14 How Do I Write a Book?
Wilson had always wanted to write and publish a book. Wilson didn’t have any particular knack for writing. Indeed, he was more of a doer than a thinker and better with his actions than his words. Yet somehow, deep down, Wilson had early in his life developed a desire to be an author, not to earn a living but to have published a book. Wilson had other ambitions, including to learn to fly an airplane and to invent something for which he could earn a patent. Wilson didn’t regard these things as bucket-list items to check off, just to say that he’d had the experience. Instead, they had something to do with who Wilson wanted to become. And a book author was at or near the top of his list.
Books
Writing and publishing a book is the lifelong dream of many writers and even a few non-writers. Prime among the reasons is that writing a book seems not just like a worthwhile challenge but also a big challenge, even a mammoth challenge. For some individuals, including even some writers, writing something as long as several pages is a formidable task, an arduous chore, better avoided. Writing a chapter seems at the very edge of reach, while writing ten or twenty of them seems inconceivable. In fact, folks who start books sometimes work on them for years. Experienced professional writers don’t generally see books as presenting that same challenge. Writing a book a month, between 50,000 and 100,000 words in length, wouldn’t be at all unreasonable. But that flow and productivity is what makes a writer a suitable professional. And even then, the attention, concentration, creativity, and discipline necessary to write a publishable-quality book remains considerable. Gird yourself for the task. It’s achievable, can be highly satisfying and rewarding, but can also be frustratingly arduous. Lots of books get started; fewer get finished and published.
Length
Consider appropriate book lengths, to get a better sense of the challenge that you face writing a book and how you might best manage that challenge. An average-length novel is around 75,000 to 100,000 words. That’s between 250 to 350 pages, with each page at around 250 words. Non-fiction books without illustrations may be a little shorter, from 50,000 to 75,000 words, between 200 and 250 pages. Books for young adults would generally fall at the lower end of that same range, maybe 50,000 words and 200 pages. Chapter books for youths, still without illustrations, would be significantly shorter at 20,000 to 40,000 words, between 80 and 150 or so pages. Try to keep your book within these ranges. If you violate book-length conventions, you limit your publishers and market. The market for a 500-page novel isn’t nearly as large as the market for a 250-page novel. Fewer readers read very long books. A book that is too short likewise won’t satisfy the publisher’s parameters and reader interests. Plan to write a book the right length for your audience.
Motivation
Consider how you can use the above word and page counts to pace, measure, and motivate your progress. First, keep the word-count function displayed on your word-processing screen as you write, page after page and chapter after chapter. Then, use the page and word counts against your chapter progress, to make frequent calculations of book length, so that you can ensure that your progress matches the above book-length guides. For instance, if you expect your book to be 15 chapters, 300 pages, and 75,000 words, then at chapter 5, your page count should be about 100 pages and your word count about 25,000 words. Use these estimates continually to write more concisely or at greater length, as you realize that you are either short of your preferred length or instead writing a longer book than you should be. Also, use your daily and weekly word and page counts as measures and objectives to motivate and reward yourself. Set daily and weekly goals, then shoot for those goals. Pick up the pace if you’re not meeting your goals, and congratulate or otherwise reward yourself when you meet them. Being able to see clearly how to reach the end, even when you’re just at the beginning, can keep you motivated to write, bit by bit, a little at a time.
Time
If you don’t have a clear enough sense of the time and effort that writing a book can take, consider these estimates. Writers write at very different paces, some prolifically and others at a crawl. Learn your optimal writing pace, at how many words and pages per hour. Then use your writing pace to estimate the hours that your book would take to write. A skilled and dedicated writer can generally produce at least a page (250 words) an hour, while a prolific writer might produce up to three or four pages (up to 1,000 words) an hour. Say, though, that with research and revising, a novice writer might take a couple of hours per page. In that case, a 350-page, 100,000-word novel might take a novice writer around 500 hours to write. Five hundred hours is about three months of full-time, forty hours per week writing. But few writers have the mental energy to write eight hours a day, even if that’s their only job. Twenty productive writing hours per week is a more reasonable pace, meaning the novice writer’s novel would take six months, not three months. If a novice writer is writing a novel on the side at five hours a week rather than full time at twenty to forty hours a week, then that’s two years to write the novel. You can see why writing a book can take real discipline and perseverance.
