‘We have this image of a reader being someone who’s giving time and attention to our words… but online that doesn’t happen.’
Anna Faherty found out the hard way that there were no books to help her teach a course on ‘digital storytelling’ – so she had to write her own. And if you’re trying to write a business book then much of what she tackles in it – writing for busy readers, structuring ideas, adding in details and taking out fluff – is relevant for you too.
Even if you’re not writing a book, you’ll learn a huge amount from this conversation about capturing and keeping attention online, and why AI stories are not the way forward for anyone who cares about social justice.
There’s also a super-practical post-it tip and an extended discussion about Gregory Peck and leopards. You’re welcome.
Anna’s site: https://www.strategiccontent.co.uk/
Anna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-faherty-8a51194/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
Write it Wild 2025: https://alisonjones.lpages.co/write-it-wild/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Substack: https://extraordinarybusinessbooks.substack.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Anna Faherty, who runs the writing, training and content development consultancy Strategic Content, where she collaborates with clients like the Natural History Museum and the Wellcome Collection to research and develop major exhibition and digital projects. Passionate about supporting others to develop creative and strategic writing skills, and thinking skills, Anna also facilitates workshops for professionals and teachers marketing innovation at Master’s level.
And her book, Writing Online and Audio Stories: Crafting nonfiction for websites, podcasts and social media, was published by Routledge earlier this year. So already everybody is sitting up and getting their notepads ready. Could not be more on point for this podcast, but how lovely to see you again.
Anna Faherty: Nice to see you. Thank you for having me.
Alison Jones: Great to see you here.
Anna, I should explain, is also an ex colleague working at Palgrave together, and also Anna, every time I go into the Wellcome reading room, I just, I think of you because you were so fundamental to that and it’s such a lovely space, so thank you for that, actually, on a personal note.
But talking about the book, I loved the story behind it, which reminded me of that sort of great Toni Morrison line that if you want to read a book, but it’s not been written yet, then you have to write it.
It was very much your experience, wasn’t it?
Anna Faherty: Yes, well I suppose I could tell a focus story about how the book came about by…
Alison Jones: …walk the talk, go on…
Anna Faherty: …saying, that’s what I’m trying to do I guess, by saying that I was teaching a course on this subject to undergraduates, people who’ve done no writing at all, almost, and from all sorts of backgrounds, so some were on English Literature degrees, but some were on Music Production degrees or Criminology degrees or things like that. So people who weren’t experts in writing. And I’d spent a lot of time developing all the materials and it had gone really well and we’d really helped students who lacked confidence to get their own stories out, like, non fiction stories about their personal experiences, out in the world.
And then I had to give up that teaching role and I wanted to do something to make the most of all that work that I’d done and also to continue helping people because I really felt of all the courses I’ve taught, and I’ve taught a lot, this had made the most impact on students. So I spent some time thinking about ways to do that and writing a book was always one of the options.
I sent out some feelers to a couple of publishers quite early on but after some discussion both declined the project. So I ended up working on other things, you know, actual paid-for pieces of work, and put it on the back burner, but it was still there. I still wanted to do it. So I came back to it and then I sent a proposal and sample chapter to Routledge, who finally agreed to take it on.
That’s the kind of focus story, but I think there were other factors at play. So, when I first got a job writing what were called in my contract ‘digital stories’, I realized I didn’t actually know what a story was, and I had a bit of imposter syndrome as a writer. I was used to writing, you know, text for exhibitions, sort of on labels or walls, some of which might have had a story element, but I hadn’t been asked to write a story before, and I’m not trained in any way as a writer. I don’t have an English degree, I haven’t had any formal training in it, so I therefore invested quite a lot of time researching the nature of stories and how to write them.
And I also presented some of that at an industry conference, which went really well. And so I knew that for my people, the sort of museum contenty interpretation people, that this was something interesting and useful.
And then also when I was teaching that course, there was no book on it. So I realized that despite the tons of books about storytelling, tons of books about writing and a few about developing online content, nothing did what I would have needed as that person who was charged with writing digital stories, nothing told me how to tell nonfiction stories in short form.
