Writing a Non-Fiction Book

1. Introduction to Writing a non fiction book: Hey everybody, welcome to this course on writing non-fiction books. My name is Sam Maguire, and I am very excited about this. I've been thinking about this course for a long time and wanting to write to share my experience over the path. 16 years of writing. I wrote my first book in 2007, mostly because I became a professor and it was something that I was expected to do. But I discovered that I really enjoy this process. I'm currently in the process of writing my sixth book for Routledge press. And I want to share everything that I've learned in terms of the idea creation, all the way through the proposal, all the way through the writing editing process, and then even onto the part where you get to see the book in your hands and begin to promote it. All of these different phases are things that are really important to the process. And even though it may seem a little scary at first, they're very easy to navigate. If you have an experienced guide and that's where I come in. So I want to actually share the things I've learned to make your process easier. We're gonna be looking primarily at non-fiction books, and primarily books that have perhaps a technical slant to them. In my case, I write for audio production, audio recording how to work in recording studios. So there's always a portion which is perhaps more methodological and nature, more technical in nature, but also includes some research and some really important storytelling. So that's the goal. There's also going to be a project which you can do. So follow along. It's going to be to create the table of contents for your book, something that would be used in the proposal process, the writing process. Every phase of this really revolves around that outline as a really important starting place. So that's where we're going to start and that's where you're going to have the opportunity to be engaged in this course. If you ever wanted to write a nonfiction book, then this is the place to be. We're going to share the information, inspiration. And we're going to encourage you to take those first steps to become an author. Okay, let's get started. 2. Choosing a Topic: Okay, in this first section, we're going to talk about choosing a topic. There's definitely some important parts of this. Probably the most important part of writing a book at all is getting the topic right. So you wanna make sure that during this phase, you're spending the right amount of time figuring out exactly which topic to make. And that will really carry you through all of the rest of the phases. So first and foremost, what are your areas of expertise? This is something that may seem obvious, but certainly it can make a huge difference. I've seen more than one proposal from other authors where it's clear that they're super passionate and knowledgeable about a topic. And I've seen others where it's clear, where there's maybe some weaknesses in this area and maybe they're overextending with what their knowledge really is. And so that becomes one of the most important things is really figuring out what your current strengths are. If you think I really wanna do this, but I'm not as strong in this area. Then maybe develop some of those skills along the way. The next thing would be, are you passionate about the topic? Maybe you know a lot about something. You don't have any passion about it. This isn't a deal breaker, but the passion is going to come through all of your writing, is going to certainly aid in the process that's going to make a product that's even better because it's clear how much you care about it. And so I think that that really does make a difference. If you're debating between several different topics, then find the one that you're most passionate about. Not only will it make every part of this easier because you're excited, but it will actually go through all of your writing. Next. One other books have been written on this topic. If you have the best idea. And it's the exact same as some other book that has sold really well and is like the standard book in your area. Then perhaps writing another one that's exactly the same doesn't make sense. Not only from a copyright standpoint, I'm assuming it would be different still. But what are you bringing to the table that is different than anything else that's out there. Not only is this going to make sense for your audience to offer them something new. But the publisher is gonna be wary if you're trying to do something that's exactly been done before. The one exception to that is There's a trendy way of doing something. And they don't have an offering in this particular style, then perhaps they'll consider putting a competitor to the other books that are out there. But you're always going to have to explain what is different, what is new. So as you're doing this, as you're trying to figure out the topic, make lots of notes. Really brainstorm this from every angle. Think as clearly and objectively as you can about your own skills and what you're bringing to the table so that you can have a real honest conversation as you're picking this topic. 3. Researching: In this section we're going to talk about the research process after you've picked your topic. This is where the project for this course really begins the outline. Because as you're doing research, think about all of the chapter headings that would fit inside that topic. So you're going to start perhaps with this outline with a title at the very top. And then you can think along the lines of like introduction as one of the next ones. But then we want to start figuring out the order of all of the things that belong inside this topic. But let's talk about this, the research. Because even if you're an expert, you still need to go through and figure out exactly what this involves. You want to make sure that you understand the topic as good or better than anybody else. You want to make sure that even if you've done something for decades, there could be either new things that are out there or things that maybe just have never been a part of the way that you've done them. You want to start creating this 360 immersive view of the information so that you're