By: Dr. John Chuback

I wrote my book, Make Your Own Damn Cheese, after many years of formal academic and personal-development study. Having become a Board-Certified Cardiovascular surgeon, I was professionally quite successful but still felt somehow personally unfulfilled.

My deep dive into the self-help genre was motivated by an intense desire to understand not only why some individuals are more successful than others but, more importantly, who we really are at our essence, what makes us tick, and how do we ultimately achieve true inner peace and happiness.

After 20 years of exhaustive research into these questions, Make Your Own Damn Cheese was my contribution to the field of self-discovery, self-expression, and self-acceptance.

Below are tips for other authors thinking about writing a self-help book:

Tip #1 Study Self-Help

Well, I think this may sound a bit obvious, but if you want to write a book in the self-help genre, I think you need to begin by being a student. The best way is to read, watch, and listen to everything you can get your hands, eyes, and ears on. Self-help may seem like a niche field of study at first, but it’s extremely vast when you begin to look at it.

Tip #2 Add Something to the Conversation

You have to study to be confident that you have developed some reasonable degree of expertise in the area you are interested in.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself: do you have practical experience or formal training and education in the area you are pursuing? Do you have a personal or professional track record for success in this area of self-help?

This is going to be vital if you want to be taken seriously or even noticed at all. Publishers, and the general public alike, will ask, who are you, and why should we listen to you? It’s important to feel that you have something to add to the conversation. You can’t expect to be published if you are going to rehash a lot of previously existing information. What do you have to say that is new?

Tip #3 Find your Niche within the Niche

There are so many areas of sub-specialization here. Always try to find your niche. For example, you can specialize in topics such as positive thinking or combatting pathologies like anxiety and depression. You can also look at issues, such as physical health, fitness, exercise, etc. Whatever it is, make sure you specialize; this will help you to stay unique.

Tip #4 Use Technology

In one of the earliest and best-known self-help recordings called The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale in 1957, he begins with the following words, “We live today in a golden age. This is an era man[kind] has looked forward to, dreamed of, and worked toward for thousands of years. But since it’s here, we pretty well take it for granted.”

One thing I do not want you to take for granted is the mind-boggling technology that almost all of us in the United States have at our disposal. Your mind is like a nuclear-powered engine of imagination and creativity.

As we go through the day, we are continuously coming up with great ideas. Many of these ideas can be used in your self-help book. Unfortunately, we tend to forget even our most innovative thoughts.

For that reason, I urge you to keep your smartphone at the ready at all times and become well versed in the audio-command functions of creating notes, text messages, e-mails, and voice memos.

If you can get into the habit of sending yourself these ideas for your self-help book, the project will begin to write itself. As you get back to your laptop or desktop computer and organize and develop these snippets of inspiration you collect throughout the day, you’ll be shocked to see how much information naturally comes together as a cohesive message. I’ve been putting this simple technique to good use for years and couldn’t imagine living without my “peripheral digital brain” with me at all times. 

I became so frustrated thinking to myself that I would write it down when I got to the office and then either forget what my idea was or even forget that even had an idea. Use the technology you have at hand and learn how to use it well. All you have to do is dictate or record your ideas for books, articles, chapters, etc. and then later flesh them out and bring them to their full state of maturity.

Tip #5: Write a Self-Help Book

Like tip #1, this may sound ridiculous, but it’s not. Writer Joseph Epstein has been quoted as saying that 81% of Americans would like to write a book. That’s 200 million people! So why were only 329, 259 books published in the United States in 2011? The answer is obvious, most people who think they have a book in them and that they should write don’t. Who are you? Are you the person who is going to let your self-help book die inside of you? Don’t be that person. Be the individual who, no matter what, sits down and actually writes your book. Don’t worry about anything else. Just finish the job. If you don’t, you shouldn’t be teaching self-help, you should go back to tip #1 and study it some more.

ABOUT DR. CHUBACK

Dr. John Chuback is the founder of Chuback Education, LLC. His passion is to assist patients with personal development achievement by figuring out how to set actionable, attainable goals. He is also the author of the self-help book, Make Your Own Damn Cheese.