.

Everyone can write a blog introduction, but not everyone can write a captivating introduction. To make your content stand out from the millions of others on the internet, you need an introduction that compels readers to read your content to the end.

Your introduction should also tell your audience what to expect from the article.

There are several ways to hook your reader’s attention with the perfect blog introduction, and we explore them in this article.  

Below are some tips that can guide you in writing blog introductions like a pro:

1. Ask a question

Never underestimate the effect of questions in your introduction. They intrigue your reader’s minds and make them think deeply. Well-crafted and relevant queries are excellent approaches to capturing readers’ interest and keeping them engaged. It is a trick to take your audience on a journey of reading and engaging with your content.

However, ensure the inquiries are open-minded and straightforward. Also, it must be relevant to your message.

• Share a quote or anecdote

Anecdotes are exciting incidents, rumours, or short stories usually revolving around a theme. The tone can be lighthearted without complexities to ease your audience into your blog post.

Having a relevant quote or anecdote elevates your blog introduction. Quotes help audiences to capture vital messages. It also establishes writing from a position of authority while capturing your audience’s attention.

Nonetheless, an irrelevant quote can turn off your audience’s interest. 

• Highlight a shared problem

Convenience is the one thing everyone seeks. We are all in search of a solution to one problem or the other. It could be solving a complex project, cooking hacks, or even how to review a book.

The first step is to find out a problem that most of your readers are facing and ensure that it is relevant to the blog post.

By highlighting a shared problem, it shows you understand the challenges your audience face while being ready to provide helpful information. Readers are interested in content that solves their problems, and you can leverage this.

• Let your reader know what to expect

As mentioned earlier, an excellent introduction helps engage your audience and keeps them reading. Most people are on the internet to search for swift answers. Nobody wants to read a lengthy write-up before finding what they need at the bottom of the page. So, to avoid wasting your reader’s time, don’t keep them in the dark.

This is not to say that you should squeeze the entire message into two or three sentences. Instead, you want to give them a quick insight into what your article is about but just enough to keep them wanting more.

• Ensure your opinion is unique

When you type a query on Google, there are millions of results for such a problem. To attract readers to your post, your content must stand out. One way to achieve this is to have a unique perspective.

When your article begins with a different approach to solving a problem or discussing a topic, it grabs the readers’ attention. Even with generic or repetitive topics, you can simply change your writing style to give them a fresh tone.

With these tips, you are well on your way to not only improving your writing but also attracting more readers and increasing traffic to your blog.

At Sabi Writers, we write quality, captivating blog posts that will leave your readers wanting more. To engage our services, contact us at hello@sabiwriters.com or call  +234-810-375-1847.

Every writer, regardless of their genre, hopes to write books that become bestsellers after publishing. But these hopes are usually dashed when the books don’t perform well.

Nonfiction writing isn’t a walk in the park. From the planning to the publishing and promotion stage, many creative and strategic processes are involved.

It can be quite challenging but rest assured, you can write a best-selling nonfiction.

So, if you are writing a nonfiction book already and hope to write one that will become a bestseller, this article is for you.

In this article, you will find a step-by-step guide on how to write a best-selling nonfiction book.

What Does ‘Nonfiction’ Entail?

Before diving into the steps, it’s important to understand what nonfiction writing covers and what it doesn’t.

Nonfiction is majorly a genre of writing based on facts and realities. Nonfiction books focus on biological and historical events. The genre is not make-believe like fiction is; rather, it is based on real experiences. It covers a broad range of sub-categories, from autobiographies to memoirs and self-help books.

Thus, a nonfiction book covers not only real-life events but also covers practical solutions to real-life situations.

A nonfiction book can cover any topic of interest. It could be a technical book on wild animals or anything that happened or exists. Aside from books, you’ll find nonfiction writing in blogs, newspapers, websites, magazines, and social media platforms.

What Makes a Best-Selling Nonfiction?

Publishing a bestseller is not just about fame and money but more about the impact and influence your book has on society.

So, what makes a best-selling nonfiction is its originality. Any writer who dreams of becoming a bestselling author needs to publish a book that is authentic.

The second point that makes a nonfiction book is the depths the book carries. And, of course, your book must be relatable. It has to offer fresh ideas and opinions to any situation your readers find themselves in.

How to Write a Best-Selling Nonfiction Book

Writing a bestseller doesn’t happen instantly. But your book can attain the bestseller status if you put in the required effort.

Take this as a guide to successfully writing and publishing your book this year.

1. Map out your book’s outline: Mapping out your outline gives you a clear direction to your destination. It prevents you from getting anxious about what to write and what not to include in your book. Before mapping out your outline, ensure you know whom you’re writing for.Your book will hardly get any publicity if you don’t know whom you’re writing for and address their pain points since nonfiction is all about facts.

• Don’t be in haste: We understand the eagerness to publish your book and start selling. But quality is what you need to make your dream come true. Therefore, the process shouldn’t be rushed. Take a cue from some bestsellers. It could take one or two years or more for them to write and publish their book. Set out some time to write at least one chapter daily or in two days.

Nonfiction requires excellent research, and that takes time.

• Hire a professional designer: The saying, ‘First impression matters’, is true when it comes to becoming a best-selling author. When you’ve led your audience to buy your book, the first thing they see is your book’s cover. So, you need an attention-grabbing cover design that will make your book irresistible to readers. Hire a professional designer and get your book rolling to the top level of becoming a bestseller.