not leaving anything out. So you want to do very thorough research on the topic. You can use things like the Internet, existing books, but you want to write down the places where you're getting the information, especially information that's new to you. Things that are common in whatever field you're writing about, things that are taken for granted that everybody knows you don't need to cite. But things that perhaps are pushing your own knowledge and expanding the way that you're thinking. I think it's fairly common to cite those particular things. We'll talk more about that later on. But right now, you're just gathering information and then notating where you're getting all the information. Because that part, that tying things together becomes so important. As a part of this, reading, the relevant literature becomes really important. Not only because it'll help make sure you're seeing all the different angles, different perspectives on things. But this can be really useful in the proposal process later. So anytime you're finding a book or an article in a journal or anything related to this. Put that into a bibliography so that you can always get back to that information. And then perhaps also store some of the things about the individual pieces of information you're getting. Page numbers. Keep track of everything so you can get back to it. But in this process, you're creating a list of all the books that contain information. Because often publishers are going to say, what are the competitive titles for this? And all of a sudden you'll have a really comprehensive list of the whole thing. Another thing that's not going to be written down, or maybe harder to find in written format would be information that experts have. So this is the time when you can conduct interviews, reach out to people who are doing whatever you're writing about in an active way or maybe they've done it. And I mean, you can talk to people who've retired, people who are in the middle of it, people who are at the beginning of this career doing whatever this topic is. But record those interviews, make notes from those interviews, figure out if there's things that you're missing that are really relevant to the topic. A great way to find interviewee's is to look online. If you're doing some sort of tech book, then there's a chance that those are gonna be found and online place Facebook or someone who may have an active Twitter account or even look in places like LinkedIn, but also look for other interviews of people in the field. So maybe someone else has interviewed them about this topic. You can cite some of those things or use that as part of your research. But perhaps there's room for you to actually reach out to them and do an additional interview and ask even deeper questions. And the niche area that your topic is. So definitely include talking to people as a part of your research. Once you have done all of this stuff, once you have all of the research collected, you've read as much as you can, you've conducted interviews. Then comes this data analyst station where you're going to take all of that and figure out what it means. You're going to see if there's trends that maybe you didn't know about or maybe there's techniques which are new to you. And so you need to actually figure out how they're done or what the implementation looks like. So as you go through and you figure all that out, this part can be so important because it's going to expand your own knowledge in this area. It's going to make you even bigger expert. Maybe you thought you knew everything about this, but you're finding that there's a few different pieces to the puzzle which you weren't aware of. And this then can make it. So when you're doing the book that, you have, that extra piece, one of my books, which was about musical synthesisers, I co-wrote with a former graduate student in our program, amazing project. But one of the things we did with that book was go through every single musical synthesized or that we could find in existence and collected all of the data about that. And then in the book we were able to actually take the analysis of that data when we were talking about a specific function of one of these musical instruments, we can say this particular function exists on 65% of all synthesisers. It's like, why does that matter? It, we didn't need to include it, but it gave a different perspective and widen the perspective on some other things that we were talking about. We could say, You know what, maybe we don't need to spend 20 pages on a feature of these instruments which only exists in like 2% of instruments. Maybe that should be more like a page or two, and then we should spend 20 pages on the feature that exists in 99% of all instruments. And so the research which we documented led to this analysis, which then guided the actual book process. And so that became an important feature of that particular publication. I became an integral part of the understanding of how we were going to make this and what we're going to do with it. So that's part of it. Once you're done with this research phase, then we're going to move on to the actual outline. Keep in mind that through all of this, if you're doing data and figuring things out and you think, okay, I've seen this pop-up in almost every place I'm looking. Make that one of your header points and your outline. Which means it'll be like a chapter. If you find something that pops up every once in awhile, then it could be like one of the subheadings. If it pops up just once or twice, I know that you probably still want to put that into a chapter someplace, but you're gonna have to figure out which chapter in which sub portion of that which section and subsection. We're going to formalize that language a little bit more in the next one, which is all about creating an outline. 