And by that, I mean, probably 1500 words or much less for online readers. And I was aware when I approached publishers that this is definitely a narrow niche, but it’s an ill-served niche. And I felt I was well positioned to make a sort of helpful contribution to that niche.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s so interesting to hear that, a whole kind of, you know, the market awareness, the personal story, all of that comes together and the learning that you did. I was really interested when you said that this course had had such an impact on the students. Tell me a bit more about that.
Anna Faherty: So it was called Multimedia Storytelling or something like that, and I co-taught it with somebody else who taught the more technical, kind of design side of it, but I taught the writing element. And they had to write non fiction blog stories, basically. They were blog posts, but they had to be a narrative form.
And most of them started by thinking they were going to write about something in history or something else. But when we got to kind of talking through, you know, well, how are you going to research this? How do you know what it’s like to have lived in that moment, they’re all like, Oh, I don’t really know.
And so then I, normally managed to persuade most of them to write about themselves and their own experience. And most of them initially were like, well, I haven’t got a story to tell, whatever. And most of these students, this was at City University in central London, most of these students were sort of second generation immigrants.
Their parents had been immigrants. They were the first people to go to university. They were often from minority ethnic communities. And many of them had stories about kind of the tension between them kind of living up to their parents’ sort of expectations and their culture, but also living in this busy city and stuff that they all wrote about different things.
But many of them, once I realized that that was interesting and useful and that was what they were experts in, then they actually really embraced that and ran with that. But also some of them wrote really kind of poignant pieces about living with, I don’t know, eating disorders. One of them was a ballet dancer who wrote about their kind of life as a young ballet dancer and getting an eating disorder because of that.
One of them wrote about losing their father during Covid, which still brings a tear to my eye, but they kind of embraced the fact that they had stories to tell and they came out feeling confident that they could a), write a story, but also that they had something, it had a, you know, the educational benefit was that they knew how to write stories and if they go into the world of work and need to write some content for digital things, they’ll know how to do that.
But the wider benefit was it built their confidence.
Alison Jones: It’s a much, much deeper thing going on, which plays into everything I know and see all the time about how people, when people use writing, they think it’s going to be this sort of transactional tool and when they lean into it, actually, it’s this really, really transformational tool for yourself as well as for your reader, but let’s talk about the readers now.
So we talked a little bit about the people writing the stories – and by the way, nonfiction story is in itself an interesting phrase, isn’t it? What? Huh? That’s an oxymoron – but the people writing the stories, it’s so powerful.
What’s different about online readers? And could you please use the analogy that you use in your book about this? It just made me snort tea over my keyboard.
Anna Faherty: So, well that’s a lovely image, Alison.
Alison Jones: You are welcome.
Anna Faherty: So, I mean, undoubtedly the biggest challenge in writing for people who are looking at or reading or engaging with online content is winning and maintaining their attention. Because we all know how busy we all are when we’re online, when we’re on our phone or we’re on our computer with multiple tabs open.
We flit, we browse, we swipe from page to page without really reading very much. My wife and I have this phase where we become zombies when we’re on our phone and just aren’t even really reading anything, we’re just swiping through them. So, the analogy I use in the book, which made you snort your tea, is that online readers are like hungry leopards.
So they’re prowling around the savannah, the internet landscape, on the hunt for a meal. And, you know, despite them being big, chunky animals, they can’t use energy to chase everything they see on the horizon, every movement they might spot. So, if something catches their eye through the scrub, they have to decide in a split second whether to pursue it or not.
And I think that’s what online readers are like. So if you’re writing for those hungry leopards, you need to get straight to the point and you need to offer a sort of tasty morsel that encourages them to get stuck in. And I should clarify that I don’t mean clickbait when I say tasty morsel, because that’s very good stuff, clickbait that tempts you as the hungry leopard to go and click through, but then fails to actually give you any meaningful content.