Purposes
Given the large challenge that writing a book is, you should have a firm grip on your purposes for doing so. If you don’t know your motivation when starting out, you’ll soon enough be searching for it, when partway through you realize just how big a challenge writing a book can be. Of course, if someone has retained you to write a book for them, then you’ve got your motivation in the compensation, contractual commitment, and satisfaction of the craft. But if you’re writing a book for yourself, of your own commitment and accord, then be sure that you’re doing so for purposes that will continue to lead and motivate you through the lengthy process. Writing to promote your professional practice, business, or other career can be a strong motivator. If, for instance, you are a professor needing or wanting your own textbook, then write it. Your school employer, colleagues, and students may deeply appreciate it, especially if it is a quality and useful product. If, instead, you have no business or professional purpose, then confirm in your own mind the value of your project. Is it to inspire others or to learn and grow yourself? Is it to share general life wisdom, inform on a specific subject, or explore and express a creative vision? Discern your purpose and what it means to you. You’ll need to draw continually on that discernment.
Subject
The big question, then, is the subject of the book that you intend to write. Your inspiration for your book has a source. In discerning your purpose for writing, you’ve likely discerned the source of your book inspiration and may have its subject clearly in mind. Ideally, your inspiration, motivation, purpose, and subject should all connect. Things get harder when they don’t. You may, for instance, need a book for your professional practice but instead have an inspiration to write a creative work and yet only have a pragmatic subject unrelated to your practice. If so, don’t write a book. Instead, choose a subject at the intersection of your inspiration, motivation, purpose, and interest or need. Your subject should generally grow out of your experience and align with your passion, interests, and affinities. Keep measuring potential subjects against those indicators until you are sure that you have identified a subject that calls and speaks to you, urging you to write.
Research
Some book subjects, like non-fiction works addressing business, medical, legal, financial, or other technical fields, or texts for the education market, can take a tremendous amount of research. Other book subjects, like memoirs and novels, may take little or no research. Other subjects, like historical fiction and travel logs, can take a moderate to substantial amount of research. Be sure that you are up to whatever amount of research that your book project will take. If you choose a subject that requires substantial research, be sure that you have access to the research materials, have the research skills, and have the patience and perseverance to complete the research. The quality, depth, and breadth of research can make or break a book that requires substantial research. You may be only an average writer, but if you have excellent research skills, you may write a good book. Consider your research skills, interest, and abilities when choosing a subject.
Markets
Writing a book is a big enough challenge that you’d probably like someone, at least a family member or two and maybe a few friends, to read it. Better yet if the book sells. Whether your book has a market may be another significant indicator for whether you have chosen the right subject. That question, though, depends on your motivation for writing the book. If your motivation is to write a best seller, then by all means consider the market. If, instead, your motivation is to serve your practice or business, learn, grow, inform, inspire, or simply be able to say you’ve written a book, then don’t concern yourself with markets. You should generally, though, be able to identify your book’s market and market segment, whether or not you expect it to sell. The trade market is general distribution, supplemented by educational and library markets. Market segments include fiction versus non-fiction, print versus digital or audio, distribution channels such as online, bookstore, or mass market, and reader demographics, particularly age, sex, and education or income levels. Market segments can also include genres, already discussed in a prior chapter, like mystery, romance, science fiction, and self-help. Your subject should tell you the market segments and genre in which you should write, although segments and genres may also affect how you discern and define your subject. Pick a genre, for instance, for which you have an eye, ear, skill, and affinity.
Audience
Identifying your market isn’t quite the same as identifying your audience. You should have a keen sense of your book’s specific audience, beyond having a general sense of your book’s market. You may, for instance, be writing a non-fiction book to convey insights you gleaned on a specific subject from your own extraordinary experience of it. Maybe you and your spouse had triplets, quadruplets, or quintuplets, and you wish to write an entertaining, humorous, and informative non-fiction book about it. You’d then benefit from imagining more about your readers. Would your audience be new parents expecting multiple births? If so, then you’d write to inform those new parents of the things they might anticipate they’d face. Or would your audience instead be grandmothers interested in warm, humorous, and sentimental family nostalgia memoirs? If so, then you’d emphasize your sentimental experiences. If your audience is a crossover of those two segments along with a couple of others, like working parents trying to juggle challenging family responsibilities with a sense of humor, then you’d write to serve those multiple segments. If you write purely for yourself, you’ll have an audience of one. Instead, write with readers in mind. They’ll recognize and appreciate it.