4. Developing an Outline: In this section we're going to develop the outline. This becomes the backbone of the entire project. And this is the thing that we're asking if you're interested in doing a project associated with this course, that this is what you do. Because if you can get to the point where you create an outline and you've finished the outline, the chance of actually moving into the next phases of this project increase. It is such an important part. Without an outline, It's going to be an aimless book, uh, texts where it doesn't have any sort of organization. It could be something that has a lot of great information, but it doesn't flow from beginning to end. Even with technical, methodological type books, non-fiction books of any sort, there still has to be a story. It may not be a traditional story with characters, but you still want to make sure that as people read it, that they go from beginning to end and feel like they've gone on a progression of knowledge acquisition. That's the weirdest way to say that. But you want them to move from beginning, the middle to the end and feel like they're going on a journey. So that's what one of the main goals for this. For this specific outline, the components are going to be the chapter titles as the main parts of your outline. It could be you have one more above this, if you wanna do like three sections or four sections, and each of those sections have chapters inside them. But for the most part, you don't need to have overarching sectional divisions. We just need chapter titles. And so we start with those. What would each chapter B? Which one makes sense to be at the beginning, middle, and end. I can't tell you that for your specific topic. But I do know that in my own outlines. There's a few principles with this that seemed to make sense. One of them being that I do my best at the beginning, it's like I put down an idea for organization. It may be that whatever chapter one is at the beginning of chapter two and chapter three, each of these chapters may start here. Because that's the way that I'm thinking of it initially. But as I start to develop the outline, oftentimes, chapter two ends up where Chapter One is in. Chapter one ends up down here. And so it's like you got to have some flexibility, but start with something. That's the real key here. Put something down on paper and own it for a little while, let it settle and see if it makes sense. One thing that's always driven me crazy about certain styles of books in my field are that they'll have like this history section at the beginning. And they think, you know what, you need this history to be able to understand the rest. So often I've actually switched. I started that way because it was seemed like what everybody was doing. Then I move that later in the book because what I wanted to do was get to the information sooner and then get to the history with people who are super into the topic, give it to them, maybe just not at the beginning. And so that became an important part for me. The next sections and subsections, I always do a three-level outline for this. Because I think it's really important to be able to see with a lot of detail what is going to be if you just do chapter titles and then sections, then you may run a thing where you haven't really thought out which thing is going to go where you don't really know what's going to be in there. Maybe you're thinking, Okay, I'm gonna get to this a little later. And, um, I think I'll figure it out at that time. Don't leave that kind of thing up to chance. Don't assume you're going to know. Do an in-depth outline with at least three levels, even more. So you'll know exactly where all the information is. With the next one. You want to summarize each part with a detailed description. Publishers will in fact often asked for this. They don't just want to have an outline. There gonna be sending this out for review to people who are experts. And you wanna give enough information so the experts can look at it and see exactly what you're going to be doing. So not only put the names of these sections and like a brief sentence, but then do like a paragraph for each one of these so that you know exactly what's going to go. Where does it take a long time to do this? It can. This isn't as easy as just doing a simple outline or table of contents. This really is going to show where you know the information and where you don't. Because the places where you go and say, oh, this is easy. I'm going to summarize all of this. I'm just gonna write down 15 different things. Okay, This is perfect. Blah, blah, blah. You get to the next one. You're like, ooh, I know this is important to include, but I don't know exactly what it involves. That's where you may have to go back to the previous section of researching, figuring out what's important. Making more notes. Then adding this section and subsection is inside the chapter without accompanying paragraph description. That becomes a way to gauge where you're knowledgeable enough to write and where you may need to do some additional work for your own project. This is the thing you're doing. You know, after you have the topic, the title, you've done some research. Start this outline and this is what you can share. And also what will be a deliverable outcome of this course is this outline. From here on out, we're going to talk about more parts, but they're not the parts that we're going to expect you to have done, but will, when appropriate, reference this outline for you. 5. Writing the Book: In this section, we talk about writing the book. This is what comes next after finishing your outline. In fact, this is why you need the outline first. In many ways, there's always this caveat with everything. Which is that if you don't have that focus point to write, say that you're having a struggle writing and you're finding that there's this block, writer's block. Sometimes it makes sense just to start writing. That's okay. That's not exactly what I'm suggesting with all of this. What I'm saying is is that you should have your outline finished and then write according to the outline. If for some reason that exact process doesn't fit your situation in the moment, then still right? Don't let that block you from writing. But sometimes I've had the situation where maybe the outline isn't 100% done and I'm struggling with it. But I think you know what, let me just get this one section started. And then I write, and then I write, and then I write, and all of a sudden the rest of the outline falls into place. So there is room for doing this and non-traditional orders. And