Alison Jones: We want to give them a meal at the end of the day
Anna Faherty: Yes, you want to give a nutritious and filling meal that makes them stay on that page rather than just come to the page and then go, oh it didn’t tell me what that celebrity was really doing.
Alison Jones: Still don’t know how to lose 15 pounds in a day. Yes.
Anna Faherty: Exactly.
Alison Jones: But you don’t just, you talk about the leopards which I think is a brilliant, brilliant analogy. But the thing that really made me laugh was the way that we like to imagine our readers, which is very, very different.
Anna Faherty: Yes, so I, and I do do this with students and with professional clients when I’m talking about stories. I often have two pictures. I put, first of all, a picture of Gregory Peck, for anyone who’s not old enough to know. He was like a sort of Hollywood actor in the 1960s, very chiseled jaw and all that kind of thing. And he’s sitting, I don’t know where this picture is from, he’s sitting in what looks like his living room, but probably isn’t, in an armchair with his feet up, with a pipe, you know, in his hand, very old fashioned, but kind of relaxed and a record player in the background. And he’s got a book and he’s like staring intently at the open book.
And it’s like, that’s what I’d love my readers to be like. You know, it’s only recently I’ve written a book, before then I’m always writing for either online or on the wall in an exhibition. Both scenarios where you’re moving past, you’re on the go, you’re being distracted by other things, you’re not, like we are when we read a kind of ripping yarn and novel, you’re not kind of, completely immersed.
And so I think that’s the big difference. We have this image of a reader being someone who’s giving time and attention to our words, which does happen if you write, you know, The Da Vinci Code or something that kind of keeps you immersed while you’re on a holiday read, but online that doesn’t happen.
So I kind of talk about Gregory Peck as our imagined reader and then…
Alison Jones: far from reality.
Anna Faherty: Sadly, the reality is here’s the hungry leopard. And I put a picture of a hungry leopard prowling across the Savannah on there. And so….
Alison Jones: …that’s such a lovely example of putting something that you could just have explained that to us, but I will never forget the image of Gregory Peck on the one hand and the leopard on the other and it’s a lovely illustration of how you wrap a message up and present it in a way that is funny and accessible and memorable and visual, actually.
Anna Faherty: Yes.
So, I mean, obviously we think writing is about words, but I would say it’s about visuals too, because you’re creating. Sounds cliché to say you’re kind of creating pictures with words, but, you know, learning that you snorted your tea when you read that is more powerful than you just saying, Oh, it just struck me, because I can imagine you there going, and it can put me in the moment in that story of how you engage with that thing.
Alison Jones: And it’s that detail, isn’t it, that you talk about? This is one of the mistakes that writers so often make, is that they talk in generalities, but actually it’s those little details that bring us in, that create those visual images, that make them stick, that make them sticky.
Anna Faherty: Absolutely. I mean, I think from my perception, and this is partly based on working with students, but also on research that I did trying to find case studies for the book looking at things online, there are two things that people miss, but one of the first and most important one at the start is that they talk in generalities.
So stories are always in a specific time and place. You haven’t told me exactly when you read the book and when you snorted your tea, but I already have an idea of the place, you’re in that office, probably. You’ve got a mug in front of you. So I can, the reason that you need that specific setting is it helps you imagine yourself in it.
So, if you had a story that began with something like, Oh, I’ve always wanted to climb Mount Everest. That doesn’t attract me to read on really, unless I personally have a really big interest in Mount Everest. But if you say instead, you know, standing at the top of the Empire State Building with the wind going through my hair, I looked down and wondered what it would be like to stand at the summit of Everest.
Not the best writing there, but it has put you more in the moment. You can imagine standing on a tall building and looking down, and then you might then imagine what it would be like to stand on an even taller kind of mountain and what that would be like. So it puts you in the moment. And once you’re in the moment, you’re much more interested and you want to carry on reading. So detail.
Not overly long, kind of descriptive passages about, things that you might read in a sort of, I don’t know, George Eliot novel, but things that just help. I think of them as little snippets that you drop in, that kind of just give you, a slight sense of where the person in the story is and what they can see and maybe what they can hear or smell and then it helps you imagine you’re there with them or you even are them.
