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Which Kind of Non-fiction Book for You?

There are many types of books being written today: They include business books, pop-psych- self help - Family and Parenting- Memoirs/ Personal Experience books, New Age, Health and Fitness, Travel, Religious, and more. Now let's consider a few types and how they are written.

So You Are Writing a Business Book

Even in today's laid-back market, business books are going strong. I have written three of my own on creating personal business and helped with several client business books. Editors today look for information about careers, working together, technical skills, sales and sales training, leadership, how to start and run a business, how to compete successfully and a lot more. Readers buy these books to get ahead, become a better marketer and leader, win a promotion, master a specific job-related skill, stand out, learn particular management techniques, and more.

You need to make the organization simple and logical so that one point leads to the next. No matter how complex the issue, you must write clearly and simply. You never write around the subject in a business book, but get to the point quickly be specific and include lots of real-life examples. I learned how to do this the hard way, but thanks to a good editor at Prentice Hall who kept drilling the basics into me, I did learn.

Here are the rules:

Organize the information logically. This means arrange it in a step-by-step process. Most business books have from 10 to 15 chapters. Most chapters contain 5 -7 sub points with headings arranged in a logical order.
Use short declarative sentences of 20 or fewer words. This is one of the hard things to learn. For instance write. "We need a good working definition of ethics to guide us." And stick to one point per sentence.
Keep paragraphs to about six sentences or slightly longer. Long paragraphs discourage the reader. Shorter paragraphs make a book seem easy to read.
Write in a conversational style as if you were explaining to a friend. Here's one I found. The goal of the litigation ideally would be the closure of the prison; alternatively it would be a reduction of the institution's population. You wouldn't talk to a friend this way, you should write. The goal of the suit is to close the prison or to reduce the number of inmates.
Avoid technical terms. Nothing stops a reader like technical explanations. Always figure out a clear simple way to say it and reduce complicated concepts to simple, positive statements. The statement that says "The pices biota exhibited a hundred percent mortality response" just doesn't work. Break it down to its simplest form. "The fish died."
Use lots of real-life examples. This is the heart of most business books.
Keep the chapters reasonably short. A good length is four thousand to six thousand words (15 to 22 pages).

Here are a few of today's best selling business books that embody these principles.

It's Not the Big that Eat the Small: It's the Fast that Beat the Slow, Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton. What a great title--a book about thinking and moving faster than the competition.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,

David Allen. A complete system for getting those things done you've been putting off. This book offers a whole life-organizing system. (A blockbuster best seller).

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't. How a good company can become a great company. Based on research with 11 companies sorted down from 1,435.

What is a Memoir Anyway?

A memoir is essentially an autobiography. They can also be what I call personal experience books, a partial memoir about an experience in someone's life. This can be about bereavement, coming back from disaster, an unusual experience, and a lot more.

Books by celebrities are probably most salable today but publishers are still buying books about life experiences that inspire readers, or offer help and insights. Here are a few currently on publishers' lists.

Fly in the Buttermilk: Memoirs of an African in Advertising, Design &

Design Education, Archie Boston. A personal look at the world of advertising, design and design education from the perspective of a minority insider.

Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Aperger Syndrome, Stephen M. Shore. Stephen, who is working on a doctorate, walks readers through his life story.

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Anne Lamott. A single mother and ex-alcoholic offers this as an account of an earth shaking change in her life.

All personal experiences books (memoirs) today must have strong reader appeal and be extremely well written. I will delve into some of the hows and whys of this genre as we go along.

Writing About the Environment

The ways in which writers have explored the environment have evolved over the years. In the early 70s writers like Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry began to turn their attention to nature. From there, interest and books on the environment have exploded. Here are some of the categories that are going well.

Awareness of nature: This category focuses on what is and what has been going on in nature. Two of the titles to look at are: Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. Extinct species that once lived in North America and The Living Wilderness, a detailed description of how wild animals live, understanding and perceiving wild animals. If you have some observations on nature and want to do some research, this might be a good possibility for you.