this is more of a guide if you're looking for a step-by-step, if you're one of those people who's like, I really want to write this book, but I don't know how to do it in you really like having steps. Then this is the step. And then anything outside of this is reality and human nature. But having that outline is so useful, It's one of the most important steps for myself because then I can write on a section and then I can go to another section and right, you don't have to write it in order. But having this framework, so you're always working towards the end goal becomes really, really important. Another thing to think about is your audience, right? Hopefully by now you've figured out who the audience is and what the audience is all about. Partially by picking your topic and the research phase and finding out which other books are out there. But you want to think about who's going to read this? And anytime you're including something, just ask yourself That's simple question. Will the people reading this find this information useful? If you're writing just what you're interested in. I mean, that's one way of doing it. But you can't always assume that everyone is exactly like you. Now, you can't figure out who everybody is either. So there's always this compromise of writing, what you're interested in writing, aiming this towards an audience that's a specific audience. However, the audience, they're the one's going to buy the book and they're the ones that publisher are going to see and think, these are the people that want this book. So let's aiming at them. Now. There's a few different things about this. One of them, you can think about in levels. I think of this in three kind of levels here with the beginners. Alright? My handwriting, and then intermediate. Well, we'll just do that. Intermediate, INT and advanced. Alright. So are you writing this for people who are brand new to this whole thing? Are they touching this information for the very first time? Are they somebody who has some of this but may not have gone to the advanced levels? Or is this the group that is just the most advanced? Now in my field? I would love to just write for the advanced author, but it's gonna be a shorter book. And it's going to have very focused material. And it's going to alienate some of the audiences that I might write for. For instance, if I did a beginner book, then maybe universities might encourage students to use this book in their coursework. And so there's a lot of that stuff happening that you have to think about in terms of that, if you want to have this book sold as a textbook, not all non-fiction books or textbooks, and not all textbooks have to be in a certain format. But if you really want universities to use it, then you might want to think about making it more beginner or intermediate. Mine. I like to do the beginner information with some intermediate stuff written into each section and then some advanced nuggets in every section. That way I can tell people that it's really aimed at beginners and maybe a classroom experience. But that it has an intermediate. Advanced information, including some original research. I tried to do original research in every one of my books. So it's not just our regurgitation. Okay, Let's do the next thing here. Make the writing style clear and concise. Of course, that may seem obvious. However, you want to really focus on this to make sure that people can understand the information. Unless you're writing something that is very specific in its style, expectations, a historical perspective on some event. And there's reasons to go off into really flowery language, even though it's still nonfiction. If you're doing a mythological book, than making this very clear and concise would be very important. So you have to figure out which things you're aiming at, which audience you're looking for. In my case, most of my newest endeavors are visual, almost as much as they are in written format. So lot of illustrations, lot of organizational strategies which show instead of just tau. And so for me, the clearness and the conciseness are coming with illustrations. And that becomes a critical part of this. It's no longer just about saying the right word. It's about putting it in a format that's going to reach the most number of people. Cite sources, and create a bibliography. We talked about this previously a little bit, but this is the point where you're actually doing it. You want to give credit where credit is due. You want to avoid plagiarism. You want to avoid things like using chatbots without getting the right citations. I mean, we don't even have a way to fully site chatbots right now anyway, but you want to make this your work and not the work of somebody else that you're pretending is yours. And citing and using a bibliography correctly, our key points. Find out if your publisher has a preferred citation format. In my case, well, you might not have a publisher at this point, but you may have a desired publisher. And so you can look up on their website and see what they prefer. Or you can just get a book from them and see which one's the authors are using. And then just mirror that you're ready to go. It may be that you'll have to change this later if you end up with a different publisher and they have requirements, but at least you'll have a start with it. The last thing I'll say is that sometimes, especially for new authors, writing is difficult. And I'm mean that not necessarily so wide in scope, but it's like writing can be really tricky when you're typing and doing this in that format and sometimes saying it is the key. So use a transcription. Or your computers often, I know Mac computers have transcription services built into them. And so you can just talk the text and then edit it as needed. So if you're finding yourself, think, thinking, I can't do this that well, but I can say it. Then use transcription and just say it and then edit it to be a little bit more formal. There are some other style things, and this depends on your publisher. Some of them really don't want you to use first-person. Some are okay with first-person. It's the voice of the book. Do some research into the voice of the books that you're in the same genre with. Then you can incorporate that voice into what you're doing. Mimicry at the beginning, then once you're more comfortable with your own voice. And by voice, I mean, the type of words you use, the sentence structure, whether it's more formal or less formal, whether it's talking to your readers or just talking. Without talking to anybody, all of those things will come and you'll be able to be more established with that in your own way. Okay, Let's move on to the next phase. 