Alison Jones: You also mentioned that the writer needs to guard against extraneous detail as well. It’s that sort of, you know, Chekhov thing, isn’t it? If the pistol’s hanging over the fireplace in the first act, you’d better be using it in the second act, you know. So some people, and this is I think another probably the opposite mistake that writers make is putting in too much detail, too much extraneous detail.
Anna Faherty: Yes, I think it’s like too many adjectives as well which is an easy thing to kill off, but I think because we’re used to reading books, we think, I think with all writing, whether it’s writing a story or writing a business report, the minute you sit down at your desk and open the thing and start typing, you kind of think you’re writing something different to what you would normally say.
To what you would say in that meeting or to what you would say if you were telling someone a story. So you automatically put in extra kind of long winded sentences and extra adverbs and extra adjectives and you automatically put in more stuff because you’re used to reading reams of stuff in books.
But actually, yes, it’s that focus. So when I, at the beginning told that story about why I wrote the book I first told a kind of focus story, which was, you know, I wanted to do something with this stuff that I’d developed for the course. And then I took these steps and then I wrote the book, but there were other factors around.
But if I was just telling the focus story, I’d miss the other factors out because you just don’t have space in an online piece of content to do that.
Alison Jones: We’ve all been in those conversations, haven’t we, where somebody hasn’t really understood that principle and introduces all the extraneous stuff. Yes.
Anna Faherty: And I think, I mean, and for me, the way to do that, the way to work, well, A, is to, in some ways the constraint of word count is useful because it forces you to go through and just be really ruthless the whole Stephen King killing your darling thing. When you’ve got a book where it might be a bit more leeway you can sneak things in and hope the publisher doesn’t, you know, chop them out.
But in…
Alison Jones: not on my watch, Anna, not on my watch.
Anna Faherty: I guess I’m used to writing things that stick on a wall in a museum and you cannot go over word count. They literally won’t fit in the space and that’s taught me,
Alison Jones: A great discipline.
Anna Faherty: Yes, that’s taught me to be really kind of, yes, disciplined in that. And I sometimes even write in a box on my Word document to make myself realize when my words are going over the box.
So, I’m quite an extreme version of that in that I’ve been trained, by myself, by my work to do that but I think everybody could benefit from that like have a box and once you go over the, you know, you need to think again.
Alison Jones: That’s so interesting and you make great use of Post Its as well in terms of structuring arguments. I guess the other great benefit of a Post It is it’s got that physical constraint. If you can’t articulate your idea in a few words, it’s not going to fit on your Post It.
Anna Faherty: Exactly. So I mean you could just have a flip chart and write things on the flip chart but then you could go longer. There are two reasons I use Post Its, so this is to map out your kind of book structure and article structure, if you’re writing something for online, probably each Post It is probably a paragraph.
You don’t write the whole paragraph, you just write what will happen in that paragraph. So A, you can’t write very much on them, especially if you use a Sharpie. So if you use a thick pen, you can’t fit much on. But B, you can lay them all out, and then you can either move them around. Or take scenes out, because, I don’t know, if you’re writing a 600 word piece for online, that’s probably no more than, I don’t know, 10 paragraphs, 8 paragraphs, depending on how long your paragraphs are.
Alison Jones: a pretty short paragraph.
Anna Faherty: Well, some of them will be, I think, online, because you often have paragraphs that are like a sentence, or a line. So then you’d do your thing, you’d realise you have 12 Post Its mean you can take things off,
Alison Jones: Brilliant. I love it.
Anna Faherty: Whereas if you cross them out, there’s always the temptation that you could sneak it back in.
Alison Jones: Post Its are, I think, the absolute bee’s knees when it comes to, you know, sort of low tech, high physical engagement, high kinesthetic sort of engagement, which is just, it’s your whole brain, not, not just, sort of a bit of it.
And I can’t think of a great, there should be a really great segue here, but I can’t think of it.
