5 Tips for Creating Great Non-Fiction Books

With real-world analogies and actionable tips, Dr. Raman K. Attri walks us through a product development mindset—showing authors how to scope, shape, and structure their ideas to produce nonfiction books that are polished, credible, and built to last.

After authoring 20 books, I have figured out that great authors do not exist in manuscripts. They exist in the finished products which reach the hands of readers. It is okay if you don’t get great reviews with your first book. But eventually, you learn to identify and correct your mistakes. As an author of non-fiction, your focus should be on creating a tangible, high quality, finished product for the readers.

For that, I would encourage you to think about your book as a finished product. Imagine you are designing (concepts and ideas), developing (raw material), prototyping (writing), manufacturing (publishing) and distributing (selling or promoting) your product (the book). Now, based on that philosophy, here are the 5 practical tips that you can use to create great, well-rounded non-fiction books:

1. Think of book authoring as a product

You have to focus on creating a tangible, high quality, finished product for the readers. For that, I would encourage you to think about your book as a finished product. Imagine you are designing (concepts and ideas), developing (raw material), prototyping (writing), manufacturing (publishing) and distributing (selling or promoting) your product (the book). This will give you a systematic way to finish your project.

2. Scope your idea to a narrow niche

If a company is developing a product, they will not pack all the features in the first model itself, hoping it will take off big time in the market. Rather, they take a tiered approach by packing a specific set of features into one product model at a time. On the same line, I would recommend authors to slice, dice, scope, and sometimes de-scope the idea to a narrow niche. Then pack the associated content and start writing around that niche.

3. Focus on development before you write

Think of world-class products like iPhone. The engineers spend a lot of time developing the concepts, finalizing the features, testing out the prototypes before they decide to manufacture them. In the same way, spend more time on the analysis and development of your book. Visualize your book specifications, what’s in, what’s out, what’s your title and subtitle, create a visual outline, capture your ideas, shape up the structure of the book without actually writing a single word.

4. Categorize and organize your ideas and thoughts

The companies that produce world-class innovations capture their imaginations and preserve them. In the same way, you need to have a system to preserve, capture, and organize your valuable splashes of random ideas, thoughts, aha moments, and vivid imaginations as and when those strikes you. For that, you use any and every mode like text, voice, scribble, notes, mind maps or illustrations, table, picture. Then, you can leverage a range of apps on the smartphone, laptop, stylus, voice-to-text, audio recorders, and post-it notes. After that, there are various apps and software to organize, sequence, and classify these ideas. In a short while, you would have enough ammunition for multiple projects.

5. Create a world-class, credible book with peer reviews

Every product goes through beta testing, which involves having actual consumers test it out and provide feedback. The goal is to fix issues and send the perfect product to that market. In the same way, reach out to the diverse type of reviewers early on if you can. Non-fictions, in particular, have a responsibility to be fair, truthful, logical and rational. Therefore, external validation is very important. Ask your peers, mentors, coaches, and clients to review your manuscript. Mention their names in your preface or acknowledgement. Try to reach out to well-established authorities in your space who could write a foreword for your book. This would add to the credibility of the work and acceptability with publishers.

We expect non-fiction works to have a longer shelf life. A well-treated subject may find a place in university curriculums, libraries, and as a reference work for generations to come. Therefore, non-fiction writing might demand a high level of integrity, a sense of responsibility, and accountability from the author. So, as a non-fiction author, you have a moral obligation to be accurate while doing fair justice to your opinions, ensuring that you have painted a rational picture of their work. Even if non-fiction is not research-based, it needs to be informative, factual, and rationale.

Reader’s Resource: To enrich your understanding further, you may like to hear the author sharing the above five tips in a short video:

About Dr Raman K Attri

An award-winning learning scientist, Dr Raman K Attri specializes in the science of speed in personal and professional performance. He helps leaders and organizations to accelerate leadership to stay ahead. A prolific author of 50 multi-genre books, he writes on leadership, learning, performance, and workplace learning. Awarded as one of the Brainz Global 500 leaders, he is featured in over 200 media features.

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