6. Editing and Revising: In this section, we're going to talk about what happens as you're writing. And often, more specifically when you're finished writing. Although I tend to do this as I'm going just as often as I do it afterwards. And that's the edit and revision period. So let's talk about what this means. Writing is not done after the first draft, which seems obvious, but it's very true. In fact, you're very far from being finished. In some cases, you need to always figure out what that looks like for you specifically. Are you going to do a path of editing immediately after finishing sections? Are you going to just do an entire draft and then go back and finish the rest by editing and revising. What does that look like for you often is gonna be a combination of those things. But that's a really important part. Let's see. The editing process involves restructuring sentences and paragraphs. So you may just go through and realize, oh, you know what, there's probably a better way to say that. That doesn't make sense to me or it made sense to me when I say that, but is that going to make sense to anybody else? And then you can also go through and say, this paragraph is far better in this place and in that chapter. An example, if you're writing and you start by saying this, this topic can be blah, blah, blah. This is how we do this. Then later on you're like, let me define some terms here. And this term means this, and this term means that it may be that, that makes sense earlier to define the terms that you're using at the beginning and then talk about them. But in your head, you already knew what the terms mean. You are right about any of them, writing about them. And then you came later on and decided that you needed to define them. Well, in the moment of writing, you got all the information down on the page. Now, you just needed to make sure that it's in the right order. So put yourself into the shoes of a reader and try to see what makes sense as you're going through them, you figure out where you need more detail. Where do I need more information? And it may be that you need more length when you eventually have the idea of which book you're working on and which publisher you're going to be going towards. You'll know what they've printed before and you can kind of get an idea of what the expectation is for length. And you can work on that when you actually have a book contract that might, would say, in my experience, all of them have had a page expectation. Some of them we've gone a little under and some a little bit over. But generally speaking, we know what that length is. And so you may be adding more detail to expand the scope of your book and cover more things. Or it may be that you actually just went light in some areas and you actually need to include the detailed to have it makes sense. The next thing is one of the hardest things. Removing unnecessary content. This is so critical because often we write so much and we do this and then we're like, Well, I wrote this, I can just delete it. But sometimes you're writing things that may be outside of the scope of a section or outside of the scope of a chapter or outside the scope of the book. And you need to have that self-awareness to know when to cut things off in a little bit of time will help with this. So say you wrote a chapter, you've done like a pass editing immediately. So it's really fresh and so the idea is still makes sense to you as you wrote it down. Let it sit for a couple of days and go back and read it and then see which things you should add. And also ask yourself which things you should remove. Also work on grammar. Make sure your grammar is the right amount of simple. Makes sure your language isn't full of extra words that you don't need. Sometimes it's not the content part of the chapter you need to edit, but it's the language and the way you said it. Ask yourself for any of the sentences which may not be 100% clear. Is there a way to remove some stuff to make this simpler? That's the type of question you would ask in this u at this point, you can also get other people to read this and give you feedback. You can let it sit for a period of time. You can go read some other stuff to reset your mind and then go back and read yours and see if the flow is just as good in both cases. Are you telling the story you intended to tell? Even if this is a technical book or a methyl methodological book. Or maybe it's a manual for using software or teaching somebody how to use an electronic instrument. Any of those things you should still ask, is this taking the people on the right journey? Is that the journey I intended? Is that the journey that makes sense? Is it giving them what they need? If not, make some changes. 7. Finding a Publisher: In this section, let's talk about finding a publisher. That that's the trick, right? That's the key to all of this. No one wants to publish your book. Are you going to self-publish it? That's okay too. I mean, Amazon definitely has the option for you to self-publish and there are other services that do it as well. Ideally, it would be nice to have a publisher for a few reasons. One of them is because it adds to the weight of what you're saying to have somebody else put that stamp of approval on it and say that this is worth the investment. It also typically comes with an audience. A publisher will often have the ability to reach an audience, not just with their normal publishing outlets, but also because they have overtime built up connections. And so I think that there's a lot of this which comes with that audience built-in. Not always, but it certainly helps. So the first place to start then would be to look at which publishers have published books that are similar to