But I really want to talk about the AI stuff as well, because you touch on that so interestingly, that point about the derivativeness of AI Yes, the fact that it’s got bias inherent and I imagine people listening, if they’re not just doing it routinely, will have been tempted once or twice in their life to just ask ChatGPT to write them a post on this.
Tell us why that might not be the best idea, Anna.
Anna Faherty: Yes. Well, firstly, at the moment, I would say the quality isn’t great. So ignoring any other worries, you can usually spot if something’s being generated by AI. It’s a sort of tortuous, semi formal approach that sounds a bit like a badly written student essay in my head. Yes.
Alison Jones: There’s just something a bit off about the tone, isn’t there?
Anna Faherty: Yes, it’s got long sentences. It’s not normally easy to read. So at the moment you just wouldn’t get a great product, I think. But I definitely assume that will get better. I’m assuming they’re training it more and more and more. And so soon it might be a place where it will be in a place where it won’t be so easy to kind of distinguish AI content.
So we do need to, we can’t ignore it. It’s there and it keeps being presented to us. Like you do a Google search, you get a response that’s an AI response now. And so I used to think it was a tool I could just ignore, but I can’t really ignore it now because it’s definitely going to be used.
But for me, I guess there are, I think there are two worrying things.
So the first is that despite the name AI systems are not intelligent. So if you ask it a question, I think the example I gave in the book is that if you asked it, you know, to write a paragraph about strategies to reduce inflation, let’s say, and I’m not an economist so I don’t know this in detail, but it might generate a response that suggests that rising interest rates will do the job.
And it might be be right
Alison Jones: sounds really plausible. It sounds so plausible.
Anna Faherty: But you just need to remember that it doesn’t fundamentally know what interest rates are, it doesn’t know how or why raising them will impact inflation, and it doesn’t understand what inflation is. So all it’s doing is it’s kind of scraping off masses and masses of information that’s been written about this issue somewhere else online or in books. But it’s not evaluating, critiquing or attributing that. So therefore it can get things wrong. And also it’s not, there are plenty of places where AI can add value in terms of collecting stuff that you can then use, but if you ask it to write something like that, it’s not really adding value because there’s no expert view in there.
It is just saying, effectively, this is what all these other people are saying.
Alison Jones: Here’s some stuff I found.
Anna Faherty: Yes, Yes, it’s a bit like you might do in year, I don’t know, seven at school. So that’s the first thing.
The more worrying thing I, like, lose sleep over, is the bias aspect because it’s pulling in this stuff from published books and online content that will, in the majority, be written by cis white men who hold certain positions or have certain attitudes to life and who aren’t from the global majority. And so they’ll be writing from a kind of specific perspective, and they’ll be bringing in their own biases even if they don’t have known biases, they’ll be bringing in unconscious biases.
And again, in the book I talk about this very quick experiment I did, but I asked ChatGPT to write a story about two people in an office, and I called one Andi, with an I and I called one Abdul, and I posed the question repeatedly, and I swapped around whether I put Abdul first or Andi first. And repeatedly, the stories that came back, even if they were different about what happened in the office, depicted Andi as creative and outgoing, and depicted Abdul as quiet and methodical.
Now that’s not an awful thing to do, but it’s showing that there is this inbuilt bias where it is making, not making judgements because it’s not intelligent enough to do that, it’s presenting content in a way…
Alison Jones: perpetuating stereotypes
Anna Faherty: Yes, where it’s taking a name and because it’s found other people write about Andi as being creative and other people write about Abdul as being quiet, that it is perpetuating that and that is something we won’t necessarily spot unless we do an experiment like that.
And that’s more worrying to me because we should, we’re in an era now where we should be trying to tell, we should be trying to empower people to tell their own stories, people who don’t normally have the opportunity to. And even if we, as the kind of majority are telling stories, we should be trying to tell the stories and share perspectives with other people.
And I feel that AI is going backwards in that sense.
Alison Jones: Yes, it does, it feels so retrograde and I hadn’t really thought about it, hadn’t articulated that to myself until I read your book, but you know, we’re spending so much time and energy dismantling old preconceptions and assumptions and power structures and then to allow ourselves to just be completely trammeled by them through AI without even realizing it.
