Tips for writing a book

Handwritten manuscript of a book

In this post we share some tips about writing a book, focusing on non fiction books.

Writing a book can seem a hard task at first, and can be deterring to first time authors. The trick is to break it down into manageable chunks. It is best to treat this as a long term project (say 3 months or 6 months, depending on your speed of writing) and plan it like one.

One thing that could be useful is to write the outline of the book first: the title, chapters and subsections in each chapter. This will force the prospective author to think carefully about what message they want the readers to take away. It may also be useful to think a little bit about the intended audience and how the book may be useful to them, before deciding on the outline.

Another useful strategy is to write a little bit, even as less as a few sentences or paragraph, every single day, rather than write in big chunks in a single sitting. This is a good tool to beat procrastination as well.

One can decide whether to type the whole book on a computer, or to write it by hand first and then type it later, or a mixture of the two. Different authors have different styles, and there is no one style that is perfect. However, typing on a computer could enable one to take advantage of the good spell and grammar checkers available.

One tool that can be useful is to visualize the completed book: how does it feel like, visualize a reader reading the completed book and enjoying reading it. This can serve as a good motivation to finish the book.

Some authors may find it useful to finish a book in iterations: i.e. quickly get a first draft of the whole book, then read and make corrections to improve it, and repeat the process multiple times for subsequent drafts. Others may find it useful to do this improvement and iterations chapter by chapter, rather than for the whole book. In these days of self publishing, one could even do the publishing of the book edition by edition, which is similar to iterations but on a longer timescale.

These are just some useful tips, since different authors may have their own styles, the tips may be useful or may not. Readers are requested to add more tips, if they found it useful, in the comments section.

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