yours. Maybe not similar in the exact topic, but similar in the field. For me, when I was first looking at publishing, I had a book idea and there's a publisher called Focal Press. Photo press is an imprint that has been owned by various publishers over time. At that time was owned by Elsevier, which is a really big publisher. And I just went to their website because I had owned a number of books of theirs on different topics and they had a place where you could enter ideas and say, hey, I'm interested in writing a book. Here's my idea. I've put up my table of contents. They didn't ask for a writing sample that moment, but I had already started working on that. They wrote back within 6 h. They wrote back and said We want to talk. And so that turned out to be a really simple publishing process. The actual proposal process took months and months and months, but is simple because they wrote back nearly instantly from when I wrote them. That's not going to be the case in every situation. But I do find that non-fiction books tend to have this advantage because they're looking for content experts and certain topics. And if you fill those requirements, then you're going to have a better chance at being talked to as opposed to doing something that's a fiction based fantasy novel. So there's advantages to this, this area. Another thing you can do is ask for advice from experienced authors. People who are well-established and have nothing to lose by telling you some of their tips and tricks, right? Someone who's gonna be able to publish whenever they want. I say it like that because if you're talking to someone who's your competitor to get their first book published. Sure. You can talk to them and brainstorm. But they're in the same boat as you and have the same issues as you try to get this published. And so you're not necessarily going to be able to get really objective advice. So find somebody who's, who's able to give you really good advice in your field. You can search online for target publishers like I did when I first started and look and see if they have a submission mechanism or a way to do this. At this point in the process, There's a few different ways to look at this. One of them is perhaps the publisher wants more of the book done before they're willing to do anything. There are some publishers that really prefer a full manuscript. Mine, at least at the very beginning, just wanted a sample chapter. And then I had a period of time to finish the book after that. And so there's that range, a sample or a completely finished book. The minute you have a chapter of your book finished, you already have the outline, right? And you've done a lot of the research. Once you have that chapter, you can start looking for publishers at that point. And if they say that you don't have to have the full manuscript done, then submit a proposal. If, and we'll talk more about proposals and one of the upcoming sections. But if they want the full manuscript and just keep on chugging along, have faith that it's going to to be accepted. Which brings me to the last thing here. Don't give up. I can't tell you exactly which publishers to look at because I don t know what you're writing about. That's on you to do that research. That's on you to figure out which ones make the most sense, which ones are going to really take a look at your information, but don't give up. Keep working on this. Keep working as hard as you can. Be relentless in a really nice way. Don't be one of those annoyingly relentless people. And the division between one and the other is something, again, I can't tell you, but you're going to know because if no one ever wants to reply to you or talk to you, then maybe change your approach and soften it up a little bit. If people are responding to you and you're getting good feedback, but it's just not quite the right fit. Also. Look and what you could change. Okay. That's it for this particular, I know that seems like such a small section for such a big topic. But it's going to be really important for you to be exploring all of the avenues. 8. The Proposal Process: In this section, we're going to talk about the proposal process and mostly about the one that I'm most familiar with. Knowing that some of the other publishers are going to have different ones. First and foremost, this is when if you haven't already, you need a title. You need a title, either a working title or a finished title. But I have found that I've made a title proposal on every single one of my books. And it's rarely ended up being the one that we use. Because the proposal process is a conversation. And the more you can approach it that way, the more flexibility you can exhibit in the proposal process, the more of the publisher and your potential editor are going to feel comfortable working with you. They have years and years and years of experience and they know things that have worked in that haven't worked. So if you come in saying this is what it means to be and they don't agree with it. And you're rigid or inflexible, then that's going to create some tension that doesn't need to be there. Remember, your publisher. The potential publisher is going to invest a lot of time and even money, even though it doesn't always feel that way into what you're doing. So you need to make sure that you come in with the appropriate amount of I don't know if humility is the right word, but certainly flexibility. You want to make sure that that starts at the very beginning. Say my idea for a title as this. I'd love to workshop it if you guys have some additional insight into it, choosing a writing sample. So this is where unless they ask for an entire manuscript, where you can actually come in and say, this is a writing sample. You want to pick a good writing sample. One that showcases, I'm often an external reviewer for author is trying to get books published. I do that specifically with Routledge press on a regular basis. And I can't tell you how many times a proposals come in. And I think this is the perfect sample. It showcases exactly what they're talking about. And then there's other times when I think What on earth is this person thinking this sample has nothing to do with the rest of the book. And so you