Yes. It feels really, really kind of wrong. So I could talk with you all day on that.
There’s so many other questions I want to ask, but I’m conscious of the time. So I’m going to ask you I’m going to cut to the chase and say I know that actually your book is about online writing, but actually there’s a huge amount of crossover with business books, where you’re writing for readers who are short of time and just want to get to the point of it, but also we need to stay engaged and entertained and all the rest of it.
So, what’s your best tip for somebody listening who’s maybe about to start on writing their business book.
Anna Faherty: Good luck. Carve out some time which is what I did. I turned down freelance work in order to do it because otherwise you won’t get it done. But actually, I think my biggest tip, which is for any type of writing to be fair, but is just you define and get to know your audience. And obviously you and I would probably both agree on that, Alison, but you know, it’ll help with marketing further down the line.
It’ll help the publisher understand who you’re targeting, but it will also guide all your decisions that you will need to make about the tone of writing style, the structure of the book, the case studies you’ll choose to use whether you have tips and summaries, and it’ll help you to decide what to leave in and what to take out when we’re talking about those Post Its.
Because, I suppose for me, I think one thing when I’ve taught writing that I think students don’t realize, and I think probably the general public don’t realize, is that writing is all about making choices. You know, you referred earlier to can you have a non fiction story? And you can because the facts are the same. Well, they might be disputable. Let’s say the facts are the same for a story, but you can tell any number of versions of that story in terms of how you tell it, you know, the style and your tone of voice and stuff, but also which kind of episodes you decide to focus on or which kind of end point you want to stop at, even where you want to start.
So there’s all these choices. And unless you want to write some kind of self indulgent art piece in your prison garret, you can’t ignore your audience. And, and actually it’ll make your life easier because it will help you, presumably you’re writing a business book because you want to help people’s working lives be better or that will allow them to change something in their professional life.
As well as wanting to sell copies and both of those things, the knowledge of your audience will help or guide you to make the right decisions. And it will mean you write the best book for those people.
Alison Jones: Yes, I mean, you couldn’t put it, you know, amen to all of that. It’s brilliantly put. And I like the way you bring out the pragmatism of that. You know, we don’t just say this because it’s good for the reader. We say this because it’s good for you as the writer as well.
Anna Faherty: Yes, it narrows it down your choices and your options, you kind of like want to put this chapter in oh, but if we’ve imagined our audience is Alison and this is Alison’s job, and this is what Alison’s facing every day, she doesn’t need to know about that. That can go in another book. I think also if you’ve never written a book before, there’s always a temptation to put everything you know in it because you’re trying to say, look at me, I’m this fantastic professional. And you know, I’ll admit that I wrote my book as a reputational thing. I want to say I’ve written it I ,want people to kind of give me freelance work because you know they found it useful, as well as helping people but you know you need to step back and go what does Alison, or whoever the imagined reader is, what do they need and then we can take out the stuff and maybe write another book on it or maybe write it as a blog post or whatever.
Alison Jones: It’s just your first. Well, not for you. It’s not your first, but yes, exactly, brilliant. And I always ask my guests, Anna, for a recommendation as well.
So recommend us a book, will you? I’m really looking forward to this.
Anna Faherty: I think it’s quite difficult because it changes all the time. But I think I’m going to choose an oldie. Well, it’s not that old. It feels old, but it’s not as old as, say, choosing, I saw you had Henry Mintzberg on the other day. It’s not as old as choosing one of Henry’s old books. But I would choose the,
Alison Jones: I don’t know if he’d care for that myself.
Anna Faherty: I would choose the Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I don’t know how you say it.
Alison Jones: Yes, I don’t know.
Anna Faherty: Which is probably over 10 years, 10 years old now. But I still feel people could learn a lot from it because it talks about the reality of starting a business or even, and I think you could apply this to writing a book as well.