• Edit and proofread your book: While it is good for you to self-edit, it could be very exhausting to go over your manuscript again. There will be things you’ll miss out on as the writer, which a more qualified person, an editor, would recognise. Hire a professional editor and proofreader to do a perfect job for you.

• Have a marketing plan: Do you plan to publish your book on Amazon? That’s fine, but not enough. A marketing plan helps your audience find, buy, and refer others to buy the book. A marketing plan would also focus on the appropriate keywords, articles, or nuggets from your book, increasing your book’s publicity.

These five steps should be modified and expanded to suit your publishing goals.

You can write a best-selling nonfiction book as long as you put in the work.

Need help writing your nonfiction book?

Reach out to us today at hello@sabiwriters.com to begin your journey of becoming a bestselling author.

There are different reasons why people become authors, from making an impact to giving other people a voice. However, unless you want to give out all the books at no cost, you need to sell your book.

As humble as writers like to be, your book can have a wider reach only if you sell it to as many people as possible.

So, authors shouldn’t shy away from talking about book sales, and in this article, we share tips on how you can boost your book sales in 2023 and beyond.

5 Tips You Need to Boost Your Book Sales in 2023

1. Make your title attention-grabbing

Sounds like something you have heard before?

Well, it’s true.

When your book has an attention-grabbing title, it is likely to sell more. Readers want relatable and interesting books. And they determine it from the title of your book. Whatever title you come up with, ensure readers will be drawn to it. Also, ensure that your book’s title isn’t misleading from the content of the book. What good will it do if you end up confusing your readers with your book title?

Another thing to note is that before readers purchase your book, they want to be sure it will be worth it. Your book title should tell them what your book is about without giving away too much.

Once you’ve come up with the title, you should do a title reveal along with the book cover, which brings us to the next tip.

• Hire a professional book cover designer

A captivating title isn’t enough to attract readers. Your book cover must be equally captivating. Ignore the saying, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. Readers judge books by their titles and covers. If they are not held spellbound by your book cover, they will scroll past your book and move on to the next eye-catching one.

This is why your book can’t have a mediocre cover design. You should hire a professional designer and get a design that translates your title and the content of your book just enough to get a reader’s attention.

• Create a blog or a website

If you don’t have a blog or website as an author, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities, one of which is having a sales funnel for your book. Besides that, having an author’s blog or website gives your readers access to you, making them feel even more connected to you.

Through your blog or website, you can inform them about your writing progress, book releases, and other updates. You can also write articles regarding your book or topics and themes discussed in your book. This creates anticipation for your book (if it’s yet to be released) or just enough interest for them to buy it.

If you cannot afford to get a website, build an email list and reach your readers through email marketing.

• Give your book out for reviews

Before you launch your book, you should give some copies to beta readers, public figures, and literary critics to get reviews. If you get mostly positive reviews, you can use them to promote your book on your social media platforms or your website. Reviews create hype, and hype can sell your book.

• Launch a pre-order campaign

Creating a book launch campaign can drive massive sales for your book. You can hit various best-seller lists with this strategy. Also, a pre-order campaign helps build your reach and visibility. Get creative by posting different forms of content around the launch of your book. Show up consistently.

Above all, the quality of your writing should be your main priority. These tips will only work when your writing is good enough to keep readers going till the end and wanting more. Once that is covered, you can implement these tips and boost your book sales.

While proofreading and editing are two distinct steps in a continual review process, they have varied impacts on a manuscript. Editing (also known as copy editing) tackles problems of style, vocabulary, and formatting, and occasionally also involves rewriting and restructuring the content. Proofreading, on the other hand, focuses on grammar and punctuation. However, to know the best editing process your work needs, you must know the difference between these two terms.  

Some writers regard proofreading as a science because of its systematic approach. Nevertheless, the aim of proofreading is to find all grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. Additionally, proofreading detects inconsistent referencing, formatting, and terminology. But generally, proofreading offers minor changes to a work’s overall outlook or beauty.

Effective proofreading requires specialised training and experience (and goes well beyond what the spell-checking program on your computer can do). This is because the human brain is not perfect at spotting errors at a glance. But with training and practice, you can master the science of proofreading.

On the flip side, editing can be said to be an art because it emphasises the overall beauty of the work. In editing, the focus is to make a write-up as good as possible. It is the act of enhancing the overall quality of writing. It employs a lot more creativity and often considers the reader’s emotions.

As a result, editing can significantly alter a text, raising queries like: Have I used the best words to communicate my meaning successfully? Did I use passive voice? Does my tone fit my reader? Are there extraneous words or sentences that are too long? Can the structure of my work be adjusted to strengthen my argument?

The main goal of editing is to communicate a piece of writing’s meaning and ideas as effectively as feasible. It also entails paying more attention to the material itself, employing subject-matter expertise to make the language more understandable, and frequently double-checking your facts’ accuracy. Additionally, it’s an opportunity to review spelling and grammar in-depth, as it is with proofreading.

Going forward, you can set aside your writing for a day or two before editing or proofreading it so you can view it from a new perspective (or seek feedback from someone else). This helps you detach yourself from the work and give an unbiased view of how you presented your facts, grammar, sentence structure etc.

For more editing tips, click what-type-of-editing-is-most-suitable-for-you/ or visit www.sabiwriters.com for quality editing services.