want to make sure that you're doing a sample that is really representative of what you're trying to accomplish and that becomes important. Engage in market research. Almost every proposal I've ever had to do had some sort of comparative analysis with other books, finding ones that are similar, finding ones that do the same thing, but then explaining why yours will be different. Helping the team understand that your book has a high probability of success and that it could work. I mean, all of these things are gonna be partially on your shoulders and so be thorough. You already have an outline at this point. You already have the writing sample, either a chapter or more at this point. Hopefully you have some of the illustrations and things because visuals can be so important. And so we haven't talked much about the visuals. If you're not somebody who can do that, if you don't have the ability to create them, then find somebody who does. Or find a way to get, at least for the sample, some representative things for it. Most publishers aren't going to want to invest money in creating that. But in my experience with my publisher, there is a clause in my contract that says if the publishing editorial team have to recreate illustrations and there's a cost associated with it. It comes out of my royalties in the long run. So I'm paying for that. Either way. I've gotten really good at creating those myself, But it's certainly something to think about. You want to have an attractive sample. You want to have something that readers are going to read and see and understand exactly what the essence of what you're doing is. You also want to develop an effective summary. The pitch for your book. Oftentimes a proposal will have in one sentence, tell us what the book is about. You should be able to do that. You should be able to explain in one sentence, are exactly what the essence of your book is, then you'll have a longer section as well. This wouldn't hurt to do at the very beginning. When you do your original outline. When you do your topic and all your research. That part of the process at some point, write down what this is all about in a very concise, descriptive, clear way because you'll use that information over time for sure. Whatever else the proposal asked for, put it in there. Don't skimp, don't go way too much, but do a thorough job. Let the publisher know that you've done your homework because by this point, you will have done your homework. If you're skipping steps and all of this, I mean, you can do it in a different order. But if you're skipping like the research step and the looking at other books that are on this topic that you're writing about. If you skip those, it's going to show in the proposal gonna make everyone feel a little less comfortable actually giving you a contract, which is the final thing. The proposal process often can take months if the publisher is using external review process. Routledge uses a double-blind process, which means I don't know who's writing the review of this. I don't get their information. They're able to be totally anonymous to me. So they can say whatever they want. It's really important. And they're able to give feedback on the content and then they do a very in-depth review. And so once that's done, which can take months, they come back, the publisher will come back to me and say, here's what the feedback is. What do you think? And every single time I've said, you know what? Obviously this feedback came from people who care and we're invested in this and know a lot. I say, let's incorporate as much of it as we can. And the publisher is always said, awesome, That's exactly what we wanted to here. And then I incorporated because I think it's important, I think it's important not to waste this process and think somehow my way is the only way possible, then a contract comes. I'm not sharing any of my contracts on the specific course. If you're really interested in that, you can contact me through the Skillshare. And I'd set up a Zoom with you and show you my contracts. They're pretty typical. The money split is very skewed towards the publisher, but the publisher does a ton, but it's like a 2080 split. And if I do co-authorship, then I get like 10%. You know what I mean? The whole thing, It's insane, but it's also their audience. Their system is well established. And so I'm taking advantage of them and just as many ways as they're taking advantage of me. But I'm happy to go through that, but just not on a video like this. Okay. Let's go on to the next section. 9. Working with an Editor: In this section, we're going to talk about working with your editor. Once you have the contract in place, you're gonna be working with them. And there's a few guiding principles. One, when we talked about this a little bit previously, be ready to refine and make changes, whatever they say should be taken into account. You don't want to burn a bridge with somebody who has the decision-making ability for any future projects. And so you wanna make sure you're keeping that healthy relationship. You want to remain open to feedback and suggestions. Anything that they say, if they're saying it, it means their years of experience have triggered a response and you want to make sure you're really careful with that. On this last one. Remember, the goal is to make a great, not necessarily always what you envisioned from the beginning, but you want to make a great, You want to keep that collaboration with your publisher healthy. In addition to that, you want to do a bunch of other things with your editor. You want to make sure you're meeting your deadlines, communicating often, asking questions when needed. With my team. There's a guide for authors. It's a long guide. It tells me exactly what format to put things in. They've changed it over the years and every time I do a new book, I make sure I pull the whatever they send me and I read through it from beginning to end because there was one book when I didn't do it, I had to make like five days worth of changes to fit it into the new format when I thought the old format was still good. Now, I always read exactly what they send me. The guide for authors is like the Bible. You have to make sure you're