Reaction to specific places, Grand Canyon: True Stories of Life Below the Rim a personal discovery of many authors of the facets of the Grand Canyon…Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World. Photographer and filmmaker Tad Nichols knew Glen Canyon well before the dam and in his books take readers on a photographic voyage down the Colorado River in the canyon. The photographs are accompanied by entries from his travel journals of the 1950s. The Sierra Club advocates taking the dam down.

All My Rivers are Gone: A Journey Through Glen Canyon. Folk singer, actress, songwriter, Katie Lee made 16 trips through Glen Canyon. Portions of her journals are recorded here.

Personal Journey with Nature, In these books nature transforms the author or expresses the author's strong feelings. Sacred Summits: John Muir's Mountain Days…For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays & Other Writings, Aldo Leopold. Leopold worked for the U.S. Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory. He believed those who worked the land could best protect it.

A Sense of Place: These books detail how place affects you, the author as a person. A good example is Five thousand Days like This One. This is a story about the seasons of a family farm and its family told by the family daughter.

Nature Writing as Spiritually: These nature books are steeped in spiritually. An example is: Cultivating a Spiritual Connection With the Natural World, Ralph Metzner. Metzner holds that by disrespecting and destroying the earth we are disrespecting and destroying what sustains the human spirit.

This category still offers a growing field. You can see an entire list of these on Amazon.Com.

Using Personal Examples

Do personal examples have a place in your non-fiction book? You bet they do. Personal examples add authenticity and energy to any manuscript. I'll pull a few examples from my own books and show you how and why. I have a book which I have talked about before, called How to Sell and Re-Sell Everything You Write.

Chapter three's title was: How to Fit Your Experience to a Magazine's Needs. To make this point I went back into my experience when I was teaching writing. Here is how the chapter started.

Over the years I have discovered that most writers, at least most beginning writers, like to start with the idea and then try to find the market for this idea or finished article. Frequently, beginning writers will rush up to me at one of my writing seminars and say; "I've got this great article idea, where can I sell it?”

One man, I remember quite well, had written a complete article on his canoe trip to Minnesota. What he wanted me to tell him was what magazine would buy this article without changes.

A lady in the same group had taken a raft trip down the Colorado River, and then wrote an article about how the raft dragged her down-river, mostly underwater. She also wanted to know what editor would buy it just as it was.

Both seem terribly disappointed when I told them I didn't think either article would sell unless they slanted it for a particular magazine. I have always believed that starting with the idea first, then trying to find a magazine to buy it is backwards, like making a whole suit and then trying to find someone it will fit.

What all of us as writers need to understand is that any individual article idea we come up with is not all that important. There are literally thousands of good ideas out there everywhere. Everyone one of us has an experience bank with thousands of pieces of information that could easily become articles.

So, telling stories, and weaving your point in and around what you are trying to put across becomes clearer. It's almost like drawing pictures with words. Look back at your own experience to and see what you can come up with to explain the point you are trying to make.

Travel Books

Travel Books have always been big, but the field keeps changing. Travel books can be broken down into Guides, Phrase books, and off beat travel books,

Off the Beaten Track, Self Adventure, How to find the authentic experience,

Such things as Guerrilla Travel Tactics: Hundreds of Simple Strategies Guaranteed to Save Road Warriors Time and Money, Lost in My Own Backyard, A Walk in Yellowstone National Park. Windowseat: Reading the Landscape from the Air. Blue Ridge Music Trails,

England: What the Guidebooks Don't Tell You,!,300 questions such as why the British Drive on the left. Eating and Drinking Guides, The Colors of Fall: A Celebration of New England's Foliage Season, 50 hikes in South Florida, The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents and Oystery Denizens of the Deep,

Travel books need facts and research. Hotels and restaurants mileage, sights to see and a lot more. Often you can do some research out of foreign newspapers.

But remember, each type has it own rules. As we go along in this newsletter, we'll look at many other genre, and fill in the details of how to put them together.