A Quick Guide to Writing Short — Part 2: Nonfiction

by Carla Douglas
@CarlaJDouglas

In my last post, I talked about the popularity of short fiction and the many forms it can take. Why is short so popular? A few reasons. We have little time for reading and our attention spans are short. It’s also become easier to produce an ebook, and in this format, length doesn’t matter.

Writing short offers as many—if not more—opportunities for nonfiction authors. The ebook is a convenient container for many of the nonfiction pieces people have been writing for years and scattering about on blogs, in pdfs, on websites … and in drawers.

Some options for short nonfiction

Short nonfiction can take many forms—some are commercial, some are business or professional tools, and some are simply smart ways to organize the documents, both paper and digital, that accumulate over the years. Here are a few examples:

How-to: A more traditional kind of nonfiction book, but pared down to the bare essentials for time-starved readers. If you have a concept or process that you believe might benefit others, why not polish it and put it between ebook covers? Again, I’ll refer you to Corina Koch MacLeod’s Idea to Ebook: How to Write a Quality Book Fast—it’s an example both of a concept developed into an ebook and a guide to how you can do the same. And a very quick read at about 15,000 words.

Blog-to-book: This is a route many nonfiction writers are taking. If you’ve blogged at length about a topic, you may well have the expertise to put it into a book. Keep in mind that you’ll need to revise your posts to shape them into a book.

Research or process notes: Have you published a novel? Readers are increasingly fascinated by the minutia of their favourite author’s writing process (and life!). Authors of historical fiction, for instance, might have a set of research notes that could be polished into a book extra, to keep readers interested. Glossaries, maps, field notes, family trees—all of these can be packaged into something to release when you’re between novels.

Summary book: Do you have a full-length book that could be summarized to highlight its key ideas? Readers appreciate this—a sort of longer version of the “look inside” feature on Amazon. Here’s one example: BusinessNews Publishing’s summary edition of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. Watch out for copyright issues: consider this kind of publication only if you own the copyright to the work being summarized.

Course and classroom materials: Teachers and professors have been posting lecture notes and assignments on their websites for some time—this is convenient for students and it improves the learning experience. An even better idea is to reach students where they are: on their phones. Recent research from Pew shows that 58% of American adults own a smartphone; for the age group 18-29, that number is 83%.

Dissertations, monographs, essays: Work you’ve previously published but which you either don’t have a digital copy of or which you’d like to revise or update. Note that if you want to adapt these for publication and sale, you’ll need to spend some time and effort on revisions.

Academic papers, reports, speeches, lectures, talks: Conference papers, white papers, might include previously unpublished books and papers and might exist already as a pdf or Word doc. Whether or not you intend to publish these on Amazon or another platform, converting these documents to ebooks helps get this material organized. It might also help you to see future potential for older material that can now be repurposed for a contemporary readership.

Tips for writing short nonfiction

Nonfiction readers want information delivered quickly, and they have little patience for wading through weedy prose.

Take time to revise. If you’re converting unpublished or previously published academic work into an ebook, chances are it needs to be revised and updated. Be certain your ideas are clear. Does your writing say what you want it to? The academic writing blog Explorations of Style has a three-part series on how to use writing to clarify your thinking.

If you’re going to adapt existing material from a website or blog into an ebook, it will probably need more than a copyedit. Blogs have their own structure, and so do books. Before you turn your blog into a book, read Jane Friedman’s article, Please Don’t Blog Your Book: 4 Reasons Why.

Don’t skip the editing. More and more, academic articles are being published without any copyediting to speak of. Recently I enrolled in a MOOC that was sponsored and taught by three universities. The content was good, and so was the teaching. But the readings? Not so much. Tedious 30-plus-page academic papers full of rambling sentences, random use of punctuation and available only as pdf downloads. Distractions like these can stand between you and your reader, and many readers will bail.

Format for contemporary readers. Do your readers a favour, and guide them through your book with a linked TOC and meaningful chapter titles, headings and subheadings. Keep your paragraphs short—nonfiction on an e-reader is always better viewed in chunks. For more tips like this, watch for our forthcoming book, You’ve Got Style: A Self-Publishing Author’s Guide to Ebook Style.

Finally, keep your reader in mind always. As bestselling author Hugh Howey has observed, “It’s about the reader, stupid” and this is as true for nonfiction as it is for fiction.  

Image by Johan Larsson

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