3 Key Takeaways: Atomic Habits by James Clear

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7342532038248910112

I‘m a professional ghostwriter and these are my key takeaways from Atomic Habits by James Clear. We love a book where I end up making lots and lots of bookmarks.

My first key takeaway is this, use one absolutely stunning example or case study right out of the gate to grab attention.

So in Atomic Habits, right in the first chapter, he tells a story about the British cycling team and this is an incredible example of how this team went from being pretty terrible to being the best in the world by changing a habit, which is exactly what he’s talking about in this book – the power of habits. So it ties in directly to what he’s going to be talking about in this book and that means you get to understand immediately why this book is so important, you’re so impressed, you’re going to want to read on. If you can use something really striking that shows how powerful what you’re talking about is or how interesting the stories in this book are going to be, whatever it is, really grab the reader’s attention right there in that first chapter before they even have a chance to look at anything else.

You are going to keep their attention for a lot longer even if they find that the content doesn’t match up. They are going to keep wanting to find out what it was that turned that cycling team into winners because they want to be winners. 

My second key takeaway is this. If you are doing a paperback or a hardback, check your print colour. This looks terrible in print. This particular edition, I don’t know if it’s the same in all editions, this is the edition that I own, it has been printed in black and white.

Clearly, the original example was created in colour, so we have a black font on top of a dark grey graphic box. This just hasn’t been tested enough to make sure that it looked good in all print types. It could have been avoided very easily.

This is one of those little tiny things that can really make a book look much more professional. It only happens once in this book but once is enough for me to have noticed that, written it down, called it out, and I’ve actually used it as the basis for other tips videos that I’ve done because it’s such a striking example of something that was just a monumental mistake that shouldn’t have happened. You as the author are probably not going to be responsible for the printing process if you’re doing traditional publishing.

If you are self-publishing you absolutely are responsible for checking that it all works correctly and if you’re in traditional publishing you should want to see galleys or you know their proof print so that you can make sure that everything is okay. And if something isn’t okay, do not feel afraid to bring that up with your agent or directly with your contact at the publisher, however you happen to be working, to make sure that it gets fixed before it goes into production. This is something that could also be missed in further publication runs so if there was a print version of this book that was originally full colour and now it’s been produced in a black and white book that is exactly when this kind of mistake can happen – or if it was produced in the hardback and it was a different colour paper and it looked great and now we’re using a different type of paper for the paperback again that is how these mistakes can happen.

This is my third key takeaway. If you are doing a non-fiction book make sure that you add calls to your website everywhere. There are a number of ways you can do this. James Clear has done it by creating extra resources and workbooks and then linking to them from the book so that anyone who’s interested in learning more can go to that exact page on his website and find out more about the chapter they’re reading.

You can do a downloadable workbook that your reader can fill out after they’ve gone through the book and learned all the lessons. You can have supplemental materials. You can have just a pdf version of the book so that they can enjoy it when they’re on the move as well as when they’re reading it in the actual physical format.

Whatever it is you can constantly constantly constantly at least once in each chapter find an opportunity to link to your website. Even if you only do this once or twice throughout the book it’s still going to be so much more effective than just expecting the reader to come and find you later on their own. If you want to make a lot of money from a book the way to do that is to bring them to your website and to sell them something else.

Your services, whether it’s as a speaker, whether you actually do something within someone’s business and provide that service, or whether you’re just selling tools that they can use within their business. What’s really important is that you make sure you use those calls to action to keep them coming back to you so that they sign up to your mailing list, they give you their contact details so that you can remarket to them, and you make sure that you are giving them a lot of value because that value is going to build loyalty which is what we need. Those are my three key takeaways from Atomic Habits.

If you have read the book and you spotted anything else that really caught your eye let us know in the comments and you can also let us know in the comments if there are any books that you think I should review next to find out the key takeaways as to what made them so successful or how they could have been done better.