living in accordance with every preceptor because it can really burn you if you don't. As I said, things have changed over time. At the beginning, they made my index and now the new guide says I make my own index. So I bought a piece of software that analyzes everything in the book and recommends an index. It cost me 20 bucks instead of paying because you can still say it's publisher, please do this, but it was like $300. And so it's like read through all of that. Ask questions to your editor. They know what's happening and what's expected. If there's any clarification needed. Don't hesitate to just talk open that conversation. Most importantly, become friends with your editor and not like close, maybe your close friends with them, but be friendly with them. Send them emails at holidays. I don't do this enough personally, but I do know that over time with various editors I've had at the publisher, I've certainly talked to them and said, Happy holidays or whatever, just be friendly because that's so important in this business, is to be the kind of person people want to work with. More important in this business than almost any other one, because you rarely ever are in the same room as them unless you live in the same city for some reason, you're always having to just communicate via either video, chat or e-mails or whatever, but be as friendly as you possibly can. It will go a long way. 10. Promoting Your Book: Okay, This is the final part. Once you have that book in your hand, you're holding it. It's time to begin the next phase which is promoting. Hopefully along this way, you have some sort of outlets already being developed. In my case, I run a YouTube channel. I've got, I'm going to probably hit 20,000 subscribers this year. That's a very focused group, a very niche group, and a group that interacts a lot. And there'll be a place that I always push my books towards and say, Hey, if you like what you're getting here, then you should consider doing more like check out this book I did. It has a lot of value and here's why it's valuable. But there's a lot of different options for this. It could be that you're just part of a Facebook group that's on this topic. Or it could be that you have employment at a place that is in the field. Maybe you're a teacher or professor. And they could use this book to help them in their studies. You need to find some of these avenues, some of these outlets so that you can share how exciting this is. So social media, it's a slam dunk that this can be helpful. It's not easy to build a following. But if you can, if you can take advantage of that, then it's a great place to promote your book. Start there. When you're starting picking your topic. Don't wait and think my social media phase is coming later. If you really want to be successful as an author, start the social media thing now and build that as you're doing all the other stuff. So that way, by the time your social media presence is maturing, hopefully your book will be coming out and you'll have that thing. But if you think of this in phases, you're already behind the curve on this. Thinking about signings and speaking engagements. Even though you're writing a non-fiction book, certainly you'll be able to like go to the local bookstores, any of them that do signings and things. And you can set that up. It helps if you have an audience following you over social media. So you can say, Hey, everybody In Denver come check out this signing of doing it. The tattered cover bookstore, right? It's like you have some of that stuff happening. Bookstores love local authors coming in. And for lots of reasons. One, it's an event that they can host, which they're not paying for. P, Hopefully it brings in some people that maybe haven't been to the bookstore. I mean, it's like there's a lot of benefits to this, so don't take that for granted. Speaking engagements. If you're an academic and you have conferences that you go to, try to get some papers that you can present or workshops that you can run. All of them usually have open applications for that proposals. And so you want to make sure that you're doing all of that. Offer review copies to influencers. So when I do a book, I have, for instance, a box that comes to my contract always has a set number of books that they provide, both paperback and hardback. And so I take those and make sure that the right people get them at my work. So then they'll do like a spotlight on the newsletter. And it'll see a bunch of people who are connected to the university. That for me is a big deal. I've done interviews with influencers in the books themselves and always makes sure they get a copy so that they'll push information about it. But the real thing about this is the community. And the community that you build is the one that you can share this to. It's hard to share a book that you wrote without looking too self-serving. If you're waiting until the book is out to start building that community. So you want to start early, start often, and don't just do this thinking you're going to get a payout of from it. But actually build a community, like be part of the community and contribute. Follow what the other people are doing and give them kudos and be like an active member of a community. And not just thinking you're gonna get something out of it. If that's the only reason, then it's gonna be a very long lonely road. Anyway. I hope going through this process from beginning and it's useful. I know that there's so much more we could talk about and so much more we could do. Want to see your outlines. I want to see what you're doing with your projects. I want to know if this was helpful, which parts would you do that would be more in depth. We can do additional courses on Skillshare by specific parts of this if you're interested. So just let me know and keep this dialogue going. Thanks for being here and a part of this little journey of making this video. And I hope that if you really are looking to make a book that you'll just do it, that you'll make the first step of picking the topic, researching and creating an outline. Because that right there, that little sliver of this process will carry you through the whole thing. Okay. Talk to you later.