Title
To get started on your book, open a new electronic file, give it a name that you’ll easily locate among your other electronic files, and place the file in a folder where you’ll find it. Your folder may be for your book, where you’ll place other files like book research, proposals, submission materials, contracts, and correspondence. Then, give your book a title, even if only a working title, so that you can return to the title and revise it as often as you think of improvements. Book titles often include a subtitle. Your title may clearly identify the book’s subject, while the subtitle gives the prosaic title an entertaining twist. Or your title can entertain and attract, while the subtitle clearly identifies the book’s subject. Generally, though, book publishers, sellers, buyers, and readers would prefer that the title or subtitle, one or the other, let them know what the book is about. Titles or subtitles can also attract and entertain, for marketing purposes. Find a title with which you are comfortable. Then get feedback from readers, reviewers, editors, and publishers, before landing on the final one.
Structure
Books, like articles and other longer writings, need structure. Your fiction or non-fiction choice, and choice of genres, will affect your book’s structure. But in simplest terms, books generally have a beginning, middle, and end. Books need to begin with some form of setup, a statement and development of the tension, issue, opportunity, or problem. The setup may be for a hero’s journey, to solve a mystery, or to determine the course and destination of a romance. Whatever your book’s subject may be, you need to introduce the reader to the subject as presenting something of interest that the reader should prepare to follow. The central part of the book then becomes the confrontation, addressing, encountering, or embrace of the issue, challenge, or opportunity. The final part of the book then has to do with the resolution of the problem, tension, issue, challenge, or opportunity. A book can extend that three-part structure into a five-part classical structure involving introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Get a clear sense of how to develop your subject within that general structure.
Outlining
Consider using your book’s table of contents as your outline for how you will proceed. You’ll eventually need a table of contents. Why not start with it, working from there? Tables of contents for books have a common structure, either with chapters below which you may add section headings if you wish, or with parts within which you would place your chapters and their section headings. In other words, you may have one level of division using only chapters, two levels of division using chapters and sections, or three levels of division using parts, chapters, and sections. For example, Part I might include your introductory chapters, Part II your confrontation chapters, and Part III your resolution chapters, while a Part II chapter involving the climactic confrontation might have three sections addressing the meeting, struggle, and outcome. Begin your outline (table of contents) as soon as you open a new electronic file, name the file, and title your book. Then, develop your outline further and continually revise it as you work through writing your book and gain insights about its preferred flow and structure.
Schedule
Prior chapters have suggested how to write sentences and paragraphs, generate and preserve writing ideas, and develop and maintain your writing flow. A key for writing a book can be to remain continuously engaged with it, even if you don’t have the time or inspiration to write big chunks. When you write a little at a time, preferably daily or with no more than a day or two break, you remain familiar with your place in the narrative, what you recently wrote, and what you intend to write next. If you put your book writing aside for more than a couple of days, and especially for a week, month, or more, you may entirely lose your narrative train. You may also begin to forget what you’ve already written. If you’re writing fiction with multiple characters, you may begin to forget scenes, dialogue, events, timelines, relationships, and characteristics. Find a consistent daily time and place to write, but also use any convenient interval and place to write. Follow these practices, and you’ll soon find yourself making enough progress to encourage you further.
Reflection
What is your purpose or are your purposes for writing a book? What subject is calling you to write a book? Are your purposes for writing a book consistent with the book subject that calls you? Do you have experience with the book subject? Do you have an affinity for it, meaning does it interest and draw you? Are you up to the research that your book subject would take? Do you have the research skills and access to the research materials? Do you anticipate a market for your book? Who would read your book? Why would they read it? Who would gain the most from reading it? What genre fits your subject, market, and audience? Do you have a title and subtitle for your book? Do you have a good sense of your book’s structure? How many levels do you anticipate for your table of contents, one, two, or three? What writing schedule do you expect to maintain to keep you in frequent contact with your place in the narrative and to keep you familiar with the content you’ve already written and the content that you plan?
Key Points
Many individuals have the ambition to write a book, while fewer do so.
Keep your book to near the average length for books of your type.
Set daily and weekly word and page goals for writing your book.
Expect your book to take dozens or hundreds of hours to write.
Know your purpose for writing so that you have continual motivation.
Choose a book subject with which you have experience and affinity.
Be sure that you are up to the research that your subject may take.
Your book subject should inform your book’s market and segment.
Know and write for your specific audience and crossover audiences.
Title and subtitle your book for both subject clarity and attraction.
Structure your book in an introduction, encounter, resolution form.
Use a one-, two-, or three-level table of contents for your book outline.
Maintain a writing schedule that keeps you familiar with book content.