And the sort of lack of knowledge and certainty that you’re faced as an entrepreneur or in fact, he even talks about anyone who’s doing a new project in a kind of time of uncertainty. So you could be working in a business, but starting a project where you don’t have all the data. So he says, instead of trying to get sort of all the information, and I see students trying to do this, they have a business idea and they want to have all the information to tell them what the right answers are and you’re never going to have all the right information.
Some of it just won’t be available or some of it you just won’t have the resources to get at that stage. So he says rather than doing that you start small, you do something, you collect data and you learn and if necessary and after you’ve learned something, you then pivot so you adapt in light of what you’ve learned and that might be something you’ve learned about the market or it might be something you’ve learned about the business idea and I do think it mimics the writing process a bit because we send to a publisher our outline of what we intend the book to cover before we’ve written it. We say the goals and aims, we put the, you know, contents list out there.
But of course, once we start writing, we realize that that whole chapter that we thought was going to cover whatever actually is not really enough to put in that chapter. And maybe it’s a theme that goes throughout the book or something, but we pivot as we write and learn, and also as the publisher or other people might give us feedback.
So I think it’s a great book for anyone in business, but I also think it’s a kind of good attitude to have as a writer as well.
Alison Jones: Yes, I love that. And I think, you know, we think about lean so often, but to actually go back to the original text because it’s so well written and he really does go into the rationale behind it, how you do it in practice. Yes, if you haven’t read it before, if you haven’t read it for a while, great recommendation.
Thanks, Anna. And if people want to find out, Oh, sorry, go on.
Anna Faherty: I was just going to say, I love his examples as well, where he shows real life companies that did this, they said we’re going to do this, but then we did this, found out no one wanted that product, but what they did want was this, because we often look at the end product of a business. Like you look at Amazon today.
Alison Jones: From idea to product.
Anna Faherty: Yes and actually it’s really interesting to go back and see what some of these companies wanted to do in the first place. So I think that’s the kind of perspective that you don’t often get in business books. Because they’re telling a story normally, other business books about how this great thing happened and not sort of saying that all these pivots along the way, anyway.
Alison Jones: It looked very different on the ground and actually just to bring it all together, I love the idea that when you are writing online, which I really feel you should be doing, if you’re writing a book, you should be socializing or you should be putting those short form articles out as well, that’s lean, isn’t it? You create, construct your hypothesis, you put it out an article. You see what the response is. You iterate, you improve. By the time you’ve written the final book, it’s vastly better than it would’ve been had you locked yourself away in a room and written the damn thing in sort of, you know, a weekend.
Anna Faherty: Definitely. And it also gives you a structure to make you get stuff out there rather than have lots of half finished things. I used Substack a bit during my writing process to test out some case studies, but I wasn’t diligent enough, but I know lots of writers will use something like Substack to just almost put out the writing in order as it happens and get feedback, and that’s a really useful way.
And people are often scared that somebody’s going to then steal their content, but the reality is it doesn’t happen.
Alison Jones: It doesn’t happen like that. And if somebody likes an idea that you’ve got, they’ll take it and run with it in their own direction, then they’re not going to do it your direction, because you are you and they are they, and yes, brilliant, wonderful.
So Anna, if people want to find out more about you, more about the book, more about the work you do, where should they go?
Anna Faherty: Easy to connect with me on LinkedIn. I have quite a distinctive name,
Alison Jones: Yes, you do.
Anna Faherty: Be easy to find me. Or visit my website, which is strategiccontent.co.uk.
And the book is published by Routledge, so you can also find it there, but it’s on Amazon and everywhere, everywhere. All good bookshops.
Alison Jones: All good bookshops, as they say. Marvellous.
Such a pleasure to talk to you and honestly, thank you again for writing the book. I got so much out of it and I have to say on, if you’re tired of kind of hearing about the hero’s journey every five minutes, Anna’s story recipe I think is a much more helpful, not more helpful, you know, it’s a very useful complement to, yes, really, really practical.
That’s the word I’m groping for. Thank you. So thanks for your time today.
Anna Faherty: Thank you. It’s been great. Thanks, Alison.
