Do you have any books you'd recommend to get better at messaging?

The books that have had the biggest impact on me aren't always specific to messaging but provide greater clarity into the importance of storytelling and psychology. One of my favorites is Michael Lewis' "The Undoing Project". It really helped me understand the psychology that drives people to make the decisions they do and that while we'd like to think humans are rational and logical people, we actually make decisions primarily driven by emotion. That's why it's so important to frame messaging through the lens of a story and incorporate emotion into your messaging. 

Getting better at messaging can entail a few things and can depend on what exactly you want to improve (ie. having strong frameworks/structure, consistency in writing styles and tone, persuasion, etc.). However, what I always strive to get better at is storytelling. A few books that either directly or indirectly offer what I've found to be great gudience for how to tell engaging and meaningful stories include:

Blink, Made to Stick, Start with Why (I'd suggest watch the TED Talk), Obviously Awesome (disclaimer: I haven't read this book yet, but have heard great things about it). I'd suggest exploring behaviral or social psychology books as well. 

To get better at messaging, there are a few books that I’d highly recommend. However, I’ll say that a lot of it comes down to trial and error.

The books that have helped me with messaging include:

• The Copywriter’s Handbook - Robert Bly

• Make It Punchy - Emma Stratton

• Obviously Awesome - April Dunford

There are also a bunch of blogs that will help, but putting the message out there, running tests, and collecting data and insights is an important next step.

Launching to Leading by Ken Rutsky (#shameless self promo, but it is good...) It provides a gameplan on how to build B2B messaging that is breakthrough, narrative driven and impactful. It leverages a proven storytelling framework, the Hero's Journey, but simplifies it and scales it to be relevant for this application.