21 Tips For Making And Selling Your Nonfiction Book

• Sales advantages of writing nonfiction books
If only from a sales perspective, nonfiction books tend to garner more sales than novels. According to a recent Gallup poll, 46 percent of Americans have nonfiction book on their nightstands; in contrast, only 35 percent of Americans have fiction at their bedside.

• How to conduct an interview for book research 
Indie writers researching a nonfiction book (and even those writing novels!) often must conduct interviews. This is a valuable way to gather background information and quotations that will be useful in shaping and penning the book.

• How to structure your nonfiction book
Perhaps the toughest question a nonfiction writer must answer is how to organize her book. Often there’s a lot of information to get out.

• Potential disclaimers for your title page 
Sometimes when self-publishing a book, you’ll want to include a disclaimer on your title page. A disclaimer is a legal-sounding statement that aims to protect you from lawsuits by saying that you are not liable or responsible for anything the reader does as a consequence of reading your advice.

• Your acknowledgements and dedication pages
Many authors like to take a bow (or curtsy) to those who helped their book become reality. Many also like to honor someone special in their lives by dedicating the book to them. These names respectively appear in the acknowledgements and dedication.

• How to create your book’s table of contents
Though the table of contents is one of the first pages readers will see, it’s one of the last you’ll actually complete. Because it must perfectly match the names of your various sections and chapters, as well as have the correct page numbers (if doing a print book anyway), it is always in flux as you write and format the book.

• Forewords, prefaces and introductions
Before your actual book begins – particularly if writing nonfiction – you may want to include material that that introduces readers to it. The idea of these introductions is in large part to establish why readers actually should read the book.

• How to handle direct quotations, paraphrases
When writing academic papers or nonfiction books, you’ll likely needed to include the thoughts and observation of experts to bolster your positions or explain your points. These experts’ statements can be presented either as direct quotations and as paraphrases.

• Write end of chapter summary in nonfiction books
Usually chapters come packed with information that prove more than a reader can remember. A summary helps jogs readers’ memories of what was read, and in doing so sets them up for the next chapter. 

• Enhance book with sidebars, breakout boxes 
When penning a nonfiction book, you probably want to include sidebars or breakout boxes in the book’s main text. Such tools can help make the main text more readable by dividing it so one large block of words doesn’t appear page and after. 

• Thinking up a title that sells your nonfiction book
With nonfiction books, you’ll want to select a title that helps rather than hinders sales. A good title ensures that your book will be easy to find as it pops up in search engine queries; a bad title ensures other books will appear in such searches even though yours is better written.

• Make tables readable in your nonfiction book
When self-publishing a nonfiction book, you probably will want to include tables of some sort. If writing a book about rock climbing, for example, you might include a list of the National Climbing Classification System.

• Create an index for your nonfiction book
Sometimes after finishing a nonfiction book, readers want to review a specific concept or idea that appears on only a few pages of the volume. The table of contents probably is too general to give them the exact page numbers that they want to read. Instead, they turn to the index.

• Writing your nonfiction book’s bibliography
If writing a nonfiction book, you’ll likely want to include a bibliography at the end of your book. This offers a list of other books, periodicals and online sources where you acquired information to write your book. It typically appears before the index.

• Place hyperlinks in your nonfiction ebook 
One of the advantages of an ebook over a paper book is the ability to link to other pages with a mere touch of your fingertip, which is especially useful if you write nonfiction. 

• Always review proof your book before okaying it
After you’ve uploaded a formatted version of your book’s text and its cover, you’ll be asked to review a proof of your book. No matter how busy you are, no matter how much of a rush you are to get your book for sale, no matter how many times you’ve already looked at it, heed these five words: “Never leave anything to chance.” Take one last look at your book.

• How to write an author’s bio 
If writing a nonfiction book, the author’s bio helps establish you as a qualified expert to write about your book’s topic, encouraging potential readers to purchase your writing. 

• Pay attention to your author’s bio pic 
One of the elements of a self-published book that shouldn’t be overlooked is the author’s photograph. While the photo often is a thumbnail or even smaller, it can subtly affect a reader’s decision to purchase your book. 

• Seek endorsements for your nonfiction book 
One way to generate interest in your book is to obtain an endorsement of it from an expert, especially if writing nonfiction.

• Speak about book’s topic to various groups 
When promoting your book, you don’t have to limit public appearances to book signings or radio/television interviews. You might consider creating a presentation related to your latest book’s topic and then finding places to present it. 

• Write articles to promote your nonfiction book
If you’ve researched your book – and most fiction writers research their novels and short stories – you almost certainly read magazine, newspaper or journal articles on interesting topics only tangentially related to your title and that merited maybe only a sentence or two in your manuscript. These topics can be the kernel of articles that you later write to promote your book.